Auchinvole Chris: Smoke-free Environments (Controls and Enforcement) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Auchinvole Chris: Smoke-free Environments (Controls and Enforcement) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 14 July 2011. Volume:674;Page:20139. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CHRIS AUCHINVOLE (National—West Coast - Tasman) 
: 
 We will remove retail displays ban retailers from using tobacco trading names to advertise tobacco and have stricter restrictions on selling tobacco to young people particularly to minors. I offer congratulations to the Minister the Hon Tariana Turia on her compassionate persistent striving effort to bring this bill to fruition. I offer congratulations to the Maori Affairs Committee and all others who have worked so assiduously on this issue. 
A lot of people have said how good timely and really there the Smoke-free Environments (Controls and Enforcement) Amendment Bill is. As someone who started smoking when I was 11 and did not stop until about 15 years ago I would like although I strongly support this bill to spare a thought for the dedicated die-hard—and I mean that phrase quite literally—smokers. I am talking about the guys who have smoked pretty much all their lives and feel that they cannot stop. They are still out there—in ever-decreasing numbers dying faster than the rest of us but they are still there. I have a message for them: “You can give up—oh yes you can.” The best way to quit that I ever found—the only way I ever found—was to simply get someone to ask one to. So if a person knows another who smokes—and this is a bit like the alcoholic who drinks—they should face them with it and ask them not to. If it is someone they respect and love all the better. It does work. 
The curtain is coming down on smoking which was a phenomenon of my generation. We have seen the birth of wholesale smoking and the cessation of it. All the films we used to watch when people like Shane Jones and I were quite young would show everybody smoking. It was a forced illustration of how to be cool and manly—and womanly too; they had ladies’ cigarettes. It was a solid advertising wall and the curtain is now coming down on it. 
As one totally committed smoker I thoroughly enjoyed cross-examining the representatives of the tobacco industry at the select committee meeting I attended. One could say only that we stitched them up—we really did stitch ’em up. We knew rather more about their industry than they did. There can be no pretence about the effect of smoking. 
I still feel for those smokers we meet who suffer from the effects of emphysema after a lifetime of smoking. What a tragic way to end an otherwise active life! I still feel for the guys I worked with in forestry who would start each day with a 5 minute - long cough and a lot of throat clearing and would then light up a gasper because it was their “only pleasure”. It is sad. 
Have we got there yet? I would suggest that we have not—not yet. I still have sympathy for those who gather outside pubs for a puff in the evenings but again my message to them is: “Hey fellas you can give up. You really can.” 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: Order! 
CHRIS AUCHINVOLE 
: Well the Assistant Speaker may have already done so. My message to those people is that they can give up they really can and they will be loved for longer if they do.