O'Connor Greg; O'Connor DamienCHAIRPERSON (Greg O'Connor): The House is resumed. Just before I start once again I'll remind members the way that the House has agreed to run the committee of the whole House is that if a member indicates that he or she has a series of questions then the Chair will give that preference to exhaust two or three questions. It does require the Minister of course to be in a position to answer those questions one after the other. It's not always possible and members are welcome to go their five minutes. However it is designed to ensure that as we go through the process we are doing what we're here to do: extract the answers from the Minister in the chair.Hon DAMIEN O'CONNOR (Labour): Thank you very much Mr Chairman. There's one question I have here: who wrote this bill? I want to refer to the second part of the amendment that I have tabled here. The second part refers to clause 12. Previous speakers have rightfully pointed to what I believe is probably close to the most harmful provision in this piece of legislation and that is removing the limits on nicotine for smoked tobacco products. My amendment proposes to change the bill to put back in place a limit on nicotine.I was Associate Minister of Health and indeed I was the Minister at the time we took smoking out of bars. I'm proud of doing that and I'm proud of the fact that there are no bars where smoking takes place now. That I'm sure has contributed to the reduction in smoking. I contest the Minister's view that the number of outlets does not affect the uptake of tobacco. Can I move forward—because I know I've had a speech on that particular issue. This is at the heart: in every area of alcohol we have limits and we have different steps. In gambling we have limits on the time that poker machines can return to zero. That is that the cycle time affects the addiction of all of these things. The higher the nicotine level the more addiction. As was said nicotine is more addictive than heroin so it is critical that we reinsert a maximum level of nicotine. Otherwise we will have health and addiction problems. Then a question I have of the Minister—as well as who wrote it—is: why is there no limit given that we have limits in pretty much every other area of food consumption of human consumption and of anything and there should be one here?The health issues have been well traversed but there are economic issues here that play out in a way that people haven't considered. In Farmers Weekly last week there was a story on the value of soft power. In fact what it said was Exporters urged to go hard on soft power." We are an exporting nation. The coalition Government makes a lot of noise about trying to double exports they say—that's the old hat approach—and grow the wealth of this country. What exporters are being told in a farming magazine is that they have to focus on soft power. What is soft power? Well the presenter of this to that thing said that New Zealand is "being perceived as a collectivist and progressive country that acts on behalf of the greater good when leadership is called for." We know that with this retraction of the legislation—this progressive legislation that had been passed by the previous Government—already around the world people are shocked at what we are doing. The question I have is: has the Minister done an assessment of the effect on our international reputation à la soft power from changing this legislation?In fact the provisions under clause 12—which my amendment refers to—remove any measurement assessment or limitation on the level of nicotine in tobacco. I'm sure that doesn't occur in any country—other than the developing countries perhaps but probably even there they would have a limit on it. That has been taken away. There's a picture in people's minds "thinking that we have humanity a collectivist approach are creative and kind values that are kind of lacking in the rest of the world at the moment." We had through a number of unfortunate incidents but strong leadership built up a reputation for being progressive for taking on board the values and the aspirations of humanity. This bill that will kill more people is a reversal of that direction. The farmers and the other exporters who are thinking "This is just about health because I don't smoke." this will affect them as well. Our ability to sell and our reputation at the international markets will be degraded by passing this legislation that will increase the number of people smoking and taking up tobacco and will have unlimited levels of nicotine and products that will drive addiction."