Kedgley Sue: Smoke-free Environments (Enhanced Protection) Amendment Bill — Procedure Second Reading 
Kedgley Sue: Smoke-free Environments (Enhanced Protection) Amendment Bill — Procedure Second Reading 
[Volume:610;Page:7458] 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 This bill will probably do more to improve the health of New Zealanders than any other bill before the House this term and as such it should be supported by every member of this House. It is nonsensical for some parties to claim that this bill is somehow a conscience issue that should be voted on according to an individual MP’s conscience when in fact it is a specific public health measure and when there are no moral issues in the bill—none at all. Certainly the bill is widely supported in the community—in particular by the 75 percent of us who do not smoke and who are fed up with coming home from a night on the town smelling like an ashtray with our eyes and throats hurting and our hair and clothes wreaking of smoke. Most people including myself are counting the days until we can breathe clean unpolluted air in cafes and bars and do not have to risk our health every time we decide to go out on the town. 
It is nonsensical to claim as some parties are that it is not the Government’s role to intervene to protect people from harmful exposure to tobacco smoke. We have laws requiring cyclists to wear helmets people in cars to wear seatbelts to reduce their risk of harm and we expect the Government to protect us from exposure to cancer-causing substances like asbestos and dioxin so why on earth would we not expect it to take similar steps to protect us from the well-documented harm of second-hand smoke? The truth is that some MPs and parties in this House are sounding like King Canute trying to stem the turning tide. They are reciting discredited arguments from the tobacco industry and using discredited tobacco-industry tactics to try to water down or defeat all or parts of this bill. 
The tobacco industry has used every trick in the book over the past 4 decades to oppose every form of tobacco control and to try to influence our political process. It has flown in so-called independent expert witnesses to cast doubt on the harm of second-hand smoke tried to conceal the evidence of harm from cigarette smoke lobbied against legislation objected to health warnings and misled the public about the very real health issues involved in second-hand smoke. We know all of this thanks to an excellent report by two researchers—Nick Wilson and George Thomson—which has exposed the tactics the tobacco industry used in New Zealand. The report shows that the industry knew it was pushing a product that was addictive and a killer but still it spent billions of dollars trying to cover up the evidence of the harm of cigarette smoke so it could keep on selling its harmful addictive product. 
It is disgraceful that the industry was able to delay effective protection from exposure to second-hand smoke for so long and in so doing contribute to hundreds—or more likely millions—of preventable deaths. But it is disgraceful too that some of those tactics are still being used today by opponents of this bill who are doing the bidding of the tobacco industry by trying to water down or throw out this important piece of public health legislation. We can see the hand of the tobacco industry at work in frantic last-minute lobbying postcards we have been bombarded with and MPs singing the tobacco industry tune—that property rights are more important than non-smokers’ rights and that ventilations will somehow solve the problem of second-hand smoke whereas compelling evidence has been presented to the Health Committee that they will not. It is galling too that a party that brands itself as being family friendly and supported this bill all the way through the select committee is now trying to throw out the central provision of this bill. 
If smokers were harming only themselves with their habit then the arguments of opponents would sound credible. But the truth is that every time a patron in a bar or a club or a Returned Services Association lights up he or she puts at risk the health of any other person who happens to be around because two-thirds of the smoke from a cigarette is inhaled then exhaled into the air so that everyone in the room breathes in that smoke. Of course we have been told that second-hand smoke contains 50 chemicals that are known to cause cancer. There is overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that second-hand smoke is a leading cause of death and disease and causes about one person to die a premature death every day in New Zealand. The Heart Foundation estimates that people who are exposed to second-hand smoke increase their risk of heart attacks by about a third as well as increasing their risk of the other fatal diseases that plague smokers. The foundation says that bars and places where smokers concentrate pose the greatest risk to passive smokers because of the concentration of smoke in those places. 
Armed with this knowledge we cannot continue to turn a blind eye to cigarette smoke’s harmful effects and allow thousands of workers to be exposed on a daily and continuous basis to those harmful effects. We must be honest and acknowledge that smoke-free zones in cafes and bars are simply not working because smoke travels throughout an entire room and to continue the Minister’s analogy I say it is like trying to have a non-chlorinated zone in a swimming pool by allowing chlorine only at one end. We must acknowledge too that hospitality venues are not just places to socialise but are workplaces for staff who have to work around the clock with smoking patrons continually. Nobody should have to risk their health to go to work nor should workers be forced to choose between their health and their jobs. Yet we heard numerous heartrending submissions from workers who had had to do just that and whose health had been severely compromised as a result. 
This bill will benefit everyone in society including the hospitality industry. There are no high compliance costs—no building alterations are required and employers particularly those in the hospitality industry can look forward to reduced staff sickness and absenteeism and reduced chances of litigation. I predict as others have that the vastly improved environments in bars will actually mean more not fewer patrons. But there must be a level playing field in the implementation of the bill and it must apply to all bars and clubs equally and that is why the Green Party is vehemently opposed to last-ditch efforts to exempt Returned Services Association clubs from the provisions of this bill. That is absurd and we must resist last-minute pork-barrel attempts to garner votes from Returned Services Associations and other clubs and we must have an across-the-board approach. 
 I would like to signal that the Green Party will seek to amend the bill so as to ban the sale of toys that imitate the act of smoking to anyone under the age of 18. Cigarette toys are being sold to children as young as 3 and those toys basically teach children how to become the smokers of tomorrow. I have here seven different toy products that have been sent to me from all around the country. There are squirting cigarettes cigars—all sort of cigarettes and all these products are designed to make children think that smoking is somehow cool and fun. Cigarette companies have long targeted young people in their marketing campaigns knowing as Philip Morris puts it that today’s young person is tomorrow’s potential regular customer and that the vast majority of smokers begin to smoke while in their teens. So if we are serious about trying to discourage our children from becoming the addicts of tomorrow we must prohibit the sale of products like these which are specifically targeted at young children to encourage them to think smoking is cool and to get hooked at a young age. 
I will also be seeking to amend the legislation in order to remove the penalties infringement notices and prosecution procedures that apply to individuals. We would prefer that we rely on social pressure not penalties for getting smokers to comply with the new law. Enforcement has not been an issue in other places like California for example where there are no specific penalties yet there has been 92 percent compliance after 1 year. I think we can expect the same high compliance rate here in New Zealand. Finally we strongly support requirements that the bill require full disclosure of the contents of tobacco products and that all of the more than 600 additives used in tobacco products—used to enhance the taste of tobacco smoke numb the throat and so forth to make cigarettes more palatable for first-time users—ought to be disclosed on tobacco products.