Davis Kelvin: Inquiries — Inquiry into the Tobacco Industry in Aotearoa and the Consequences of Tobacco Use for Maori —Report of Maori Affairs Committee 
Davis Kelvin: Inquiries — Inquiry into the Tobacco Industry in Aotearoa and the Consequences of Tobacco Use for Maori —Report of Maori Affairs Committee 
[Volume:669;Page:15956] 
KELVIN DAVIS (Labour) 
: 
 A recurring theme that the Maori Affairs Committee heard during our inquiry into the effect of tobacco on Maori was the fact that the tobacco industry is a killer of whakapapa. I can attest to that from a personal point of view. In the late 1990s my uncle J J Johnson a cousin of my grandmother and my uncle Hau Davis the brother of my grandfather both passed away within weeks of each other both from lung cancer and both in their early 70s. I hold the tobacco industry to account for their deaths. The act of putting a cigarette between their lips in their mid-60s was the result of a decision that they made when they were children. 
The select committee heard that the tobacco industry targets the young the brown and the stupid. I can attest that my uncles were both very young when they started smoking and that they were brown but those gentlemen were by no means stupid. We heard how nicotine is one of the most addictive substances on earth and when a child is in the grip of nicotine that child cannot resist it and it lives with them and kills them in the end. So I hold the tobacco industry accountable not only for the deaths of my two uncles and other relations who have died as a result of cigarettes and tobacco but also for the 600 Maori deaths a year and the 5000 New Zealanders who die each year as a result of the tobacco industry. That is 50000 New Zealanders who have died in the past decade as a result of the tobacco industry. This report should send a message to the tobacco industry that its days of ramming its noxious product into the lungs of our people are coming to an end. 
One of the most profound submissions that I heard during this tobacco inquiry was from a woman in her 50s or 60s in hospital dying of a tobacco-related illness. With her watching her die in those agonising moments were her children and her grandchildren. Because the stress of watching their mother and grandmother was so great every 20 minutes or half an hour they actually had to leave the hospital room go outside and have a cigarette. Do members see the irony in the fact that in order to alleviate the stress the pain and the tension of watching their mother and grandmother die this family had to partake of the very substance that put her in the hospital in the first place? 
Worse than that when that family went out to have their cigarette they sat on a hospital bench clearly labelled “Auahi Kore” which means that no smoking is allowed. Even worse than that adjacent to that area was a maternity annexe. We heard how the children and the grandchildren of that woman would be joined by pregnant mothers to have a cigarette on that smoke-free park bench in the hospital grounds. There we have it—the way the tobacco industry has captured people from one end of the spectrum unborn children right through the generations from children and grandchildren up to the dying grandmother up in the hospital ward. We are not talking here about the circle of life; we are talking about the circle of death. The tobacco industry is responsible for it. 
We heard how the tobacco industry framed its product to target children and how if somebody was to walk into a supermarket a dairy or a service station they would see behind the teller the power wall display of cigarettes and tobacco products. Around that power wall of tobacco products will be lollies chips and all the sorts of things that capture children’s attention and their eye. That is the way that these murdering bastards capture kids from the time that they are 5 or 6. They are held in the grip of the tobacco industry right through until they die just like that woman in the hospital bed surrounded by her family. 
It is time that this Parliament took hold of the recommendations in this report and sent a message clearly to the tobacco industry that its days are numbered in New Zealand.