Mackey Moana: Smoke-free Environments (Controls and Enforcement) Amendment Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Mackey Moana: Smoke-free Environments (Controls and Enforcement) Amendment Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:674;Page:20082] 
MOANA MACKEY (Labour) 
: 
 Certainly I have to agree with the speaker who has just taken his seat the Hon Tau Henare that anyone who has had the courage to try to bring about any kind of legislative change in this area deserves to be recognised. There is no question about that. I was not aware of Tuku Morgan’s bill to ban tobacco displays but that is fine—that is great. I know from Steve Chadwick’s experience of personal threats made against her and her family that it is not an easy area to get into. Where I have an issue with the honourable member who has just taken his seat is that some members of National are now making out that it is all because of them that the Smoke-free Environments (Controls and Enforcement) Amendment Bill has come about. I recognise the Minister in the chair the Associate Minister of Health the Hon Tariana Turia for all the work she has done. To be fair this issue has been around for a long time and our local National member refused to turn up to events to support the banning of tobacco displays. She refused to accept the postcards that the youth ambassadors for the Cancer Society had collected and she refused to provide support. So from my personal experience of having supported those young people and the Cancer Society in Tai Rawhiti to ban tobacco displays I have not seen up until tonight a lot of support from National but I welcome it and I think it is very important that these issues have cross-party support. 
Part 1 of the bill which I shall speak to is about exemptions from the prohibition of advertising of tobacco products. We know that the tobacco companies themselves will be looking for other ways they can get the advertising of their products out there. I remember when I was at high school I worked in a dairy a lotto shop and a superette not long after the changes had been made to ban tobacco advertising. Suddenly we saw these displays come in because the tobacco companies saw the loophole: they could not advertise but they could use the packaging itself as an advertisement and they could use the displays that hold the packages as an advertisement. 
I very much remember having people from the industry come into the business I worked in looking at the area behind the counter right next to where all the lollies were stacked up and seeing how they could get the best value out of that display. There is a serious question to be asked as to whether Parliament ever intended that. I think that when Parliament banned advertising of tobacco products back in the late 1980s it did not intend that these power walls would become the de facto advertising. But that is in fact what happened. When one works in retail a lot of industry representatives come into one’s shop to see how their products are placed in the business. The business I worked in had quite a high turnover and I never saw as many representatives from any other area of industry as I did from the tobacco industry when I was doing that after-school job. They were in on a regular basis. I never saw as much turnover of advertising displays as there was in the tobacco area. 
So clearly—and we know because billions of dollars have gone into developing power wall displays and getting the best value out of them—those displays have an impact because these companies would not spend the money on them if they did not. But I am very very pleased to see the closing of that loophole in this legislation. 
The question then comes about exemptions and I note the extensive work that the Health Committee did on new sections 22 and 23 which deal with the exemptions. There have to be exemptions obviously: internal company pamphlets or information needs to be exempt from this. There will be some artworks that involve using tobacco insignia of tobacco products and we would not want to see them exempt. There is also the very fraught issue of all the television radio magazines and newspapers that originate from outside New Zealand. We cannot begin to tell CNN that it has to adhere to this law as well. The select committee has drawn a very fine line and I think it has done it particularly well in saying that provided a particular form of media was not specifically meant for New Zealand or the New Zealand market then obviously it would be exempt as well. 
There has been an enormous argument internationally about the use of tobacco products and tobacco advertising in the movie industry. For a while there was a real move away from showing any form of use of tobacco products. I think that has gone back the other way. These are not things we can control in New Zealand nor should we try to but they are things we need to be aware of. From my own experience of seeing how the tobacco industry was able to use power walls as a loophole with the previous legislation I have no doubt that it will be looking for loopholes in this new legislation.