Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Well thank you very much Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT in opposition to this Customs and Excise (Tobacco) Amendment Bill. These are extraordinary times when the priority of the Government after a Budget promising to borrow $140 billion is to pass laws making it harder to get foreign investment into New Zealand for distressed companies.DEPUTY SPEAKER: I have been watching the House and I know the Speaker has been very strict on making sure that we're talking to the bill in front of us.DAVID SEYMOUR: Absolutely and I think it's reasonable that in the first few seconds of a speech we set out some context.DEPUTY SPEAKER: Well we're now almost a minute.DAVID SEYMOUR: The next bill was to register forest traders and this one is to register tobacco importers. Why? Because people are smuggling tobacco into New Zealand. Well the obvious problem is that if somebody is smuggling they are already breaking the law. It's not obvious why putting more bureaucracy on to those who are following the law is going to affect those who've clearly shown they're prepared to break it from the fact that they're smuggling at all.But there's a wider problem here and that is: why do we have a black market for tobacco? I borrow arguments from the Greens with respect to cannabis. The Green Party argument with cannabis is that prohibition and bureaucracy doesn't work and it leads to a black market. Prohibition of cannabis means that the black market and smuggling is worse than having a legal market. The Green Party says with respect to cannabis the right thing to do is to legalise it and let people sell it so that the black market goes out of business.Now that's interesting because the reason we're here today is that the Green Party and Labour and New Zealand First and National all support levels of taxation on tobacco that are as bad as prohibition for so many of the people who wish to consume it. So the Green Party says prohibition doesn't work on cannabis but they are prepared to support prohibition-like levels of taxation on tobacco and then support a further measure to regulate tobacco importation that some people might say sounds eerily like the war on drugs.Why do we suddenly have war on drugs - like approaches to tobacco? Well because for the last 10 years this Parliament—and it's been said and it's true by every party except ACT—has supported putting up the tax on tobacco 10 percent every year. That's why people think it's worth smuggling. That's why we have a black market. That's why ironically even the Green Party is now engaging in a war on tobacco trying to stamp out the black market their taxes have created.But that's not the real tragedy. The real tragedy is stories like one that I saw not so long ago in a supermarket. A seven-year-old girl with her mum at Countdown and Mum was buying a very small tin of baked beans and a packet of cigarettes that cost $35. You can make assumptions about what was going on but I could see it. That little girl knew that that $35 was dinner. Successive Parliaments have made people in New Zealand desperate taken more and more money through tobacco tax out of the poorest households in this country. It has done almost nothing to reduce smoking rates. What it has done is driven the supply of tobacco underground. If this Parliament was serious about dealing with the black market in tobacco it would take a leaf—no pun—from the Greens' book and reduce the prohibitive taxation that has necessitated these war on drugs - style controls. Thank you Madam Speaker.