Reti ShaneSMOKEFREE ENVIRONMENTS AND REGULATED PRODUCTS (VAPING) AMENDMENT BILLIn CommitteePart 1 Amendments to Smoke-free Environments Act 1990Dr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): Thank you Madam Chair. It's a pleasure to speak to this bill in the committee of the whole House and I'd like first of all to acknowledge the work of the Hon Nicky Wagner in getting to this and to speak to some of her Supplementary Order Papers (SOPs) which I'll start one at a time.The first Supplementary Order Paper in the name of the Hon Nicky Wagner I'd like to speak to is Supplementary Order Paper 536. The purpose of this is SOP is to extend the privilege for some vaping retailers to be designated as specialist vaping retailers. Now the privilege you get with a specialist vaping retailer is several things. First of all you're allowed to advertise you're allowed to vape in store you're allowed to run promotions and you're allowed to retail basically the full range of flavours that are able to be vaped. In the Health Committee we spent an awful lot of time trying to figure out what those flavours should be what would be available to a specialist vaper what that store might be able to do as opposed to a dairy or a petrol station. And we spent a lot of time figuring that out. Should we subcategorise the flavours? Where we got to was substantively to give our intention and direction to the Director-General of Health through regulations to finally quantify that and sort that out. But we did have this dilemma as to what the percentage of retail products should be to be a specialised vaping store. We know you've got to be bricks and mortar because we didn't want online proliferation. It was a challenging question to decide and there was no overseas precedent as I recall and we somewhat landed mostly on 70 percent. Now it turns out that there are a number of very reputable specialist vaping stores who have less than 70 percent of their product that is retailed as a vaping product. And so what this SOP looks to do is to reduce that percentage down to 50 percent. But there's a safety net here and I'll comment to that safety net on one of the other SOPs. That safety net is they need to be responsible retailers and the director-general has the sign off on that. So the director-general has the final say as to whether a retailer can qualify for the 50 percent rather than the 70 percent and be a specialist vaping retailer. And we know that this would apply to a lot of very reputable vaping stores which is why the Hon Nicky Wagner has placed this on the Table as an SOP. I want to just re-emphasise because it can otherwise be lost in the bill that very important safety net whereby the director-general will be able to take into account the reputation of someone who's requiring or requesting to be a specialist vaper—meet that 50 percent criterion. Furthermore it's actually more than just reputation because how it's written is any other matters that the director-general considers to be relevant." That gives him or her a large amount of authority a large amount of scope to say yes or no. So it really is safety protected here. So really then my question to the Associate Minister of Health Jenny Salesa is: can she enunciate any concerns that the Government may have with SOP 536 so that we can talk them out here?"