Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Amendment Bill (No 2)

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s my honour to rise to speak on this amendment to the Smoke Free Environments and Regulated Products Act that takes action on youth vaping. Labour supports this bill and we support the four areas where major amendments are made in this bill. That includes changes to the manufacture, sale, supply, and distribution of disposable vapes. Those will be banned under this bill, and that’s appropriate given the high number of youths who use disposable vape products. They are the most commonly used products by young people, and having young people start vaping is a harm we want to avoid.

In addition, Parliament is playing its part in this bill in sending a clear signal that vaping laws need to be adhered to. We all know where young people get their vapes from. They, one way or another, get it from a shop or an online store, and we are all aware from various sting operations, whether that’s done by Health New Zealand, Te Whatu Ora, or by Fair Go or other journalists, that that is sometimes rules that are honoured in the breach. Young people are getting vapes—people under 18—through illegal sales to them quite often. In increasing the penalties for these sales, we are sending a clear signal to the regulatory authority that we expect to see more prosecutions being taken. That would be a desirable thing, in my view. There are not sufficient prosecutions under way currently for there to be a disincentive to bad actors, so I hope to see that change with this bill.

There are also restrictions on the visibility of vaping products from the storefront, so you won’t be able to see vapes when you look through the window of a store any more. That’s a positive development, too. However, I would add the biggest ad for a vaping store is the store itself. They’re usually all lit up in neon or psychedelic colours. That is the ad from the vaping store that you see from the street most easily, but I do think not being able to see the products, just like for cigarettes, is a positive development. Finally, there’s the inclusion of early childhood centres in the—new stores are prohibited a certain distance from those.

Those are good reasons to support the bill, but the bill also raises a number of questions for us. In her earlier remarks, we heard the Associate Minister of Health mention that a further tranche of changes are to come. We wonder: why can’t these changes all be considered at once? It’s unusual to reform part of a bill and not have that alongside the other parts of the bill that are being changed. Why is that? Is that because of coalition agreements that are hard to reach and need to be worked through? We in the Opposition are not let into that conversation. It would be great to know what the big picture here is for vaping and tobacco and other nicotine product regulation that the Minister outlined. It seems to me that the Health Committee has done a good job of agreeing in a bipartisan way on these reforms, but we don’t know what the full picture is.

This bill also had a short select committee period. It’s unclear to me why that was, particularly when there was no opportunity for official consultation before this bill was brought into the House. You’ll recall that from the regulatory impact statement, and we canvassed that at first reading, there was no official consultation. So the committee’s done its best. And I enjoyed the opportunity to work with my colleagues on some of these practical matters. We had good advice, particularly on some of the practicalities around disposable vapes from our advisers, the Ministry of Health, but also from the public, and some vape manufacturers who are of course very able to give detailed advice on what makes a vape disposable or not. You see, the thing is, normally, that would have been preceded by a period of official work, so it’s no skin off the committee’s nose if we’re back here sometime in the future in this term of Parliament, reopening this, because I think we’ve done the best we can in the time we’ve had available to make sure that we’ve been diligent about that. Of course, it wasn’t a normal legislative process, but I feel that we’ve worked together to try and get the outcome we all want, which is to reduce youth vaping and ban disposable vapes.

Look, I do want to thank all the submitters who came to the committee in that short time frame that we had, and none the less gave us their best advice on what they would like to see to meet the aims of this bill. There are a number of potential measures that submitters raised which have not found their way into the final bill, and I do want to mention that. There are still concerns about the number of new vape stores and vape store numbers overall. We are aware that there are more vape stores in low-income neighbourhoods, including neighbourhoods with Māori and Pacific in them, and those groups are the communities amongst whom youth vaping is the highest. The option of a sinking lid on the number of stores was raised, or even density limits. Submitters called for greater reductions in flavours. They called for plain packaging and further limitations on the amount of nicotine. They called for more education when it came to vaping, and, a sentiment shared by the committee, further compliance and enforcement actions.

Once again, we’re pleased to be able to vote for this bill. It does take a positive step, but we fear that even this will not be enough to turn the tide on the increase of vaping we’ve had since 2021, where it shot up from under 2 percent to, well, at some measurements 10 percent; others in some communities of young people, over 20 percent. That’s happened in three years. You have to do a lot to turn the tide on that. As I’ve noted, we in the Labour Party, and many of the submitters, felt more regulatory change would be required to put that genie back in the bottle to reverse the rates of youth vaping. Well, I guess the thing is time will tell whether or not those changes are to be the case. That’s a shame if you’re one of the young people in this period who has got hooked on vaping.

In conclusion, it is good to be able to work with committee members, with colleagues from across the House, on a bill that will make some positive benefit, but there is still much further to go to address this harm in our community.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It is my pleasure to speak in support of the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Amendment Bill (No 2) on behalf of the Green Party. I want to echo a lot of the sentiments from the previous speaker, the Hon Dr Ayesha Verrall, and I just want to note that, effectively, if we look back at the past few years, I think this bill has been the product of a lot of community advocacy around the harm that vaping causes in our communities. During the last election, and as a second-term MP, I noted the amount of advocacy groups who came to our Parliament calling for more action when it comes to the regulation of vaping products—particularly how those manifested within the retail sector. This included young parents, young people, and organisations that predominantly serve Māori, and there was a growing concern around the unaddressed harm that vaping caused in our communities.

I think this bill presents an opportunity to think about how we choose to debate different types of substances—which substances we allow ourselves to debate within an evidence and public health framework, and also the reality that any regulation of a substance in which there is a profit motive by businesses will have a strong lobbying component by those businesses who actually benefit from the status quo. That was no different than the select committee process that many undertook.

I want to acknowledge the members of the Health Committee, and our colleague Hūhana Lyndon who partook in most of the select committee deliberations and submissions. I had the privilege of sitting in on, I think, a couple of hearings and hearing from submitters themselves. Having worked in South Auckland before becoming an MP, it is really clear to me that the issue around the harm and the prevalence of vaping in our communities is one that will remain a hot issue because this bill is not a panacea. In fact, as Ayesha Verrall noted in the previous speech, we need to take this bill not in isolation but as part of a broader ecosystem of policy and levers in relation to drug harm minimisation.

There are other bills, when it comes to issues around tobacco products and addictive substances, with which the Government is taking us backwards, right? We’re making some steps forward here when it comes to vaping specifically, but I do still think that, overall, we need to be more ambitious than a bill that had a relatively short select committee and, as the previous member noted, no proper consultation prior to being brought to the House—particularly in this bill, when we know that there are organisations that work very closely with people who are affected by vaping.

I think there was an opportunity to bring the public on board. When we have a bill that is so high profile in nature, I think—and we saw this in the distribution of the submissions—it kind of enables organisations that are really well-resourced, including people in business sectors, to prepare really cogent submissions, but it actually prevents the broader public who often don’t have the time, the resources, or the means to make submissions, from adequately participating in that process. I think this is one of those bills that would have really benefited from bringing a broader community on board.

Many organisations that came to the select committee noted that—well, particularly those that work in public health—they supported the bill but called for us to go further than the interventions that we’re making around disposable vaping, around the fine system that we’re putting in place, around the restrictions in places that this bill deems adequate and where young people congregate. In fact, many of them—and I’m mindful that I may be repeating some of the previous comments—asked us to look at, again, a whole-of-ecosystem approach and to look at issues around regulations around retailers. It has been noted that, while this bill will look at how vaping products are displayed in stores, it doesn’t look necessarily at the broader regulatory systems and models around how we allow shops to basically pop up in our communities. That continues to be an issue, right, because you can create limits around where those shops may operate, but these shops actually continue to make a profit out of causing addiction and harm, effectively, in our communities. I think submitters were really right to raise these issues. While they may sit outside of the bill, they should serve as food for thought for the Government.

In the same way that this has been a relatively constructive cross-partisan process in which most, not all, political parties have been on board, I think I would echo the calls that actually in the broader policy settings of the Government and goals, I would invite the Government to bring all political parties on board when it comes to issues of drug law reform. At the end of the day, if we take an evidence-based approach, there should be no fear of us coming together to discuss basically how we regulate drugs.

Other issues that were raised were specifically relating to density limits for specialist vape retailers. I think this is particularly important because as we moved in this recession environment where there have been a lot of changes in terms of the make-up of shops in our communities, in areas of Auckland, I’ve noted, and many constituents of mine have noted and fed back that to me, and I’m sure to others, of how they’ve seen local businesses close only to be then replaced by a vape shop that actually sits in quite close proximity to an already existing vape shop. That is something that I think needs to be addressed, because that density and the way that the advertisement then is carried out by proxy of the density creates the conditions for vaping products to be more attractive to young people, particularly.

There were issues around flavours being addressed and/or nicotine levels. Then there’s also the tricky conversation around the minimum age requirements as well. I think, again, the select committee process highlighted the vested interest that ultimately retailers have, that companies that make a profit from the harm that vaping products cause have. I do welcome the select committee being able to work with nuance, and through as much as possible and as much as our cross-partisan approach would allow, look at not so much those commercial interests but, actually, the wellbeing of our communities.

I think the other things that have been raised by submitters were the consideration of what other public spaces we should have considered as part of this bill. I think that’s a really important thing because for many communities—and I think of migrant communities or even faith-based communities—young people will be congregating in spaces that are not necessarily captured in this bill. I think we need to look at, for example, what other mechanisms we need to put in place to ensure that the intent of this bill is one that allows it to be successful.

Other things that I noted from submitters were the calls for cessation programmes to be adequately resourced. I acknowledge that some submitters noted what they perceived was the importance of vaping products when it came to cessation. I acknowledge that many organisations will be working with limited resources to allow for people to quit nicotine and tobacco products, and those organisations need to be adequately resourced if we’re to meet, I think, the intent of this bill, and to ultimately take a public health approach. When organisations that are connected to our communities and that are operating from a public health framework are allowed to thrive, it also, in my view, restricts the ability for a prohibitionist lens and panic to sink in in our communities, because, actually, we’re resourcing the organisations on the ground who understand the communities, who understand the harm that substances cause, and we allow the intent of this bill to thrive.

I just want to end by saying that, once again, while we support this bill, we still have a really cautious approach to the overall goal of this Government when it comes to tobacco and nicotine products. We urge the Minister in charge to look at the evidence, to look at the data in making any decisions in relationship to this issue, because otherwise we are letting down communities who are facing really ill adverse health effects as a result of the harm that the substances cause. Kia ora.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of the ACT Party as the ACT member on the Health Committee, which heard this bill. I’d just like to echo agreement with my fellow colleague on the committee—Ayesha Verrall—about the collegial way in which the committee work, and in no small part thanks to the able chairing from Sam Uffindell—doing a great job of chairing that committee and bringing us together and working through some issues that many of us held with this bill when it first came to select committee.

The bill ostensibly is about addressing the increasing concern that we have up and down this country in youth vaping. The committee heard stories from submitters not just in this bill’s process but even before. We’ve had people come and speak to the committee about the effects that youth vaping is having on youth, and the long-term negative effects, the short-term effects on their health, their opportunities, and, indeed, their mental health. I would also refer again to my colleague Sam Uffindell talking about it as a drug addiction rather than a—what was the term?—basically saying that it’s a dependency on a chemical addiction, not just a habit. I think that is something that we need to keep in mind as we pass this bill through.

At the select committee, we’ve got these four points that have been traversed already. Number one, we had a ban on manufacture, sale, supply, and distribution of disposable vapes. Personally, I was quite shocked hearing about the very low number of convictions and investigations that have taken place for retailers selling to those under age. I think it was kind of a shock for all of us to hear about the lack of enforcement. I want to put on the record that I would personally like to see a lot stronger enforcement taken by vape smoke-free enforcement officers. I think that the Minister has done a good job of adding some increased fines to make a higher penalty and more of a disincentive, and an incentive to enforce the rules and a disincentive for people to be breaking them, by increasing the fine schedule.

We’ve also heard about the affordability, the cheapness, the low cost of disposable vapes being the reason and the intention to ban these, but we also had an issue. The effects of allowing only refillables had a whole lot of perverse outcomes. That is, some of the most damage that has been observed overseas from vaping bans has been people producing their own vape juice and what that can actually have in it when it’s a homebrew of some description, and the damage that that can do. I personally was quite worried that we were going to end up with a negative outcome that way.

Also, the ease of use of some of these disposable or pod-based vaping devices were seen as an assistance for people who have been quitting smoking actually making it easy for them to pick up a device that gives them that chemical addiction hit that they need to keep them away from cigarette smoking. Also, there is one more thing to add on that: if you’re buying a product in vape-induced form, you don’t exactly know what quality that product is at all times. Having a closed device provides a degree of safety about the products that are being used. At committee, we made some changes and so this will mean that this ban will not extend out to cartridges and pod-based vapes. So that is something that I think has been well canvassed at committee.

ACT and I have concerns about what we’ve seen a black market for. When this Government came in, we had a situation in New Zealand with our cigarette and smoking laws that would, I believe, have led to a black market—that’s with the denicotisation of cigarettes, basically kicking smokers off cigarettes that they purchase at a legitimate store, and into, perhaps, the black market. I personally think we would have ended up with a very entrepreneurial underworld taking advantage of this—

Todd Stephenson: Gangs.

CAMERON LUXTON: And gangs—my colleague Todd Stephenson correctly identifies yet another avenue that could have been opened. This Government came in and changed this law, the law that the last Government left in place, but we needed to find something to replace it with. I congratulate Minister Costello for starting to work through these issues. We don’t want to see ex-smokers who have used vapes to great effect return to cigarettes because we’ve made it so hard for them. I think the hard-working, diligent, and collegial Health Committee has returned a bill in good order, that is very acceptable, to the House. I’m pleased to support it. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s great to be able to rise and speak on this bill, and thank you to Cameron Luxton, the previous speaker, for his complementary tone there. I do appreciate that.

I’d like to extend the thanks to all the members of the Health Committee, who have worked through this bill. We got—

Dr Hamish Campbell: Especially the deputy chair.

SAM UFFINDELL: Especially the deputy chair—yes, yes. We managed to get it to a place where we felt it needed to be, and I’d like to thank the Minister Costello, as well, for bringing this in.

There’s been some commentary noted around the shortened select committee time. Look, the reason for that was quite clear: youth vaping is a real challenge in New Zealand. We are clear on that, and I don’t think there’s anyone in this House that would disagree with that. We want to get these changes in quickly. We want to be able to get rid of disposables as soon as we can, and we want to be able to ramp up the fines and the enforcement fees as soon as we can, as well.

As the Minister did say when she primarily came and addressed the committee when we started hearing submissions on this bill, this is not the be-all and end-all of the vaping legislation; this is the first part of it. There will be another part to that as well, but it’s very important that we get this first step in so that, one, we get rid of disposables, which is the product of choice for youths when they vape; and, secondly, so that the fines are there and they are sufficient and they are heavy so that people who flout the law and sell to minors—and we know that that does happen—know that they will be held accountable. It also will incentivise those enforcement officers out there to go out there and take that enforcement action. At the moment, they are weighing it up against the cost of the enforcement, but this does further incentivise them to do that.

Look, there were a number of changes, and I’m not going to go over that, but what I will talk about is the things that the committee did change, and I’ll do so very quickly. One was about not extending the ban on the disposable devices, because we know that that would have left people with the only option being the open devices. People were turning up to wherever they go to buy vapes late at night, and they’re not there. They don’t have them there and they’re reverting to buying cigarettes, and it does run the health risks that Mr Luxton has pointed out, as well. It’s important that when people who have smoked—and we’re talking about older smokers here, mainly—want to go and buy an alternative product, it is available for them, and that would have been removed from them had we proceeded with it as it was originally drafted at the first reading.

We were clear that child safety mechanisms must not be able to be deactivated. We also had concerns around the dumping of vape products at very low prices or for free as well, and the incentive there to get young people involved and participating in that. We thought that, no, we can’t allow that, and so that has been rubbed out. Also, we have done some stuff around the visibility so that vaping products cannot be visible from outside the store.

I just want to thank everyone again for coming together. We’ve had a whole week there in the adjournment when we got through all of our submissions and we did a few other field trips, as well. I think that every day that week when the committee was working during the adjournment week, the chair wasn’t popular, but thank you to everyone for coming together and getting this back to the House. I commend this bill to the House.

Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan—a five-minute call.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Like my colleague Ricardo Menéndez March said, yes, the Green Party does support this bill, but I think in terms of the select committee, like the chair of the Health Committee just mentioned before, the shortened select committee process is regrettable, because it did mean that we weren’t able to hear from the community in its entirety and be able to tease out some of the issues.

However, in saying that, there are a lot of really important amendments that are being made as part of the select committee process, and I think that all of that strengthens this particular bill. However, I would like to point out one particular part where there were a number of submissions that were talking about out-of-scope submissions. I find that really interesting, because in this case, I thought that nothing would be out of scope because the whole purpose and essence of this bill is to reduce the number of people from vaping. If you are restricting it specifically to what the Minister has intended in here, it almost defeats the purpose of some of these processes or the purpose of the bill itself.

I think particularly some of the things that should have been considered are things like introducing a sinking lid on retailers. That’s something that has been called for when we were talking in the first reading of this bill, and other things like futureproofing the Act to ensure that it covers other things, because overall, fundamentally, we want to hit that smoke-free target and that includes vaping, that includes heated tobacco products, that includes the traditional cigarettes and tobacco products. It is a shame that some of these out-of-scope elements were not considered by the Minister and by the select committee to be included in this particular bill, because I think it does line up with the purpose of this bill.

One of the things I would like to specifically mention is around the advertising element, and particularly when it comes to the new section 25(4A), inserted by clause 12. This is something I would like to ask the Minister for further clarification on during the committee stage, because it specifically refers to how New Zealand - based websites must not link to advertisements that do not comply with New Zealand legislation, but it is limited to New Zealand websites. Now, we know that one of the biggest areas and biggest concerns globally, not just in Aotearoa New Zealand, is the number of young people who are taking up vaping, particularly young people who are under the age of 18.

Although this bill has made some progress in terms of making sure that retailers cannot sell to under-18-year-olds, websites are not the main root of how young people engage with the internet at this stage. One of the things we see that are challenging in other countries—for example, in Singapore, where vaping is banned but they’re still seeing a lot of vaping in their young people and a lot of that is by targeting through social media. So one of the things that would be good to actually see in this would be expanding it out to include not just New Zealand websites but social media as part of that ban, that limitation and restriction, around advertisement. I think that is something that would be good to consider during the committee stage in particular.

I think, overall, we do see that this bill, although it makes some changes, simply does not go far enough, particularly when we’re talking about things like limiting the number of retailers, things like having limits on heated tobacco products. Although this mentions a lot in terms of disposable vapes and some of the other elements around refills, etc., it still doesn’t address some of the other elements of non-disposable vapes; it doesn’t address some of the issues and concerns that we’re seeing with flavouring—I think some of the out-of-scope submissions did also talk about limiting the flavouring of different products.

Overall, although the Green Party of Aotearoa does support this bill and we’re supporting it, we do have a number of questions for the Minister during the committee stage on this bill, and we’re really hoping—and we’re also urging the Minister to consider expanding the scope of this, despite the fact the Minister says that she will be undertaking further things. I think the time is now for us to do something about it.

It’s a great honour to stand up and speak in support of the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Amendment Bill (No 2). I’m glad to hear that there’s support around the House, and the previous speaker, Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan, did mention a number of things that I do want to touch on. One of the things is a number of things which were considered out of scope, but it is actually in the report about why they are important. That is going to be, as we’ve heard from the Minister, more regulations coming into place.

We’ve also heard about the short select committee process, but I will also point out that maybe not all members in the House talking on this debate have actually been part of the select committee process. We’ve been working on vaping probably since early March. I noted on 6 March, we did have a number of briefings talking about vaping and youth vaping. This is not just something that’s popped up at the last minute.

I just did want to clarify a couple of those points. I think there’s probably been a little bit of misunderstanding about that. This bill is a vital step towards protecting the health and wellbeing of young people in New Zealand. This bill really does deal with a strong tension: a tension between stopping people smoking through vaping but not encouraging people who have never smoked—so we don’t want them to start vaping. We’ve seen an increase in youth taking up vaping, which is of great concern. Somehow the message of “less harm of vaping” has been morphed into “vaping is safe” and that is definitely not the case.

I will say we do need to be very careful—we can’t take decreasing smoking rates for granted. We have seen cigarette smoking rates in places like Australia and UK increase for the first time in decades, possibly in part due to their restrictive regulations that are put in place around vaping and smoking. I think we’ve got to be very careful with regulations that we do bring in, and I think kind of taking it in a bit-by-bit process is actually a wise way to do it. In saying that, our large increase in youth vaping rates does present a challenge and it does need to be addressed properly, and that’s what we’re doing.

We’ve talked about a number of things that the bill is doing and, through the select committee process, what has been improved, and we’ve talked about the disposable vaping. Of course, these disposable vapes are cheap, they’re easy to disguise and easy to hide in pockets and things like that, and so they have been a popular tool for young people who are vaping.

We heard about the pod system, how that’s important—especially with people who are facing disabilities, especially in the hand and fine motor skills, that they actually need to have a pod system. Of course, what we don’t want is to have a situation where people are reverting back to cigarette smoking. The same with a sinking lid on the number of vape stores: what we don’t want is places where cigarettes are available but vaping’s not, and so if people go in for a vape then they’re more likely to go to cigarettes. These are some of the things that we’ve been working on in the select committee process, not just in this bill but more widely.

Also, increasing the fine for selling to under-age people is very important. Not only is $10,000 clearly not a strong enough deterrent but, actually, by increasing it to $100,000, it also tips the balance. Actually, when enforcement officers are thinking about prosecuting, that actually the cost of going to prosecution is kind of a lot lower. It kind of increases that benefit, tipping the balance in favour of prosecution—and that’s what we definitely, definitely want to do.

This is an important, important bill. We are not trying to eliminate vaping as a tool to quit smoking, but we are trying to stop youth taking up vaping, and we also want to make sure that our children are safe. Therefore, I commend this bill to the House.

Members, the time has come for me to leave the Chair. The House is suspended, and I will resume the Chair at 9 a.m. tomorrow for the extended sitting.

Debate interrupted.

Sitting suspended from 9.56 p.m. to 9 a.m. (Thursday)