Henare Tau: Inquiries — Inquiry into the Tobacco Industry in Aotearoa and the Consequences of Tobacco Use for Maori —Report of Maori Affairs Committee 
Henare Tau: Inquiries — Inquiry into the Tobacco Industry in Aotearoa and the Consequences of Tobacco Use for Maori —Report of Maori Affairs Committee 
[Volume:669;Page:15950] 
Hon TAU HENARE (Chairperson of the Maori Affairs Committee): 
 I move  
That the House take note of the report of the Maori Affairs Committee on its inquiry into the tobacco industry in Aotearoa and the consequences of tobacco use for Maori 
. First of all I will do what is not done these days and congratulate and thank my Northland colleague and relation Hone Harawira on bringing this inquiry to our select committee. I also give thanks to the Maori Affairs Committee for agreeing on the terms of engagement. I also thank some people who have assisted me in my deliberations as chair: Amelia Abplanalp Anna Duggan and Penelope Forrest. I thank them for their sturdy work. 
Just today I received letters from the New Zealand Dental Therapists Association Smokefree Nurses Aotearoa / New Zealand and also the Health Sponsorship Council—Te Ropu Whakatairanga Hauora in Wellington. These are three letters of support for our committee and for our report. 
This report is far-reaching. It outlines in graphic manner what the tobacco industry and smoking have done to the Maori population and I suggest to the whole of the population who smoke. I was one of them up until 160-odd days ago. In fact throughout the inquiry I smoked like a chimney. Just as we were coming to the end of it I nearly came to the end of it. I fell over and had a heart attack and it was because of nothing other than my smoking. I decided that I wanted to live a wee bit longer. I decided the day after my heart attack that I would give up smoking and I have been smoke-free ever since my heart attack. 
I am not what one would call a zealot. I am not a person who goes out bashes people over the head and tells them that they must give up smoking. That is Hone’s job. But I can tell members that there are a lot of good people out there in Aotearoa whom we saw in front of our committee and who gave us their special personal stories. As the days went on as the weeks went on and as the months went on we heard from people who have lost loved ones: who have lost fathers who have lost mothers who have lost brothers and who have lost sisters. If we were to go over the number of people we met and heard from in the committee it would tally up to hearing about quite a number of people who have departed this world who really did not need to depart this world. 
The great sorrow is that most of us smokers—I think the vast majority of us smokers—know that it is bad for us know that it is bad for our communities and know that it is bad for the people we share so much with. We continue to smoke and that tells us something about the addiction that is nicotine and that is tobacco. It is time for the tobacco industry to realise in a meaningful way that the product it sells although legal is an abject danger to our whole community. 
I end on this note. I asked the tobacco industry whether its product was safe. I asked that question twice. It is pretty obvious from all of the submissions and from what those in the industry said in reply that the product is not safe. Kia ora.