Coddington Deborah: Smoke-free Environments Amendment Bill — Procedure Referral to Health Committee Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee 
Coddington Deborah: Smoke-free Environments Amendment Bill — Procedure Referral to Health Committee Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee 
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DEBORAH CODDINGTON (ACT NZ) 
: 
 The Hon Peter Dunne is absolutely right. This legislation is nothing to do with health protecting people’s health stopping young people from seeing people smoking or protecting employees from second-hand smoke—which is a matter of dubious statistics at best. The World Health Organization has come out and said that 400 people dying each year from second-hand smoke is a very dodgy statistic. Dr Paul Hutchison might be a very good gynaecologist and obstetrician but I would like to inform him that the Gresham Hotel has been closed for the last 18 months and was an abysmal failure. 
I would like to ask those honourable members over there who owns their lives? All of those people in the Government who voted to send Peter Brown’s Death with Dignity Bill to the select committee thought for a moment that they might own their own lives. This bill is all about telling other people what to do with their lives. It is about a bossy-boots nanny State. It has nothing to do with protecting people’s health; it is all about control. If it were about protecting people’s health it would not be such—I think that I am allowed to say this—hypocritical legislation. It is hypocritical legislation because if it were true to principle—I agree that it would be bad principle—it would ban smoking in private homes. It would not exempt maraes. 
The point was raised by the Hon Peter Dunne that if a cigar bar gets rids of its liquor licence— 
Hon Peter Dunne 
: And its full-time employees. 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON 
: No I just want to continue with that because volunteers are redefined in this legislation as employees exactly as under the Health and Safety in Employment Amendment Bill. Volunteers are now employees courtesy of this Labour Government. That is why we are seeing school camps closing down. That is why volunteers all over the country are stopping doing what they do which is volunteering because their employers will be liable under the legislation that this Government is passing. 
I have run a couple of restaurants in my time and I have done a helluva lot of working in restaurants carrying plates and serving drinks etc. I would like to inform this Government that restaurants are private places. Who pays the rent? Who pays for the liquor licence? Who has to put in all the extra toilets to comply with the liquor licence? Who has to set all the spaces out between the tables to comply with the liquor licence? Not the Government. Who takes the risk? Who borrows the money? Who goes into debt and mortgages his or her home to set up these businesses? Who pays the taxes? It is private individuals; people who own their own lives. It is about property rights and they do it from choice. Why should they not have the choice of being smoke-free? 
Sue Kedgley 
: Who pays the costs if they get sick? 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON 
: The honourable member Sue Kedgley asks who pays the costs when they get sick. Actually the smokers pay the costs when they get sick because the tax that the Government takes from smokers pays for those costs 10 times over. 
Taking up that point from the Green Party I remember listening to another member of the Green Party Sue Bradford. Before she became an MP she was an advocate for unemployed workers’ rights—a contradiction in terms but we will not go there—and was fighting the fact that the Government of the day had increased the tax on cigarettes. She said that was unfair to unemployed people and people on benefits because they needed their cigarettes—they were the only luxury they had in life. Oh dear how the worm has turned! Again with legislation like this we get this hypocritical situation. A party wants to ban people from smoking cigarettes but does not mind if they smoke cannabis. 
If a marae is exempt because it does not have a licence and does not have paid employees and if I open a café that does not have a licence and does not have paid employees why am I not exempt too? If this is not about control and bossyboots Government telling people how to live their lives answer me that. If a victim of a sex crime cannot have a cigarette at his or her place of work and they know that the person who perpetrated that crime can smoke in his or her prison cell what sort of legislation are we passing here? This Government pretends to be concerned about victims’ rights. What about the victims it is banning from having cigarettes and at the same time allowing the perpetrators of those crimes to have a cigarette in their prison cells? Why should prisons be exempt? Why should maraes be exempt?