SpeechKEVIN HAGUE (Green): I would like to begin this contribution even though it seems odd because it was such a long time ago in the usual way in a second reading of thanking members of the select committee and thanking the submitters. Most of those members of the Health Committee as Annette King has remarked are now gone but to the submitters who are still around I say thank you. To the officials also I say thanks very much for the great work that you did to support us and thanks to the Minister today the Hon Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga. Much of the impetus for this bill came from the inquiry by the Māori Affairs Committee that came up with the grand goal of having a smoke-free Aotearoa by 2025—a great goal that I think is pretty well universally supported by members of this House—and part of what that inquiry realised was that in achieving that goal we would need to be active across a wide range of different domains. So we would need to be increasing the social marketing around tobacco but also recognising that smoking is not really a rational choice—social marketing by itself is clearly not enough. We needed to be more aggressively increasing the price of tobacco because there is good evidence of the effectiveness of that. We needed to be extending smoke-free areas—a fantastic initiative from previous Labour Governments and Annette King has mentioned Helen Clark. I would like to mention Annette King herself as being someone who has very strongly contributed in that area. We needed to be moving into the supply side—licensing retailers for tobacco products. I have to say that it has been very disappointing to see that really we have not increased the social marketing. Prices have increased since the inquiry was finalised but not nearly at the rate that the experts told us was required. We have not extended smoke-free areas and there have been no supply side controls. But in this one area of plain packaging or standardised packaging—which is the topic for this particular bill—there has been a bill. And as Iain Lees-Galloway has remarked in some ways the idea that sits behind this bill now with the changed name is in fact to do away with the last vestige of marketing. Not so long ago—20 years ago—we could have gone to any sports stadium in the country and seen billboards around the outside advertising Rothmans Benson and Hedges or other cigarette brands. Such a sight today would be a total shock to someone who was not exposed to that. I have done an experiment of showing photographs of those stadiums to young people and their eyes widened because they could not believe that that was allowed. What the tobacco companies have done is respond by making their packs mini-billboards for their products. So those cigarette packs littered around our cities—the point of them from the point of view of the industry is to market the product. I mention all of that by way of preamble because we are currently not on track to hit that goal—a smoke-free Aotearoa by 2025. That slow action—being a slow follower rather than a leader on the part of this Government—will ensure that we do not meet that target so the delay in bringing this bill back to the House is in my view inexcusable. I have mentioned Helen Clark and Annette King and I do also want to particularly acknowledge the contributions of the Hon Tariana Turia and Hone Harawira in the last several parliaments on this kaupapa of smoke-free Aotearoa. Their impetus behind plain packaging was incredibly important. I also want to mention Marama Fox in fact and how much I enjoyed Marama Fox walking out of that interview on television at the weekend with the latest of those big tobacco representatives who have come to our country to try to tell us how we should be making our domestic policy. I raise that because as Annette King in her contribution noted in the select committee we received a lot of submissions. Some of the very worst of the submissions that we received were from the tobacco industry. They were contributions that were frequently amateurish where the tobacco industry sought to give us a vaguely science-y-sounding or science-y-looking submission. They were from proxies of the industry—people whose research was funded by the industry itself. I found it extraordinary actually—the amateurish nature of those submissions. I believe that they were amateurish because they were from an industry that is used to getting its own way and that is very slowly adapting to a public policy environment where it is required to actually front up with evidence. In this case it is an industry that did not have that evidence. I celebrate in fact that that industry has become a pariah industry. But I want to say something to the members of another submitter—to the members in fact of the Food and Grocery Council an organisation that opposed the plain packaging bill that we are discussing here today and that has in fact opposed every single piece of legislation that I have seen in my time in this House that was aimed at reducing harm from tobacco. It is now spreading that same approach to measures that are intended to reduce harm from alcohol and from the food environment. I say to the members of that Food and Grocery Council who are many more than simply those members from those industries please think carefully about who you want to represent you and whether you want to be the proxies for those industries. Although we received some poor submissions we received some very good ones also. I do want to particularly note the submissions from Hāpai Te Hauora Tāpui from Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) from the Smokefree Coalition and from the Public Health Association and say that across many years now those organisations have been the sources of authoritative and useful information to members in this House. In that connection I want to say that this House as we seek to take forward not only this measure but also those other tobacco-control measures that we will need to reach that smoke-free Aotearoa goal will be the poorer for the Government's decision to remove the funding from organisations like the Smokefree Coalition and from ASH. That is a retrograde step that I hope the Associate Minister of Health—and I can see he is listening intently to this contribution—will reconsider because those organisations form a vital part of that public debate on tobacco control. They have an essential contribution to make to reducing the harm from this industry. Let us remember that every year 5000 New Zealanders die from preventable tobacco-related illness—600 of those are Māori. And everything that this House can do everything that the Government can do everything that civil society can do to prevent those deaths we should be doing. Thank you.