Faafoi Kris: Customs and Excise (Tobacco Products—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Faafoi Kris: Customs and Excise (Tobacco Products—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 26 September 2012. Volume:684;Page:5721. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KRIS FAAFOI (Labour—Mana) 
: 
 Malo ni Mr Chair. To use a word that David Clark used Part 2 is a cynical and poor attempt by the Government to make it look like it is trying to do something for the public good in this bill the Customs and Excise (Tobacco Products—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill to stop New Zealanders smoking. It is a poor and cynical attempt at trying to make the Government look like it is trying to do something to cut down smoking within New Zealand. 
It was an honour and a privilege to sit in the 49th Parliament on the Health Committee chaired by Dr Paul Hutchison—I look around me and I see Iain Lees-Galloway who was on that committee and Kevin Hague who was on that committee—and to take some real action against tobacco companies and actually remove tobacco displays from our shops. As you see if you go to a service station or a dairy today you will notice that there are no longer any displays for tobacco or for cigarettes. It was an absolute pleasure to be on that committee as we worked across this Parliament—apart from the exception of maybe a couple of ACT MPs who voted against that legislation—to take some real action to reduce the number of Kiwis starting to smoke and to make sure we get as many Kiwis quitting smoking as we possibly could. 
But this bill and especially Part 2 of it is not motivated by trying to reduce the number of smokers or to stop people starting smoking. As a number of my colleagues have said this is simply a cash grab. It was said that this Government is trying to get its mitts on $528 million over the next 4 years because of its failed economic policies and the fact that it could not and has not raised enough money to come through with its policies. So that is what this part Part 2 and what this bill is really about. Is it motivated by cash revenue by trying to raise revenue or is it motivated by trying to reduce the harm that smoking causes in our communities? 
I want to take a quick look at the Pacific smoking numbers. As Iain Lees-Galloway said in Part 1 of the debate just below one in five New Zealanders are smoking and unfortunately for the Pacific community it is over-represented in the smoking statistics because 27 percent of Pacific adults are smokers. Unfortunately for Pacific men that number is 34.5 percent so one-third of Pacific men smoke and one in five—just over 20 percent—of Pacific women smoke. In terms of the revenue that is going to be gathered from this bill it is surely the Pacific community by its over-representation in the numbers of smokers that is going to be over-represented in this. Every year 100 Pacific people die because of heart disease come about because of smoking in that community 30 die of lung cancer because of their smoking and 23 Pacific people die from strokes because of the fact that they have been smoking. So smoking does have a disproportionate effect on the Pacific community and that is why we want this bill to actually take some strong measures motivated by public good—public health good—to make sure it takes some swift action and decisive action to make sure at least from the Pacific perspective that those numbers could be reduced. 
We could actually use some of the $528 million that is going to come via this bill by increasing the excise tax by 10 percent in those 4 years and hypothecate it to make sure it is going into smoking cessation programmes and into preventing young Pacific Islanders taking up smoking. Those statistics that I pointed out before are just awful. Being a Tokelauan it is the worst of all Pacific nations in terms of smoking because 42 percent of the Tokelauan population are smokers. So as someone from that community I think we really need to make sure we are targeting our Pacific people—a large and growing population in New Zealand—to make sure we are doing as much as we can to use some of this money that we are raising to target them to say “Don’t start smoking.” or to take steps to reduce or stop smoking. I do not think that this bill is motivated by trying to decrease those numbers.