Rurawhe AdrianHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Mr Speaker. One of the I think real benefits of this Parliament from a policy perspective is the quality and number of the health professionals we have here. We've heard from three of the medical practitioners tonight. We've just heard from a midwife we've heard from a volunteer ambulance officer and somebody experienced in psychological therapy. Now you'll hear from a health service manager and an accountant—not quite the same sort of gravitas. But I think what we heard from particularly the doctors and from Ms Pallett was compelling stories about the harm and the addictive nature and people presenting in emergency departments with terrible terrible sequelae from their smoking years but still unable to shake the habit. I've joked in this House before it's not that funny but as an ex-smoker I've referred to the fact that giving up smoking is easy—I should know I've done it about seven times. I finally got there but it is a highly addictive product and the best way is not to start in the first place. So to that degree I certainly support the goal. But I do want to touch on a couple of the concerns that I have about whether there is sufficient evidence of this being the right thing to do and in fact more so whether one of the three policy elements could actually cause more harm than good. I'll elaborate on that in a minute but I do want to acknowledge the comments that Debbie Ngarewa-Packer made about the previous Government's confidence and supply agreement with the Māori Party and the excellent progress that was made firstly in setting the goal of Smokefree 2025 which at that time was pretty ambitious. Now we know we're not going to get there but at least we set off on a path that mainly through impositions of increased excise certainly put people into the situation of saying time to stop". But for those hardcore chronically-addicted smokers no amount of new excise is going to change that I don't think. We did need to think of other means and after what I believe is an unfortunate delay of several years we now have an Associate Minister of Health who's acted boldly I think in these three ideas. The retail outlet issue we agree with in principle and it's certainly going to be helpful for those who are addicted and trying to quit because generally speaking when people have kicked the habit it's the temptation of walking into a dairy and knowing that those cigarettes are behind the counter that actually tempts them to go back. There's no doubt there's going to be a cost on this really important part of the retail sector and for many of them the margins that they make on cigarette sales is what keeps them going. That's not a reason not to do this. But I do think we need to be eyes wide open in terms of what it will mean not just for them and their businesses but actually if we accelerate the demise of the corner dairy—which has been going on for a generation or more—then this could be the thing that that tips them over. So I think eyes wide open is a really important thing to do there. The area that I have the biggest concern about is the low-nicotine cigarettes and it does worry me that we may be doing more harm than good and I encourage the select committee to really drill into this. Why do I say that? Well as Brooke van Velden has mentioned nicotine is the addictive substance but it's the other things in smoked tobacco that causes the harm. Nicotine itself just really doesn't do much harm at all except hook you into the substance. It's the toxins the tars and the carcinogens that are in smoked tobacco that cause all the harm. So the policy question therefore is this: if nicotine levels drop will people compensate—what's known as compensatory smoking? Will they smoke more? The evidence on that is equivocal. In the United States there was a kind of candy-coated Food and Drugs Administration research that suggested that would be significant quality adjusted life years—in the hundreds of millions—for their population if indeed that were true. But looking more into European and United States studies it did suggest that—well firstly the research is difficult to draw a conclusion from because with such a high dropout rate. That in itself I think informs the decision—it's like probably half of the people who went on through clinical trials to low-nicotine cigarettes actually dropped out. So you can pretty much say I think for them if they continue to smoke—and most of them did—that they weren't prepared to continue with a low-nicotine product. For the rest of them there is clear evidence that carbon monoxide exposure increased because of the compensatory smoking. If one isn't getting nicotine through one cigarette and needs two to satisfy the craving then that's going to cause more harm than good. There's enough evidence I think that exists already for concern about this for caution around this and I would encourage the Health Committee to make sure that they get the best advice that they can from the ministry about what they have looked at because there is definitely I think an equivocal evidence base right now.The other thing to do obviously with the low nicotine is: what's going to happen to excise? Rather disappointingly but not unusually the regulatory impact statement doesn't say a lot about whether excise will go up down or stay the same. I presume it's going to stay the same. Paradoxically if that trend of compensatory smoking exists then it may be possible that if people aren't in a mood to quit and they have to smoke low-nicotine cigarettes the Crown revenue from excise may actually go up and that seems counterintuitive. But I think we need to have some kind of financial analysis of the impacts of this. The third area is in the age restrictions and we heard a very interesting contribution from both Chlöe Swarbrick and Brooke van Velden on this. As a father of teenagers I actually support this but I'm not sure how effective it is. Debbie Ngarewa-Packer talked about the potential for punishing people who are nevertheless of an age if they smoke. I'm not sure that that's actually going to happen; it'll be the sellers that are punished. I haven't looked into the bill about whether or not somebody who may over that age buy cigarettes and then provide them to someone who was born after 2009 whether there is some culpability there. But my main concern in this area is: how effective is this going to be? We know from the Government's attempts to regulate and control the supply of vaping products to under-18-year-olds that strong anecdotal and some evidentiary base exists that that's been a failure and that the number of secondary school students who now vape routinely and regularly is much much higher than the Health Committee heard when we went through the Smokefree environments amendment bill in 2019—or 2020 I think it was. We heard from school kids coming in from St Bernard's College and I think it was Wainuiomata college that came in and told us that the data we had from the ministry was simply not consistent with their lived experience that there was widespread use of vaping products in amongst the under-18-year-olds. I raise that because simply prohibiting the purchase of something doesn't mean it's not going to be used and we do risk potentially romanticising the product by making it out of their reach and having the opposite effect. Now I don't think that's as material of a concern as I have with the low-nicotine cigarettes. But I do think the Health Committee needs to look really deeply as it tried to do with the vaping products and actually we didn't get a very good response. So I think we've really got to keep the ministry's feet to the flames on this one. I applaud the ideas I applaud the novel approach to breaking this cycle of nicotine dependency but we've got to go in with as much of an evidence base as we can and particularly if there's a risk that we could do more harm than good. But I wish the select committee all the best in that; I'll be watching it very very closely because I'd really like it to succeed.DEPUTY SPEAKER: Members it has come time for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break. The House will resume at 7 p.m.Sitting suspended from 5.58 p.m. to 7 p.m."