Williams Andrew: Customs and Excise (Tobacco Products—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Williams Andrew: Customs and Excise (Tobacco Products—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 26 September 2012. Volume:684;Page:5708. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
ANDREW WILLIAMS (NZ First) 
: 
 I rise to take a call on behalf of New Zealand First on the Customs and Excise (Tobacco Products—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill. We spoke on this bill yesterday and it is back in the House again today. Some of you will recall that yesterday on behalf of New Zealand First I expressed our concerns that this would be simply a tax take. As we have heard $528 million over 4 years—a huge amount of money over half a billion dollars—will be going into Government coffers. We certainly are hopeful and expect that it will be the case that a significant amount of the funding that comes out of this measure will go into the required health measures to actually help with the reduction of smoking in our country. 
 While I was sitting in for the Rt Hon Winston Peters on the Finance and Expenditure Committee on a few of the days we did actually flesh out some of the unknown factors in all this. One of the ones that somewhat surprised me was that this always does refer to New Zealand becoming smoke-free by 2025. So there is the feeling out there that there will be no more smoking in another 12 or so years. In actual fact the definition of “smoke-free” from the officials was that by that stage it would mean that where there is currently something like 16 percent of New Zealanders who smoke it would be slashed by about a third down to something like 5 or 6 percent of New Zealanders who smoke which would still leave 50000 or 60000 people in this country smoking. So it cannot really be called smoke-free because even at 2025 there will still be 50000-plus people who are defined as being smokers in this country. 
In that situation it is perhaps a little bit more levelling in terms of what the true situation is. But we do also have a situation with foreign tourists. Of course New Zealand is promoting itself heavily in markets like China Taiwan Japan Korea and all through the Asian countries and that is a potentially huge growth market for tourism to New Zealand. Of course they do have a high percentage of smokers coming from many of those Asian countries. So again New Zealand will always have a situation where we cannot become 100 percent smoke-free because if we are going to expect to have several million tourists a year coming to this country and a significant chunk of those tourists are coming out of many of those countries where there is still a reasonably high level of smoking then that will not be the case. If we were to turn it off flatly many of those tourists simply would not bother coming to New Zealand and that would be a huge problem. 
I think we have to be a little bit realistic here. It is an admirable aim but what we are basically saying is that we are trying to cut the rate of smoking of domestic residents in this country of New Zealanders in this country by about a third from 15 or 16 percent down to about 5 percent. At that point in time that would significantly reduce by more than 100000 people the amount of people who are smoking. In that respect I would certainly hope that if you multiply those 100000 people out across the health system and consider the effects of smoking—we have the chairman of the Health Committee here Dr Hutchison and I know that this is a subject dear to his heart—over the next decade and the next 12 years if that can be significantly reduced in terms of the effects on their health the reduction in what happens in terms of their health the extension of their lives and increasing their life expectancy then that certainly is a good thing. 
It did worry me a little bit too that this bill was being seen only by the Finance and Expenditure Committee and it seemed to be being seen only in terms of dollars but I certainly hope that Dr Hutchison and the Health Committee will take it on board. Actually I hope that his committee monitors this. I have known Dr Hutchison for many many years because he was a doctor in Mairangi Bay and I used to go to his practice. I know how he is committed to good health. So I certainly hope Dr Hutchison that you will follow this through and that you are fighting with your Minister of Finance Bill English for an allocation of increased funding—the increased funding that comes out of these taxes year on year 10 percent year on year—for the necessary health projects to reduce smoking. Thank you.