Street Maryan: Customs and Excise (Tobacco Products—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Street Maryan: Customs and Excise (Tobacco Products—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 26 September 2012. Volume:684;Page:5710. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour) 
: 
 I am pleased to contribute to this Committee stage debate on the Customs and Excise (Tobacco Products—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill. Yesterday when I spoke on this bill I talked about the numbers of New Zealanders who die from smoking-related illnesses or from passive smoking—the inhalation of other people’s smoke. It sits at somewhere around 4500 to 5000 people per year who die prematurely because of the effects of tobacco. So I applaud the Government’s efforts to make tobacco harder to purchase which is what this bill will do. 
This bill amends the Customs and Excise Act—and I am speaking to Part 1—to increase by 10 percent the excise on tobacco every year for the next 4 years. So effective from 1 January 2013 1 January 2014 1 January 2015 and 1 January 2016 there will be a 10 percent increase in the excise on tobacco. That will help to put the product itself further out of the reach of young people and that is an important step. 
But I have to go back to some points I made yesterday and which my colleague Iain Lees-Galloway has made again this evening that if this were truly a health measure with health-related objectives in mind perhaps the first objective in the regulatory impact statement written by Treasury would not read: “This analysis assesses options to increase tobacco excise to help achieve the objectives of responsibly managing Government’s finances to achieve its fiscal strategy goals;”. Objective number one: to achieve its fiscal strategy goals. This is a tax grab. This is not about health. Had it been about health it would have come to the Health Committee. It might have been introduced by the health Minister. It is in the name of an associate health Minister the Hon Tariana Turia but even she was not present. She was clearly involved in some other activity and was not able to move the second reading of the bill herself so it fell to the Hon Chester Borrows. 
There are a number of people in the National Government who will be hoodwinked tonight into getting up and saying how good this will be for the health of New Zealanders. I expect Dr Hutchison the chair of the Health Committee to be one such hoodwinked. I am anticipating Dr Hutchison’s speech. In fact I will be seriously disappointed if Dr Hutchison does not get up and tell us how good this is for people’s health. He used to be a doctor—he used to be a doctor. So I would expect him to get up and say that. 
I am very pleased for health reasons—and so is the Labour Party—to support this bill but the thing I find missing in Part 1 of this bill which is the part currently under discussion is the thing that might persuade me that the Government had health measures in mind and not simply managing the Government’s finances to achieve its fiscal strategy goals. Certainly secondly it does have “achieving the Government’s goal of making effectively New Zealand smoke-free by 2025;”. Treasury had such trouble with that sentence that it could not even express it properly. The syntax is all skew-whiff. But anyway the first objective clearly is about achieving the Government’s fiscal strategy goals. If it were not that if it were seriously a health measure—and I am pleased that Dr Hutchison is coming up to the Table to get a copy of the bill so that he can prepare his arguments in rebuttal of this—it would say in Part 1 of the bill surely would it not: “We are going to take this money which Treasury calculates will be a substantial amount”—that amount that my colleague quoted before and I am just struggling to find it— 
Dr David Clark 
: $528 million. 
Hon MARYAN STREET 
: It was $528 million over 4 years. It would say in Part 1 if it were serious: “A proportion”—I am not going to be greedy and say all of the $528 million over 4 years but a proportion; let us say a tenth—“would be dedicated to assisting people to give up smoking.” Assisting people to give up smoking—in other words putting money back into Quitline putting money back into the products that assist people who are addicted to nicotine to withdraw from it to manage it in the course of that withdrawal and to successfully give it up. That would be something to really praise the Government about had it been serious about this being a health measure. But for all my examination of Part 1 I cannot find anything that says that these four substantive 10 percent increases are going to be put back into health. They are not. They will be used to paper over the cracks of a disparate and an unsuccessful economic strategy. 
Although we support the bill for health reasons—and I am sure that there will be one or two well-intentioned members of the Government who support this bill for health reasons—there are others who are simply saying: “Here is a tax grab. Here is something that we can do because we are falling terribly short in our projections on what we are going to get from asset sales. So we are not going to get the money that we expected to get the market is low our assets are depreciating by the day and we are not going to get the funds that we thought we would get from asset sales and therefore we need additional forms of revenue. What can we do? We will hike up the cost of tobacco make cigarettes more expensive and we can do it under the guise of it being good for people.” 
This is a cynical measure. However having spotted the cynicism which one could spot at 500 paces—at 500 paces—we are prepared to support the bill for all the right reasons and in fact recognise that what should be in here is some mechanism for delivering the revenue gathered from these four 10 percent increases back into health and health protection for New Zealanders. 
There is more to be said about this. The bill is currently inadequate. It serves one purpose and one purpose only as a tax grab. If we are lucky it will have a by-product that will be good for New Zealanders but it was not drafted with that in mind. If it had been it would have been drafted differently. Thank you.