Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Amendment Bill (No 2)

The House is resumed. Last night when we left, we were on the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Amendment Bill (No 2). I call the next speaker, who is Ingrid Leary.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. The most compelling thing for me when I sat on the Health Committee listening to evidence about vaping was seeing a graph presented by Professor Hoek which showed New Zealand right at the top of the graph for 16- to19-year-olds that had vaped 20-plus times in a month, to the year 2023. New Zealand was up at 17 percent. Then there was the US down at 6 percent and the UK at around 10 percent. So we were way off the chart.

The bill was presented to us as a crackdown on vaping, and certainly there does need to be a crackdown on vaping. What we heard in the select committee was a lot of anxiety, not only from young vapers who are addicted but also from parents and from public health professionals, who reminded us that we don’t really know what the long-term effects of this habit are. So is this bill a crackdown on vaping or is it a bit random? Is it a bit of a distraction? It feels pretty random to me when I think about what the bill does and doesn’t do, and also the context in which it has been presented to the House, from which Minister and which party. What is the real agenda here around vaping and smoking cessation?

What the bill does do—and we’ve heard this—is it disallows some disposable vapes. It also reduces the visibility or the opportunity to have displays in store and online, which are good things and are part of the reason we are supporting this bill; and it has stronger penalties. It is important, I think, for anybody who is selling vapes to under age young people that they do face harsh penalties, although what we heard in the select committee was a real gap and a real concern around enforcement and the fact that very few prosecutions had occurred, that there was confusion around what the rules were, and that outside of the penalties regime, there didn’t seem to be a fear of being prosecuted, which is something that I’m not sure that this current bill fixes.

More importantly, what the bill doesn’t do is it doesn’t address price promotion. It doesn’t reduce the opportunity for young people to see vaping being advertised where there is a price promotion, which was an opportunity missed, and we were told by submitters that that was really important if we really want to crack down, as the Government has said. We didn’t see anything much about the number and density of vape stores, even though there was evidence that, particularly in low socio-economic areas, there is a prevalence of these vape stores, one after the other, just as there can be with alcohol stores, exposing our young people not only to the visibility of vaping but also to the opportunity to get hold of vapes.

We didn’t see very much, if anything, about the appeal of vape flavours, and we know that these are marketed to young people with names like Candyfloss and Sweet Mint and things that are really designed to appeal to young people. Why wasn’t that included in the bill? There was nothing about reducing nicotine. Nicotine is the addictive substance in vapes. Surely that would have been somewhere where we could have started to have some effect in legislation to make sure that the nicotine levels were graduated to be able to get young people off vapes, and indeed reformed smokers off vapes, but that was missed.

There is nothing in the bill about age verification, or about how one verifies purchasing vapes online or in stores, and, crucially, in my view, there was nothing about the monitoring, valuation, and performance of how the measures, including enforcement, were going to be conducted. It feels to me that this is a bit of a random bill, a bill that doesn’t go far enough. It is worth supporting because, of course, any step to reduce our young people vaping is important, but it’s such a missed opportunity.

Then, when we look at the context of how this was introduced and by whom, we have a Minister who introduced it who says she wants to crack down. I question the authenticity of that statement because this is a Minister who does not have a good track record at evidence transparency, and her integrity has been questioned by Professor Chris Bullen from Health Coalition Aotearoa.

Let’s look at what kind of evidence this Minister relies on. She has told us that nicotine is no more harmful than caffeine. She has presented that to her health officials in a document whose origins were unknown, a document she said she didn’t know who authored, a document that was eventually produced and redacted. It’s a document she maintains was produced before the election and yet contains references to the coalition agreement. It’s a document that inspired deep concern from the Auditor-General as to the conduct of information-keeping and information release.

When we look at a Minister who has acted in that way around smoking cessation, how can we trust that this bill is really about vaping cessation for our young people? The Minister has chided her own officials for describing the evidence that she was trying to produce—that some called a Google search—as out of date, selective, and crap. She took the unprecedented step of criticising her own chief adviser and saying that that chief adviser was trying to undermine her.

Well, I question the motivation for introducing this rushed vaping bill to the House, and is it true that this is really part of a crackdown on vaping with a bill that does not go far enough? When we look at the context of this, we see that the Minister also tried to change the regulations and rules around vaping to have them delayed for two years. Instead, Cabinet said that she could delay them for six months. Are these the actions of a Minister and a Government that really wants to crack down on vaping?

I’m providing this context because I’m questioning whether this bill is random or whether it is a strategic crackdown on vaping, and I don’t have the same faith and generosity of some of my colleagues to suggest that this is an authentic piece of work and a bigger piece of work because, of course, we have heard that there is a bill yet to come—we have no idea when it’s coming—that is apparently going to address all the other concerns, which are probably the real vehicles for being able to reduce vaping in young people.

To make matters worse, and I must address this because it has been very difficult for me to sit in this House and watch my colleague Dr Ayesha Verrall be attacked around conflicts of interest when I have sat on the Health Committee in the deliberations for this bill and watched her be at pains to show the conflict of interest with a family member. This is not the conduct of somebody who has tried to conceal anything, and I think it’s an indictment on the Government that they would try and raise this to defend their conduct when it comes to the authenticity of reducing smoking and vaping.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Thank you for raising that. Now we’ll go back to the bill.

INGRID LEARY: This is because the way I think is that we cannot look at vaping in isolation. The justification for vaping is that it reduces smoking harm, so we have to look at the totality, and my question to this House and my question to people watching is: is this a random bill? Is it something that is being designed as a distraction from a Minister under pressure and a party under pressure, trying to take the heat—pardon the pun—off the smoke and mirrors that we’ve seen? Or is it actually an authentic and serious piece of work designed to try and stop young people from smoking?

There is nothing around the process that convinces me of the latter. I look at the truncated process—that at the eleventh hour we were told it was going to be a shortened select committee, that, in fact, the Health Committee had notified for submissions prior to the bill even coming back from the House because the Government hadn’t anticipated the strength of our dismay and our concern at what they were doing from a process perspective.

We have heard that there are many things that this bill does not do, that are out of scope, that should have been in this bill, in my view. These are things that we would expect to come in the next tranche of legislation from this Minister, and my questions are: when will this happen, and will these be addressed? These are things like reducing the number of new vape stores, reducing the flavours—we’ve heard that time and time again. That was not addressed. What about the plain packaging that could be used to make vapes less attractive? What about reducing the nicotine harm? There’s plenty of evidence about that. You don’t even have to go to Google; you can get it from universities and experts. Why are these not addressed in this bill?

I look forward, as a member of the Health Committee, to doing my job as a parliamentarian, and I do want to acknowledge my colleagues from across the House for the strength they’ve shown in this regard, to making sure that this Minister comes back in a timely way with some legislation that addresses this issue. Until then, I think it’s pretty random bill.

The people of New Zealand have spoken. Vaping is a serious issue and it is time for the Government to take action. I rise up this morning to support this Government’s work to get tough on vaping and particularly on youth vaping. This bill is a first step towards limiting youth vaping and addressing vaping issues.

Just now we had our previous contributor from the Labour Party, Ingrid Leary, mention how she is passionate about addressing vaping issues, but I want to emphasise that I haven’t seen any action in the past six years to address the issues, and now they say that we don’t care. We are the Government who actually put this bill on the Table, so I don’t know what she was trying to say or what she was meaning, when saying that we are not taking action.

Let’s go back to the bill. The centrepiece of this bill is the complete ban on disposable vape devices. Also, it is important to recognise that this bill has a significant increase in fines for retailers caught cash-selling vapes to under-18s—from $10,000 to $100,000. It also introduces additional restrictions on the visibility of vaping products, and one of the best ones is banning new vape shops from operating near schools and early childhood centres.

During the submissions stage, we received and considered submissions from 849 groups and individuals. We had the privilege of hearing 41 submitters, both in person and by video conference. Because of them, we were able to strengthen this bill to serve its purpose. I also want to mention some of the great ideas that are out of scope, including licensing all retailers, the possibility of introducing density limits for specialist vape retailers, reducing the nicotine labels, and introducing plain packaging. Also, we heard feedback from local constituents and also from a lot of health foundations, especially the Asthma and Respiratory Foundation. They all agree that this bill is a positive step forward in the fight against youth vaping.

I believe that this bill is the first step towards limiting youth vaping and addressing vape issues. Also, we believe it is true that there is more work to do, and I’m looking forward to this House making more progress in due course. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. As I listen to that member Dr Carlos Cheung’s contribution, talking about the past six years, what we know is, actually, the blueprint for how we can reduce the impacts of these types of vaping methods, so we can reduce the impact of smoking in our communities, was already set out. There was a plan to make sure that we could eliminate smoking in this country, so we could continue to protect young people from the harms of smoking. That’s the blueprint for how we can really achieve this, with such an important matter like vaping, which is why, yes, we do support this bill. The member said that it’s a step forward. Well, it might be a step forward in the right direction, but it’s a long way from home plate. It’s a long way from where we actually need to be to reduce the harms of vaping in our communities.

I question some of the motives when we look towards the changing of eliminating smoking in a generation, yet just taking baby steps to make sure that we can support the elimination of vaping, or at least to minimise the harm of vaping in our communities for our young people. For me, these things go hand in hand. They are not something that should be seen in isolation whereby smoking is right over here and vaping is over here. That’s not the point. We need to be making something that’s far more coherent in order to make people understand that, yes, while we might accept that vaping can be used as a cessation tool, what we need to do is stop it getting into the hands of the people who don’t smoke; stop it from getting into the hands of the people like our young people, who have caught this craze—caught this bottled lightning, if you will, because that’s the way it just rapidly took over the country for our young people.

I think of my nephew who, sadly, got caught at school with a vape in his bag. He’s only 13 years old. I love my nephew. It would have been easy to crack down on our nephew because he got caught with a vape in his bag. I look at my Auntie Mariameno Kapa-Kingi, because she knows my nephew very well. It’s her mokopuna, so perhaps we blame my auntie. None the less, the point here is “monkey see, monkey do”, and if our young people continue to see vapes, regardless of the kinds of parameters that this bill might put in place to make sure that it might be harder for the operator to sell, harder for the young person to get it, the fact remains that when they see these examples in their environment and in their community, they think it’s OK to do it. They think it’s the right thing to do, which is why, as I reflect on the member who contributed before me, asking about what Labour did in six years, well, I take us back to just a very brief journey to well over 20 years ago—and, once again, my colleague and Auntie Mariameno Kapa-Kingi will know this very, very well. The pathway that was set out for banning smoking in this country—that’s the blueprint for how we do this.

As this bill continues to progress, I appreciate this is the second reading, but it’s not too late to make even more changes. It’s not too late to make this thing even better, to make sure that we follow that blueprint so that we can minimise the harm and reduce the harm and, in fact, get rid of the harm in our communities. I think that’s the opportunity we’ve got here. We know that when it gets through to the next stage, there’ll be a chance to make sure we can strengthen this bill. I’m going to look at colleagues right across the House to see if we can do that, to make sure that when we come to the third reading it’s going to be something that our community deserves; to make sure that my 13-year-old nephew doesn’t have a vape in his bag, that all of our tamariki right across Aotearoa New Zealand don’t have vapes in their bags.

I take the point about a blueprint, but it matters that we act on it and that’s what this bill is doing. Just two weeks ago I met with Vape-Free Kids NZ, an organisation of young people in our community, in Kāpiti. I met with Keisha and Riley; I met with Yelin and Abigail, and they told me the impact that they saw. They told me what this meant to them and what they would like to see happen. They talked about what their experience is at their high schools. I hear this from friends and family as well. Last year in particular, the constant fire alarms from people smoking in the toilet—but to the extent now that they’re telling me people are smoking in class. They’ve got the ones now without all the smoke, and they’ll hide it down their sleeve. They thought some teachers knew. This is how bad the culture has got.

This is why we need to take definitive action to crack down on the availability. That’s why they were so keen to see restrictions on the sale and supply of disposable vapes, which have just made it far too easy to get a hold of them. That’s why we talked about how young people could get a hold of vapes, how easy it was for them and how we had to crack down. We actually had to step up the consequence for people that continued to break the law and provide vapes to young people that—yes, I understand there’s an element where people will always be able to get a hold of them when they’re really determined, but we have to make it difficult and we have to put a consequence in place.

The other thing we talked about was visibility of products when they’re on sale and the impact that we know it’s had, and restricting the visibility of products in supermarkets for cigarettes and dairies and places like that, how that would make a meaningful difference. That’s what this bill does. This bill bans the manufacturing, sale, and supply of disposable vapes. This bill increases the consequence, the penalties for unlawful sale of vapes to people underage, and it imposes visibility restrictions for vaping products. It is a meaningful thing to do. As I met with these remarkable young women, they told me what they wanted to see happen, I said I would come and support this bill for them, and so on behalf of them now, I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to be able to make a contribution in this House, as always, on this Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Amendment Bill (No 2). I wasn’t a member of the Health Committee that was examining this bill, but I think many New Zealanders, and especially all parents in New Zealand, will join me in their concern around the rise of vaping in New Zealand and agree with the Health Committee—and, indeed, many parties in this House—that what we’re currently doing is not going far enough.

I say that because of the sudden—what appears to be, anyway—rise in the popularity of vaping, and also the concerning targeting that we have seen towards children. I’m reminded of a particular sweet that my daughter recently bought from the dairy. When she was eating it, it looked like she was vaping. I don’t know—many people in this House may remember lollies from their past that looked like cigarettes, which were quite popular. I was alarmed to see that this has now crept into people who are manufacturing sweets. I think it’s indicative of the huge problem of vaping.

Although we do support this bill, I would urge the Minister and the Government to think carefully about the upcoming committee stage on this and whether there are further changes, as indicated by the Labour and Green parties in their minority view in the select committee report, to take this further. I don’t think anyone in this House wants to see a greater proliferation of vaping. I don’t think we want to see this be an issue in schools, which, as previous speakers have said, it is. I do think now is the time, if we want to stop this becoming as much a part of our culture as cigarette smoking has been to previous generations, to actually make some strong decisions that keep our children safe.

Now, that’s not to take away the role that vapes do have as a smoking cessation tool, and I think that that is clear in the deliberations around that, but it would have been nice to see a few further changes in relation to this bill that would have made accessing vapes more difficult and less attractive for children. These have been mentioned by other speakers, but options included a kind of sinking lid on vape stores so that once one closes, another one doesn’t open; greater limitations on the flavours that you would have, and this kind of links into my point around this particular brand of sweet that my child was able to buy from the dairy that looked very similar to a vape; and also to minimise that appeal—I think we need to realise that there is an incentive for companies that produce vapes to make these products attractive.

We, as the decision makers in the room and the adults in the room, are the ones that have to take responsibility for ensuring that this is not targeted towards children in a way that would make them more susceptible to taking up a habit that we know is likely to be detrimental to their long-term health. We’ve had great success in terms of smoking cessation in relation to other products that contain nicotine, and we have to take a different route in relation to vapes.

We will be supporting this bill, but we do urge the Government to continue to be open-minded to the large amount of our community that is calling for even greater restrictions on vapes, and that includes, very importantly, parents and people who are concerned about the future of our children with this relatively new product that seems to be infiltrating all of our communities. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. I’ve listened to the contributions from both sides of the House, and I’ve thought about those in my generation—Generation Z; born after 1997—many of whom have taken up vaping but would have never ever considered taking up cigarette smoking. It’s about making it more challenging and difficult to take that first step.

This legislation, the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Amendment Bill (No 2), is focused on the banning of disposable vapes; increasing the penalties for unregulated sales of the product, particularly to minors; and imposing retail visibility restrictions. We think about how many vape stores we walk past nowadays that weren’t there 10 or 15 years ago, with the big, bright lights, the attractive qualities to them, to entice people into their stores to purchase their products.

I think the aspect that stands out the most to me is the last point, around including early childhood education centres into the proximity restrictions for vape stores to be established. I think of my Bay of Plenty electorate and my home and the number of incredible early childhood centres we’ve got—we’ve got BestStart, and Future Focus, and JeMMa’s, and many, many others that play an incredible role in our local community—and ensuring that vape stores aren’t set up next door to them, so that, as Camilla Belich said previously, we’re not making it an attractive quality for kids to want to take up in the first place, and that we’re putting in measures to prevent them from even considering taking that first step into vaping.

We’re going to reach our target of Smokefree 2025 next year, but there is more work to be done in the vaping space. There’s more work to be done to say, yes, “We want to have fewer people smoking in New Zealand, but we want to have fewer people vaping as well”, and so we need to do our part as the regulators and those who create the law to make it difficult for people to take that first step into vaping. This legislation does that, so I commend it to the House.

Tēnā koe e te Pīka. I stand to take a short call on behalf of Te Pāti Māori. Just as a brief summary for our whānau who are watching: this bill will ban the sale of disposable vapes by the end of this year, and it also increases fines for selling vapes to under-18-year-olds, and it’s going to introduce further restrictions on retailers who are selling vapes. From that perspective, Te Pāti Māori is supportive of the bill before us. We know, as tangata whenua, how cigarette smoking and vaping has become a real scourge on our communities and we have real concern with the lack of support around those of our rangatahi and tamariki who have started vaping and are, in fact, addicted to it.

I do want to caution—and I think we’ve all said this, but part of this is that, while we support this bill, I guess the hypocrisy is that we can’t help but keep in mind that the Government is restricting vapes but appear also that they’re continuously pushing cigarettes. From Te Pāti Māori’s perspective auahi kati [smoke-free] is where we should be. It’s how we should have stayed focused; and there have been numerous templates, blueprints, and red prints put out to actually show how communities should be progressing towards these targets. Our biggest fear is that we are bringing in nicotine to our communities. I guess, what we know from our young people’s perspective—and there were some amazing submissions and there have been some amazing advocates—is that the more you vape, the more your brain and your body get used to having nicotine, and the harder it is to go without it.

We are talking about young people. As my colleague on the other side, Peeni Henare, shared about his 13-year-old nephew, we’re seeing eight-year-olds and 10-year-olds becoming addicted. I just want to talk about what that looks like so we can identify the symptoms in our communities. Nicotine withdrawal symptoms make our rangatahi and our tamariki, our eight-year-olds, our 10-year-olds, feel extremely irritable, restless. They feel sad and down. They feel anxious. They get tired and groggy. They have trouble concentrating. They have trouble sleeping. They have trouble thinking clearly at all. They feel hunger and they have intense—intense—cravings for a fix, and this is going on inside our very communities, inside our schools. Actually, probably the biggest shock for everyone in Aotearoa is that it isn’t just Māori-centric. It hits us harder, but, actually, it’s hitting middle class, upper class white families as well.

What we need to be really mindful of is that, while we see these symptoms and we put these actions in place and, indeed, support the Government’s bill—what we also need to remind ourselves of is the services, the support, and the empathy that we need to be seen as having for our communities who have absolutely no investment around them in how to deal with this. That was probably the biggest concern that came out that we heard loudly and clearly. Absolutely, we heard from the Muaūpoko Tribal Authority. They had absolute zero tolerance for smoking and vaping, and the same with Ngāti Tukorehe, because if we look in my takiwā in Taitoko—Levin—there are 31 locations selling vapes in Levin—31 locations. I caution that we do this wisely—that we together, across parties, make an effort to make sure that those communities have the support, the wraparound support, inside their schools, inside the homes, where a lot of these, again, rangatahi and children are suffering these symptoms without us even knowing.

I guess the biggest concern that we saw when the changes were happening within the cigarette and the smoke-free targets and, indeed, the investment, is that there’s a lack of recognition in the connection to where those rangatahi go with those health concerns. So, nō reira, we leave that there and look forward to the next stage of this bill. Thank you.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a second time.