Rosewarne DanDAN ROSEWARNE (Labour): Mr Speaker thank you. I just want to address an issue that has been brought to my attention by my community in the Waimakariri electorate and that is youth vaping. School principals concerned parents and even children from local schools have contacted me to express their concerns around the growing problem around vaping particularly with young people and rightly so. There was an outcry within my community of Woodend when a specialist vape retailer just opened across from the school. And to make matters worse—I took the kids out during recess on their bikes; we went down Petries Road across Main North Road State Highway 1 to the local park there—littered throughout the bark were disposable vapes. There was a whole lot of kids playing there—you know three-year-olds—and there was the risk there that young toddlers would pick up the disposable vapes try and emulate what they had seen from their siblings or maybe their parents and they could use it particularly because there's no safety mechanism on there. That kind of really resonated with me at the time. Let me be clear: this is not about preventing people that smoke to come off—you know to take up vaping as a mechanism to quit. It's all about preventing young people from taking up the habit from scratch and becoming addicted lifelong to vapes. Of concern in 2021 26 percent of students from years 9 to 13 had tried vaping and then in 2022 18.2 percent of year 10 were actually vaping on a regular basis. I mean even beyond these stats you just ask any school principal out there not just in my community but probably any community and they will tell you that it's actually becoming a huge issue. The rise in specialist vape retailers in our community is a driving trend. We're seeing more vape stores open and more dairies and gas stations are also selling vapes. Just in 2022 alone there was a 40 percent increase in the number of speciality vape stores. It's a huge issue because it may be that it's harmless in comparison to smoking but they are highly addictive and there's actually more nicotine in a vape than there is in a cigarette. Myself I gave up smoking back when I was a young soldier in 2005—Simon O'Connor: Can't be that long ago.DAN ROSEWARNE: It can't be that long ago. But you know that was some time ago. Even now sometimes I'll wake up feeling gutted with myself because I started smoking. I'd actually just dreamt about having a cigarette and it just shows how addictive nicotine can be—and that was a cigarette. Some vape products actually have twice the amount of nicotine in them. So that can have a huge impact on actually pulling out of that addictive habit. Vapes can also have a huge impact on cardiovascular health. It also means that young people will get into it. There was a bit of a trend there where people say Hey it's not as bad as smoking." But we actually don't know about the long-term health implications that vapes have and we've heard things about popcorn lung and particularly with flavours where we actually don't know what chemicals are inside them. I have children around about that age where some of their friends are starting to vape. I was actually very impressed with Woodend School in particular who decided to run a petition and get out there in the community and raise concerns with the local MPs. Just quickly what I'll bring up is this map here and that there is Kaiapoi central and in Waimakariri there are currently nine vape retailers of which eight have opened up in the last two years. You'll see that the location is near schools and the red area on this map has a deprivation index level of 10. It seems like there's an overall strategy among the companies behind these vape retailers: they're actually switching lanes from tobacco products and opening up in vulnerable areas. This is something of particular concern in Waimakariri. I'm particularly proud of the announcement that Labour and the Government have released about those boundaries around schools and I'm really looking forward to hearing back from the community with their thoughts on the new policy and continuing this push to prevent it in our communities. Thank you."