Wall Louisa: Customs and Excise (Tobacco Products—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is subject to correctionWall Louisa: Customs and Excise (Tobacco Products—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 26 May 2016. Volume:714;Page:11443. Text is subject to correction.]LOUISA WALL (Labour—Manurewa): Kia ora. I am actually really pleased to follow my colleague Stuart Nash in taking a call because he and I are 100 percent on the same page in regard to this the Customs and Excise (Tobacco Products—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill and its implications particularly for young New Zealanders.I have a submission to the Budget Policy Statement that was presented by Warren Lindberg who is the chief executive officer of the Public Health Association with regard to the tobacco excise and what the tax take should be spent on. I just want to outline the initiatives he thought should be prioritised given our focus on making New Zealand smoke-free by 2025. The initiatives are: targeted health promotion and cessation services for young people; targeted health promotion and cessation services for Māori particularly young Māori women; targeted health promotion and cessation services for pregnant women and their families/whānau; funding post-birth cessation services support for up to 2 years following so that mothers and those around them can sustain cessation which would provide the maximum health gains for the parents and for all New Zealand babies; and research into effective cessation and effective tobacco policy for New Zealand including targeted surveys of tobacco use among vulnerable communities and populations.One of the references in that submission was to the Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) Year 10 Snapshot Study. The overall philosophy or principal position that this particular survey articulates in its results is this: quitting is hard and protecting children from the addiction of smoking in the first place is best. I think that makes sense to all of us but as I outlined earlier within the context of 66 percent of our young people trying smoking and of those 50 percent of them then smoking for 40 years and dying premature deaths—and we have talked about some of the consequences—I absolutely agree with Stuart Nash that we should be doing everything we can to stop our kids smoking in the first place.One of the biggest challenges we have with that and this is where it gets really interesting is that when children grow up in a family where one parent smokes they are actually 25 percent—the research is really interesting. It says if you are a young person and you grow up in a family where both of your parents smoke if one of them gives up smoking there is a 25 percent reduction in the likelihood of you smoking. If both parents give up there is a 39 percent reduction in the likelihood of you smoking. Basically if you grow up in a family where people smoke or if you see it then actually the statistics are against your ability to be resilient enough to not smoke. That is where it is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. We want to focus on the kids but actually to focus on the kids and prevent them smoking in the first place we have to help their parents and we have to stop the parents from smoking in the first place. What we know is that on average it takes seven attempts for someone who smokes to give up. It is an incredibly hard thing to do because of the addiction.I know this because I grew up in a household in which my father smoked two packets of cigarettes every day—Winfield Reds. He chain-smoked and that has had a devastating consequence on my family. He died when he was 63. He had a heart attack. He had cardiovascular disease which is one of the outcomes of smoking for over 30 years. I think it was lucky he did not quite make—oh he was 63 and started in his 20s so he was the 40-year smoker.The other thing I find really interesting is who supplies young people. Actually the people who supply young people are their parents—40 percent of young people who smoke are supplied by their parents and their immediate family. Another 40 percent are supplied by their peer group and those who are engaged in a peer group with older people who can go into the dairies and buy those cigarettes themselves. But actually 18 percent of them get away with buying cigarettes themselves so we actually have a problem with the enforcement of the legislation that says that if you are under 18 we cannot sell to you and if someone does they will now be fined $5000. Actually that fine is good because there should now be more of an incentive for anyone who sells cigarettes to be super vigilant in making sure young people do not have access to tobacco.I did a little bit of maths—this is for Minister Lotu-Iiga because we know he will be almost successful in reaching the under 5 percent target for Māori women—based on the statistics that I have managed to find in this 2014 ASH Year 10 Snapshot Survey. What it says is that for 14 and 15-year-old Māori girls who are three times more likely to smoke daily the statistics between 2013 and 2014 saw a 30 percent reduction in the daily smoking rate and a 7.6 percent reduction in the regular smoking rate. If I apply the 4 years of this piece of legislation then at the end of 2020 I think when we will realise the fruition of this legislation the daily smoking rate for Māori girls aged between 14 and 15 will go from 8.8 percent to 5.05 percent so we will nearly get there. The regular rate for that age cohort will go from 16.76 percent to 12.22 percent.I think therein lie some of the suggestions from the researchers—that 10 percent is a good step but it is too passive. It should be 20 percent if we want to accelerate the reduction. But I think that after this legislation has been fully realised there will be an ability for the House to then renegotiate whether it should continue and at what rate because we will then be seriously getting down to the hard-to-reach communities where actually the ability for our health system to engage with those people—and I want to pick up on what my colleague Fletcher Tabuteau said. He is right: the people who are most affected are the most impoverished. They are the ones who come from communities where the access to public health services is not as it should be. So how do we get to those families? How do we help those people? How do we ensure that they can be smoke-free? I think that will be the challenge as we look at how effective this piece of legislation is in the future. It is only one part of the solution.I think that if we were genuinely wanting New Zealand to be smoke-free we would care about the people who are most affected by cigarettes and actually ensure that they have all the services they need all the tools they need and all the support they need over whatever period of time it takes them to finally realise that smoke-free aspiration—to be supported. For my father in the end it was going to a hypnotist. It worked for him. It took him a long time and it took him many attempts but eventually he found a tool that worked and he was able to be smoke-free. Unfortunately it did not erase the 25 years of his smoking beforehand and that is what I regret the most. But through pieces of legislation like this we will start to actually impact on the mortality rates and how long it is anticipated some of us will live for. I commend this bill to the House and I again just want to say congratulations to the Minister but there is so much more to be done. Thank you.