Jones Dail: Smoke-free Environments Amendment Bill — Referral to Health Committee Procedure In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Jones Dail: Smoke-free Environments Amendment Bill — Referral to Health Committee Procedure In Committee 
[Sitting date: 15 October 2003. Volume:612;Page:9224. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DAIL JONES (NZ First) 
: 
 I am new to the way things are being done these days. Of course when I was here in the old days we would ask: “What’s a lobby group?” We had never heard of a lobby group in those days. We never had any money and as for giving money away to a lobby group if a member had gone up to Sir Robert Muldoon and said that he or she wanted to give money to a lobby group to lobby for anything well that member would have been marched out of this place. The white coats would have come to take the member away. But now that I have come back here to Wellington I find that the Government not only has set up lobby groups but has set up lobby groups so ex-Government officials can go out and lobby for Government policy. Is the Government not good enough to be able to do that for itself? It is not good enough to be able to do that itself so it has to try to get these lobby groups by way of subterfuge to try to fool members. I was probably fooled myself. I received a letter from the Quit Group. That is what the Government should do with this bill—quit it. I did not notice before but I see from the letter now that the Quit Group is a charitable trust formed by the Cancer Society of New Zealand the Health Sponsorship Council and Te Hotu Manawa Maori. 
R Doug Woolerton 
: Who are they? 
DAIL JONES 
: I have no idea. “... Public money to reduce smoking in New Zealand.” In the letter the group told me I should support this bill. I asked what its authority was for me to do that. Its report has a heading: “Socially Cued Smoking and Quitting. Preliminary Findings”— 
Hon Ken Shirley 
: Who wrote the report? 
DAIL JONES 
: Well I opened it up and read in the introduction: “Tobacco smoking is a leading cause of preventable death in New Zealand. Ministry of Health 2002. To counter this an organised tobacco control programme has existed in New Zealand since the mid-1980s.” The report came out in 2002 but the programme started in the mid 1980s. It is a little out of kilter there. In brackets it states: “Laugesen and Swinburn 2000”. I thought: “Ministry of Health 2002; that has to be good.” so I asked the library whether I could read that Ministry of Health report 2002 which surely must have volumes on the effects of smoking and second-hand smoke. The report has about 36 pages. I kept turning the pages—I will not do that now and take up time—and finally I got to page 25. This is supposed to be the definitive Ministry of Health report on the subject in terms of the report recommended to me. This is the authoritative document. This is what I am supposed to rely on as a result of this consultative group. It states: “Past exposure to second-hand smoke is estimated to be responsible for about 347 deaths per year in New Zealand. Second-hand smoke is therefore …”. We have an estimation then we see “therefore …”. In a court of law people would be absolutely laughed out. I think in any sane place people would be laughed out. “Second-hand smoke is therefore the cause of death comparable to melanoma of the skin about 200 deaths per year and the number of people killed each year on the roads 509 deaths in 1997.” Who is the authority? Woodward and Laugesen 2001. Here is another one: “Exposure to second-hand cigarette smoke increases the risk of heart disease and stroke; Benita at al 1999  
Lung Cancer and Since 
.” They just quote other reports. That is the way this industry goes. One report just quotes another report. It just goes round in a circle. We never get any facts. 
I went to the trouble of getting something written by Alistair Woodward and Murray Laugesen  
How Many Deaths are Caused by Second-hand Smoke? 
. In the results section of the whole thing it states: “We do not know how total mortality varies with changing levels of exposure to SHS.” That does not stop them making a decision. They say that they do not know how total mortality varies but that does not stop them making a decision. Again in their methods they talk about: “Information on disease risks from SHS was sought by searching the scientific literature.” When people do a research they do it on actual cases. They do not go searching the literature which other people have written so that they can write about it. What a load of nonsense!