Roy Heather: Smoke-free Environments Amendment Bill — Procedure Referral to Health Committee Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee 
Roy Heather: Smoke-free Environments Amendment Bill — Procedure Referral to Health Committee Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee 
[Volume:610;Page:7936] 
HEATHER ROY (ACT NZ) 
: 
 I would like to join my National Party colleague who said that perhaps the words “Enhanced Protection” have been removed for a very good reason for the fact is enhanced protection has nothing to do with smoke-free environments. There are several other titles I could suggest for this but two spring to mind. The first one reflects the actual intention of this Labour Government: that is to ban smoking completely in this country; so perhaps it should be called the “Banning of Smoking in New Zealand Bill”. ACT has also opposed this bill consistently from the start because of the loss of freedom it represents and also because of the blatant breach of property rights it presents us with. If somebody takes the time effort and financial risk of operating a business he or she should be able to have the say as to what goes on within those premises. This bill takes that right away from people completely so the other suggestion I would make is the “Blatant Breach of Property Rights Bill”. 
I would like to call for some intellectual honesty because that is what is missing from this debate. This debate ignores intellectual honesty. Several members on this side of the House have referred to various studies that have shown no significant harm occurring from passive smoking. 
 I would like to refer to the World Health Organization study published in  
The Economist 
 in 1998. The World Health Organization undertook a study. It was certain that it was going to link lung cancer with passive smoking but in fact it found that non-smokers married to working with or raised by smokers were no more at risk of lung cancer than anyone else was. 
Pita Paraone 
: Even Maoris? 
HEATHER ROY 
: Even Maoris that is right. The World Health Organization as we all know has long admitted that links between lung cancer and passive smoking are weak but those findings were not what it wanted and they were certainly not what it was prepared to tell the world. The study was summarised—[ 
Interruption 
] I can tell Mr Jones that it was printed in a very bulky world health document and was summed up despite being a lengthy and extensive experiment in three paragraphs. Fortunately  
The Economist 
 saw fit to exercise the intellectual honesty that the World Health Organization did not have at that point and printed the study in one of its 1998 issues. 
Several people have mentioned Returned Services Associations. I wrote to all the Returned Services Associations in New Zealand outlining my party’s stance and asking them for their comments. I gave them half a page on the back of the survey to write in and 80 percent of the forms I sent out were returned to me with comments. Just about all of those comments were in support of my party’s stand opposing the bill. They said—and I think the United Future members said—that the Returned Services Associations would just flout the law. 
The question that then arises is what exactly will happen when people flout the law. It seems to me that there is no point in having it. Good law as my colleague Stephen Franks is often heard to say should be enforceable and it should be routinely enforced. What point is there in having a law that we know will not be enforced? The Ministry of Health does not have the resources or the staff to do that. We are told that there are 17 part-time smoke police. How are they going to get around the country and enforce this legislation? It is just not possible. And if the law cannot be enforced we in this Parliament need to stop and think—if we are not making good law what are we doing here? 
Several members on the other side of the House have said that this bill will protect people from the effects of smoke. Mr Damien O’Connor said that he has been around hospitals. I have worked in hospitals and I have seen enough emphysema to last me a lifetime. If I have to treat another person it will not be a pleasant experience. But those people were not people who suffered from passive smoking—they were smokers. They had smoked for most of their lives. They had smoked for 40 45 and sometimes 50 years. The disorders they were in hospital to be treated for—the ones that Mr O’Connor referred to—were not as a result of passive smoking. Those people were smokers and they had been for some time. They recognised that they had brought their lung disorder on themselves yet in most cases they still did not give up smoking.