Alexander Marc: Smoke-free Environments Amendment Bill — Procedure Referral to Health Committee In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Speaker Recalled  Speaker Recalled In Committee Procedure 
Alexander Marc: Smoke-free Environments Amendment Bill — Procedure Referral to Health Committee In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Speaker Recalled  Speaker Recalled In Committee Procedure 
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MARC ALEXANDER (United Future) 
: 
 I am glad to finally get a call. I sat here for hours on end and never got the chance to take a call. A lot of the other members spoke once twice or three times. This is the first chance I have had to actually get up and say something. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Clem Simich) 
: The member will please make his contribution. 
MARC ALEXANDER 
: I ask the question of who will be liable for the loss of revenue to the businesses adversely affected. We are talking about individuals up and down the country who employ thousands upon thousands of Kiwis and who have put their money into an enterprise a hospitality venue and now some do-gooder Government spokesperson will come along and tell them what they can and cannot do in their comfort of their own investments. It makes absolutely no sense. Yet at the same time the State-funded prison system allows those at Her Majesty’s pleasure to smoke. Taxpayers are paying for that—apparently what is good for the goose is not good for the gander—but people who want to pay for their own hospitality venues are denied that right. How on earth does that make any sense? If the Government is going to disallow people from making decisions in their own investments it should at least have the gumption to apply the rule right across the board and disallow smoking in all prisons yet the State will not do that because it is in the too-hard basket. 
Who will be liable for the loss of choice to the proprietors of the various hospitality venues when the numbers of people going to them go down? Will the State be liable for that as a direct result of its interference in what should be a micromanaged business decision taken by the people who actually run the businesses? The Government will not make up the shortfall. It will not even give them a tax cut on the money that they earn despite the huge amounts of money that it is raking in from them and stealing from their pockets. Taking away their choice and their revenue is another nail in the coffin of the hospitality industry. 
Who will be liable for the loss of choice to the customers in choosing the businesses they wish to frequent? There are people who want to go into certain bars and have a drink have a chat to their mates have a cigar or a cigarette and the Government is taking away their choice. It is ironic is it not? What sense does it make that those who want this bill to pass will be exercising their choice to vote with the result that those affected by that choice will be deprived of their own choice by this legislation? There is an irony there that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. 
It is often true that the people who pass these sorts of bills are the very people who do not have to live with the consequences of the decisions that they impose on others. It makes no sense for the Government to come along and impose something else on those people who have built up their businesses and who have sometimes scrimped and saved and borrowed money from the bank to get their businesses to a certain level of success. That makes no sense whatsoever. I would have a little more respect for the members who are pushing this legislation through if they were in the hospitality industry and would be directly affected but—guess what—they are not. They are immune to that because they are here in Parliament earning taxpayers’ money not opening their own businesses and being a part of the hospitality industry thus suffering the effects of the decisions that they have made. 
We have made appeals using scientific evidence to show that ventilation systems can and do work but Labour is not interested in science when it has its own ideology and prejudices to ram through. Again that makes little sense. There is no common sense here at all. The Government will not listen to reason or to the evidence that science can provide that there is a perfectly reasonable common-sense answer to the problem of air quality. We have made appeals using common sense to show how nonsensical are the health reasons advanced by the health zealots the health Nazis of Labour. 
Something that happens in the rural areas—which is not something that I subscribe to—is that parents will go into the pub and take out a packet of crisps to the kids in the car who will be waiting while the dinner gets ready or whatever. Now what will happen is that those parents instead of smoking in the pub will come out join their children in the car and smoke in front of them. That is exactly what will happen. The Government will not stop smokers from smoking. All it will do is shift the problem and take it somewhere else. That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. 
Why does the Government not go after people who smoke in homes where there are children who have no choice at all? Why does it not go after that? Instead what the Government is doing is taking its health zealotry to the people who want to choose to go into—