Lees-Galloway Iain: Smoke-free Environments (Controls and Enforcement) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Lees-Galloway Iain: Smoke-free Environments (Controls and Enforcement) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:669;Page:16218] 
IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North) 
: 
 It gives me an immense amount of pleasure to rise to speak to the Smoke-free Environments (Controls and Enforcement) Amendment Bill. The Labour Party wholeheartedly supports and endorses this bill. I start by congratulating the Hon Tariana Turia on her success in bringing this legislation to the House and her success in convincing her Government allies to agree to these measures. This bill is the next logical and natural step along the path towards greater tobacco control and leading New Zealand to the position of being free from the clutches of tobacco. The bill builds on a number of years of excellent work by successive Governments which have sought for some time to tackle the horrific damage done by tobacco in New Zealand—in particular damage to Maori. I acknowledge and congratulate the Maori Affairs Committee on its recent work and particularly Hone Harawira on establishing the inquiry into the tobacco industry in Aotearoa and on being able to run such an effective inquiry.  
The major thrust of the bill and the piece that people will probably pay most attention to is the removal of tobacco displays. Advocates have been asking for that for a number of years and to be honest I think Parliament has been a little slow to react to that request. I am very pleased that finally we are debating the first reading of this bill and that those tobacco displays will eventually be removed. The point of removing tobacco displays is to reduce the number of young people who start smoking in the first place. We know that as the tobacco industry kills off 5000 people a year it needs to recruit new users; otherwise its business model is completely stuffed. The truth is that adults who are making informed decisions would not sensibly take up tobacco smoking. The truth is that it is young people usually around the age of 13 or 14 who start to smoke. By the time they are old enough to realise that it is not a good idea their health will be suffering and their lives will be shortened. They are by then addicted to nicotine and find it near-impossible to quit. So getting tobacco out of sight and out of mind and reducing the incentives for young people to take up smoking are significant steps forward.  
This is a measure that the Labour Party has been prepared to do for some time. A petition was brought to the Health Committee in the last term of Parliament. The committee took that petition very seriously and the recommendation was made by the majority of the committee—although it was not supported by the National Party members on the committee—to get rid of tobacco displays. Unfortunately the National Government rejected that recommendation and said there was no evidence in support of banning displays. It is pleasing although it has taken 2 years that the Maori Party and Tariana Turia have managed to get National to come round on this one and I would be very interested to hear contributions from National members about what has actually convinced them to do so. We know no more now than we knew 2 years ago; we had plenty of evidence 2 years ago that told us that getting rid of tobacco displays was a good thing but Tony Ryall got up and said—and Jo Goodhew is shaking her head but she knows this is true because it is in  
Hansard 
—that there was no evidence in support of removing tobacco displays. What has changed 2 years on? That is my question. That is what I want to know from National.  
When I asked Mrs Turia that question yesterday in the House she came back with a quick sharp response that 2 years was a lot shorter than 9 years. The truth again is that in the 9 years when Labour was in Government we got smoking out of workplaces we got smoking out of bars we increased the excise tax and we introduced more support for smokers who were trying to quit smoking. This bill is an excellent bill but it is merely the next step along a path and the revisionist history that argues nothing happened for 9 years needs to be unpicked and pulled apart. The only thing that would have stopped anything during those 9 years was if National had been in charge because it voted against every single one of those measures. In fact National members went around scaremongering and rarking people up saying measures to control smoking were an infringement on their personal rights. That is what National members did so the question that National has to answer tonight is what has changed? Why are the National members suddenly very much in support of this measure?  
But you know I do not think that National really is very much in support of this measure. We can tell that because it got its most junior Minister to stand up and bring this bill into the House— 
Hon Lianne Dalziel 
: Second-most junior Minister. 
IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY 
: I am sorry; it was the second-most junior Minister. It could have brought the new Minister in. But that was a real insult to Mrs Turia. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: No no it was the most junior one; Hekia was promoted above him. 
IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY 
: OK that is fair enough. The fact of the matter is that National does not believe in this stuff. This legislation is thank goodness a little tip to the Maori Party because the ACT Party is in trouble and National knows that the only hope of it being in Government in the next term is with Maori Party support. So thank goodness the ACT Party is falling over and the Maori Party is having more say in this Government. That is what has brought this legislation to the House.  
The bill does not just get rid of tobacco displays though; it does some other good things as well. It prohibits the display on the exterior of retail premises of retailers’ trading names if those names include words like “tobacconist” or “tobacco”. That is a very good step forward as well. It also tries to tackle the last bastion of tobacco sponsorship in New Zealand which was one of the first things to be banned. But there are still some things out there and those are exclusive trading deals whereby tobacco companies enter into exclusive arrangements usually with those running events. That then give them exclusive supply rights for their products at those events but it also means that some of the more surreptitious forms of advertising find their way in there.  
The bill also tries to deal with the deep discounting of tobacco products that can occur as well. However I note that a provision in the bill says there will be nothing to stop the normal discounting that would normally happen in a trade relationship. Well I think a lot of submitters will have a problem with that and I expect there to be quite a lot of discussion about that at the select committee because tobacco is not a normal product. Until we get our heads around that concept we really will not make the advances that we need to make. Built into this bill is the concept that tobacco is a normal product that should have normal trading discounts applied to it. But that is wrong in my opinion and I expect that there will be a lot of noise from submitters on that particular aspect of the bill.  
I cannot emphasise enough how pleased we in Labour are to see this bill come to the House and how pleased I am personally to see this bill come to the House. I have had a member’s bill in the ballot for close to 2 years. It was recently drawn and it would have done part of what this bill will do. In fact everything that was in my bill will be achieved by this bill and it is quite gratifying when the Government adopts a policy of one’s own. I am very pleased the Government has gone ahead and done this and I am pleased that this bill as a Government bill manages to tackle some of the other issues as well. The advice I had when I was preparing my member’s bill was to keep it fairly succinct if it was to have any chance of getting past this Government which seems to block any Opposition member’s bill at any opportunity. So I am really very very pleased to see this bill come before the House. I look forward to National members’ contributions and for their explanations about what has changed in National for those members to finally come around to introducing this legislation. But do you know what? It is great that they have caught up with the rest of us and this is an excellent step forward in tobacco control in New Zealand.