Hague Kevin: Customs and Excise (Tobacco Products—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hague Kevin: Customs and Excise (Tobacco Products—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 24 May 2012. Volume:680;Page:2560. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KEVIN HAGUE (Green) 
: 
 I want to begin by joining with other members of this House in once again applauding the singular and extraordinary contribution made by the Hon Tariana Turia to this agenda towards a smoke-free Aotearoa. I agree with the comments of Iain Lees-Galloway that it has been her drive and commitment on this issue that have seen this agenda take positive steps forward and I greatly appreciate that. 
Next week—31 May—is World Smokefree Day and it is a good time for us to look back on the progress that we have made on this agenda and the steps still to take. Cigarette smoking is the biggest cause of preventable death in this country causing somewhere between 4500 and 5000 preventable deaths each year. As George Thomson and others have established through their research work the single most important intervention in the prevention of those deaths is the mechanism of price increase. So the measures in this Customs and Excise (Tobacco Products—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill that we are debating today are the single most important thing that we could be doing about the single greatest source of preventable death in this country. They are pretty important. 
There is considerable evidence of high quality that excise tax increases are very closely linked in fact with increased quit attempts and increased successful quit attempts. That from a public health practitioner’s point of view is a very encouraging thing because it says that by making this one intervention it is possible to have a very direct effect on the problem that we are trying to deal with. It is solid nationwide evidence but I particularly note the evidence from my home area of the West Coast. In 2010 when the House debated a similar bill around increasing the excise tax on tobacco I drew attention to the fact that the West Coast has one of the highest rates of cigarette smoking in the country and the pain I felt as a result of that and my desperation and determination to do something effective about it. Last week I was very pleased to receive a communication from the West Coast Primary Health Organisation—and some other members may have also—recording some of the progress that that organisation has been making on its smoke-free agenda. I am very pleased to say that it is making some very good progress. In the current year to date it has some 436 smokers currently engaged in cessation attempts and 24 percent of those attempts are successful. That is an extremely good rate; 24 percent may sound like not very much to some people but as my colleague the Hon Tau Henare has just pointed out quitting is a really hard thing to do. The last evidence I saw was that it took on average seven quit attempts to be successful. So keep going brother and congratulations to the West Coast Primary Health Organisation because a 24 percent success rate is extraordinarily good. 
But the thing that I particularly drew encouragement from was the evidence from the primary health organisation about when quit attempts were being made. It has tracked that over a 2-year period and has noticed a surge in those attempts in the April to June quarter over the last couple of years. It attributes those surges to two factors. It says they are associated with the excise increases that have occurred in those 2 years and also the quit-smoking campaigns that have occurred in May associated with World Smokefree Day. Again that is great encouragement for what we are doing here today with this bill. 
There have been in the last week several opportunities in the House to talk about health promotion. I want to briefly remind the House about what health promotion says. It says that illness is a function of effectively marginalisation or disempowerment and the social and physical environment that surrounds a particular community. It is those socio-environmental factors that drive the fact that illnesses are clustered in particular communities. The West Coast population has the lowest median household income of any population in New Zealand. It is a relatively marginalised population. That is why the smoking rates are higher. That is why the smoking rates on the West Coast are comparable with those amongst Maori and Pacific Island people—two other population groups that are marginalised in our community. The answer to that problem is to address the marginalisation and also address the environmental factors surrounding those communities. So the price increase is important but not by itself sufficient. There are many other things that we need to be doing in the area of public policy social and physical environment resourcing community-based programmes assisting people with personal skills and reorienting our health services. 
The Ministry of Health has funded a research programme to assess what it would take to halve smoking rates by the year 2020. I say it is great that such a programme exists but I want to encourage a redoubling of the effort because in fact halving smoking rates by 2020 is still insufficient. That will not be enough to get us to our goal of rates less than 5 percent by 2025. We still need to do more. The Minister has talked about some of the other things that we are doing and I take a lot of encouragement from them but I would also draw on some other things that we could be doing. This House has had for example the recommendations from the Maori Affairs Committee. We are doing some of those things but there are an awful lot of things on that agenda that the Government is not moving on. That agenda was set by I think the biggest and most important and powerful inquiry into tobacco use in New Zealand—certainly in recent years. There was a great action programme set out by that select committee and we should be following it. I want to mention a particular initiative that we could be following and that is to take more of the excise tax from tobacco products to fund cessation programmes and health promotion programmes around smoke-free environments. That would be another concrete step that this country could easily take towards that goal of a smoke-free Aotearoa by 2025. 
I want to finally refer to I guess a time line prepared by Regional Public Health here in Wellington. It records the achievements in this journey since 1990 and it was prepared in 2010. It said we should increase the tobacco tax by 10 percent each year until 2012 prohibit tobacco product displays have tighter control of the display of trading names look at infringement notices for selling to the under-aged clarify trade rebates and discounts—we are doing that—have plain packaging reduce the transitional period amend the health warning and look at infringement notices. We are moving in that direction. And then we move on to licensing retailers local authority control over the number and location of outlets the prohibition of vending machines embedding the framework convention annually reducing the amount of imported products and so on until we achieve that goal. Thank you.