Simmonds PennyPENNY SIMMONDS (National—Invercargill): Thank you Madam Speaker. I rise to speak on the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Smoked Tobacco) Amendment Bill. I am not on the Health Committee any longer but I am pleased that my previous colleagues who are on there now still spent considerable time listening to and reading a number of the submissions.I also listened with some amusement to Maureen Pugh talking about her days driving along in a car full of smoke. My father also smoked and I can assure her it was worse when the window could be opened and you were sitting in the backseat and the ash and the smoke just came directly to you. So I think either way being in a car with smokers was not much fun to young kids.National absolutely supports a smoke-free agenda and I think it is really important that we are really clear on that and we are proud to have established the 2025 smoke-free targets. However we don't support the bill because of the timing and the prioritisation of the initiatives within the bill.Now the significant parts of the bill are the limiting of the number of retailers able to sell smoked tobacco products and that being the first initiative that is implemented. This poses considerable risks to retailers both from a safety perspective and a viability perspective and I'll speak a little more about that later. It also aims to prevent young people from taking up smoking by prohibiting the sale of smoked tobacco products to anyone born on or after 1 January 2009. Of course Dr Shane Reti showed that there were some limitations to that approach and wanted a little bit of caution to that approach because in other jurisdictions where it had been implemented it wasn't showing high success rates. The bill also aims to make smoked tobacco products less appealing and less addictive. Again Dr Reti has done a lot of the work around this and we particularly agree with this initiative.So the National Party certainly agrees with the intent it agrees with the 2025 targets and the initiatives just not the timing and the prioritisation of the initiatives.So reducing the retail availability by limiting the number of retailers down from 6000 to 600—it has been spoken about earlier that there is no science to this. It is a figure that has just been plucked out of the air. There are some real concerns around what will happen and the unintended consequences of making this the first initiative. In making this the first initiative there are concerns that a number of dairy owners will go out of business and that the safety of those that are within the 600 will be compromised.Now I've spent some time talking to dairy owners about this. Just last week I asked one of the dairy owners that I visited to outline for me what she felt she would have to do in terms of security if she was one of the 600 that would be able to sell tobacco or sell cigarettes and the cost and the safety aspects of this were considerable. We know that the dairy owners have said they are not opposed to this long term; they've just said if they could have a two-year window in which to turn their operating models around they would find it acceptable. And given that these dairy owners are the people that have been suffering most under the current situation of ram raids and blatant thefts—and in fact that was one of the reasons I was visiting a dairy owner at the end of last week when she was talking about the blatant theft that goes on now with the soft-on-crime approach that Labour has had and the emboldenment of those that come in and just will take goods from her dairy. So there are issues around the viability of these dairies and the safety of the dairy owners.I also spent some time talking with the Cancer Society when I was collecting for the Cancer Society earlier this year. Obviously they are very very positive about changes to the legislation but I was trying to explain that while we agreed with the intent it was the order in which it was going to occur that we were concerned about. Talking to a number of smokers—and yes I do still have some friends and family members who are smokers—I think we have to be very very careful that we don't get too smug and self-righteous about this. For a variety of reasons people are carrying on smoking and so we have to be very very careful that we are not demonising them that we are showing a degree of compassion to them.So I was concerned at the way in which the Minister spoke disrespectfully of Dr Shane Reti and his approach to this legislation. I think it was disingenuous of the Minister to have been so scathing of the National position when the National position has been very much that we agree with the intent we agree with the targets and therefore Dr Shane Reti had taken a bipartisan approach and wanted to progress a much more scientific driven model a model which had picked up on what has been successful in other jurisdictions. So I felt it was incredibly disrespectful that the Government were not prepared to consider what he was putting forward.I think it's very regrettable that they were not prepared to consider just a change of the timing of the initiatives so that dairy owners would not bear the impact of the initiative which was considered to have the greatest weight of evidence being the denicotinisation being by far and away the most effective. And we were certainly very very supportive of that being rolled out first and we felt that might well have done 80 percent of the heavy lifting of the reduction that we wanted to see particularly when the Minister herself had said there was much uncertainty to the initiative around reducing the number of retail outlets and really it was being picked as the easiest one to do. That does not seem to me like a very good reason to have put people's whole dairies and livelihoods at risk when the change in prioritisation could have made a great difference and could have brought in the support of the National Party.So there has been I believe considerable virtue-signalling as this Government is wont to do around the timing of what they are wanting to bring in first out of the three main initiatives in this. Had they gone with the evidence had they gone with what had been most successful in other jurisdictions had they taken the time to consider perhaps the least harm to those dairy owners who are doing it incredibly hard at this time because of their soft-on-crime approach this could have been a much more generally supported piece of legislation.I just reiterate that National absolutely supports a smoke-free agenda. We support the 2025 targets. We just do not support this legislation because of the unwillingness to try and be flexible with the prioritisation and the timing. Thank you Madam Speaker.