Prebble Richard: Smoke-free Environments Amendment Bill — Referral to Health Committee Procedure In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Prebble Richard: Smoke-free Environments Amendment Bill — Referral to Health Committee Procedure In Committee 
[Sitting date: 15 October 2003. Volume:612;Page:9246. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE (Leader—ACT) 
: 
 The first thing I want to say to the Committee is that the privilege of being able to introduce a member’s bill is a very important one and we now have a member who is in charge of this bill who is treating the Committee with contempt. Questions have been asked and she has refused to answer them. She took one call and tried to brush off the fact that lobby groups have been paid $2.1 million dollars— 
Hon Maurice Williamson 
: How much? 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE 
: An amount of $2.1 million has been paid to lobby MPs. She has not said to the Committee how deeply involved she was in this process. Before we went into Committee I described it to the Speaker as corruption. I believe that it is and I say that the member has an obligation to the Parliament and the country to explain her role in it. 
I want to say something else to the member. I received an interesting letter that came through the post and I am quite happy to table it and for people to look at it. It states: “For the last 10 years I have been fighting to get a fair deal for 850000 smokers in New Zealand who are now treated as second-class citizens. I am 73 years old and have smoked 40 cigarettes a day for over 50 years it is costing me $120 a week more than I ever paid on a mortgage or rent. When they decided that they were going to stop the younger generation from smoking I was all for it until they made up their mind that it was going to be paid for by the existing smokers only. So that means 25 percent paying for it and 75 percent reaping all the benefits. … It is the successive Governments who turned my generation into nicotine addicts by dumping the tobacco products on them by the truckloads during their war service most of them still teenagers. Now we have to pay $27 for a packet of 50 grams of tobacco $7 worth of tobacco and a $20 fine every time we buy one. While every other addict like drugs and alcohol get all the help they need only the smokers get to pay for their addiction. … I have got no quarrel with the genuine non-smoker actually I wish I was one of them. But I have got a gutsful of those anti-smokers most of them ex-smokers who were forced to give up because they were lucky enough to have a job. I wonder how Helen Clark would react if all smokers decided to stop donating their blood. … In the last 10 years it has cost me my life savings of $60000 on smokes and the younger generation is smoking more than ever before.” 
I would like to hear from the promoter of this bill Steve Chadwick as to why she is saying to this ex-serviceman that he cannot smoke in his home the Returned Services Association yet when it comes to Maori or prisoners she has said that they are exempt. I think that marae should be exempt but I also think so should the Returned Services Association. I ask Steve Chadwick where her obligation and feeling is to Bert Rovers. Why is it that smokers are the only addicts who have to pay for their addiction? Government members lean over backwards for drug addicts and people with alcohol problems. But they are so politically correct these second-rate academics that they want to make a persecuted class out of people who fought for the freedoms that that member now enjoys. 
But I now tell that member that she has an obligation to this Committee to explain how her Government gave $2.1 million to lobby groups to lobby MPs. Not one member of Parliament was told by those professional lobbyists—the sleeze group—about this corruption of our Parliament. How much did she know about it? If she did not know about it why does she not stand as the chairperson and say that this matter should be referred back to the Health Committee—let us have these lobbyists in front of us and let us have an explanation for their behaviour. She has an obligation to the standards of this Parliament. I do not know of this ever happening before. I know this Government is making us a Third World economic country but now we are getting Third World politics as well. I seek leave to table the letter of the 73-year-old returned serviceman Mr Rovers. 
Document by leave laid on the Table of the House. 
Hon TONY RYALL (National—Bay of Plenty) 
: 
 The irony of this bill is that the members who stand up and say that it should be all right to smoke cannabis say it is not all right to smoke tobacco. The member for Rotorua says that it is all right to smoke cannabis but she does not want us smoking tobacco—cannabis is fine but tobacco is wrong. This is the sort of country where one can go into a public bar in Rotorua and cannot buy a cigarette but can buy a woman. Then one can go out the door and be able to smoke a cannabis cigarette. That is the vision the member for Rotorua is talking about. 
I shall talk about the inconsistency of the Labour Party. Do members remember the scandal that erupted in mid-1999 when Nicky Hager’s book revealed that taxpayers’ money had been funnelled through a public relations firm to get people to write to newspapers and Ministers about the Timberlands sustainable forestry scheme? Do members remember the scandal when it was revealed that taxpayers’ money was funnelled through a public relations firm to get people to lobby members of Parliament? Helen Clark said that was a constitutional affront. She said it was outrageous that taxpayers’ money should be used to lobby political party members and members of Parliament. Do members remember the individual Kit Richards? He sent an email saying people should lobby Ministers. He did not say they should lobby Maoris; he said people should lobby members of Parliament about sustainable forestry. Helen Clark had that man sacked. She rang the State-owned enterprise and made it clear that he had to be sacked and her argument was that taxpayers’ money should not be used to lobby members of Parliament. 
Now we have discovered in the last week that $2 million of taxpayers’ money was funnelled through Action on Smoking and Health the Smokefree Coalition and a Maori health organisation to lobby Opposition MPs to support a bill promoted by Steve Chadwick. It is outrageous that that should have happened. 
Progress reported.