Coddington Deborah: Smoke-free Environments (Exemptions) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Coddington Deborah: Smoke-free Environments (Exemptions) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:627;Page:22078] 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON (ACT) 
: 
 I rise to support my colleague Muriel Newman’s bill. I support it because she is trying to get back a little part of the property rights that have been taken away from businesses. I used to smoke. I hate smoking now. My father died of lung cancer and I watched him die of lung cancer. It is not a pretty sight. It is not a nice thing to die of. But I support people’s right to smoke. Tobacco is still a legal substance. More than that I support the rights of those who have bars restaurants and clubs to have smokers on their premises. These are not public premises. Who pays the rent? Who pays for the leases? Who pays the costs of staff and all the other overheads? Who pays for the insurance? The owners do. The owners have the right to ban people if they smoke or to ban them if they do not smoke. At least they should have the right to do that. They do not have it any more. 
If this bill is really about health and clean air as Steve Chadwick said why has the Government exempted places like marae and prison cells? Maori on marae are deemed to be intelligent enough to choose whether they want to be smoke-free. Indeed a lot of marae are smoke-free now. But other ordinary New Zealanders who run bars clubs and restaurants are not deemed to be intelligent enough to choose. Why should a prisoner in his or her cell be able to smoke if this is really about clean air and protecting lives when the person whom he or she may well have mugged and stolen from cannot stagger into a bar sit down with a beer or a gin and tonic and have a cigarette to calm his or her nerves? That is why this bill is so iniquitous. 
Steve Chadwick talked about 350 lives being saved because of the second-hand smoke that workers who breathe in the second-hand smoke in bars are alleged to suffer from. Firstly that is dodgy science. Secondly if the Government is really concerned about people dying from inhaling second-hand smoke why does it not save another 350 lives by banning smoking in the home? We all know that if that science is true—if it is true that people are dying from inhaling second-hand smoke—then the real enemy in this is in the home and especially in the homes of Maori because Maori have the highest statistics for smoking especially young Maori women smoking near their babies. 
That is where this Government if it were serious about people’s health and about stopping them from dying would ban smoking altogether. But of course it would never do that—firstly because it would be totally politically incorrect to do that to Maori and secondly because of the huge amount of taxes any Government gets from selling cigarettes. Might I add that those taxes more than pay for the public health spend that is taken up by people with smoking-related diseases. Anyone who has gone through duty free and seen the difference in cost between what a carton of cigarettes costs in duty free and what it costs in the shops here will know how much of what we spend on cigarettes goes to the Government. 
So this is clearly about property rights. It is clearly even more about breaching the property rights of businesses because it is businesses that have been singled out for this ban. It is not homes it is not marae and it is not everywhere else. That is why anyone in this House who is concerned about supporting property rights—like United Future which has brought in its own member’s bill on property rights—should be supporting this bill.