text stringlengths 0 8.04k |
|---|
The Health Committee received 147 written submissions and heard 19 oral submissions. The vast majority were overwhelmingly in support of the bill and its intent. Most submitters believe this bill will protect whānau, tamariki, and rangatahi from the dangers of second-hand smoke. During the process of consideration by t... |
I would briefly like to outline some of the suggestions made by the submitters. Firstly, submitters were concerned that vaping wasn't included in the scope of this bill, especially as we do not know the long-term effects of second-hand vaping. We share these concerns, which is why another bill will be introduced shortl... |
Secondly, submitters argued against the bill's exemptions for vehicles which are stationary or used as a dwelling. This exemption makes it permissible for an adult to smoke in a vehicle with a child if the vehicle is stationary or used as a dwelling. People were unhappy with the idea that whānau, tamariki, and rangatah... |
The Opposition signalled in the Health Committee report on the bill that they would be proposing an amendment to the bill in the committee of the whole House stage to remove this exemption, meaning that police would be able to fine people for smoking in their motorhomes and caravans. I find this suggestion by the Oppos... |
Finally, most submitters thought the 18-month lead-in period was too long, and some committee members agreed. The committee understands that submitters have been waiting a long time for this bill, and they want action as soon as possible. They have the best interests of children at heart, and so do we, but there needs ... |
This Government is committed to making New Zealand the best place in the world to be a child. This bill is part of our duty of care for the most vulnerable—our children—and for that reason, I commend this bill to the House. |
Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): The National Party supported this bill at first reading, and it did so primarily because of its intention to keep children safe, but despite misgivings that at least I had and expressed in the first reading about the degree to which the State becomes a player in the sovereign right of ... |
We were looking forward to and I think we benefited from the submissions to the Health Committee by a number of submitters overwhelmingly, as the Minister has said, in favour of the bill's passage, but there were a number of areas that I think warranted serious consideration. While the committee may have done that, the... |
I'll start with the issue of smoking when the vehicle is used as a dwelling. The Minister, I believe, said that it was "stationary or used as a dwelling", and that's not what the bill says. The bill actually says that the vehicle needs to be stationary and used as a dwelling. Otherwise, anytime the car was stopped, the... |
Now, I want to also move to the issue that is beyond the scope of this bill, that, as the Minister said, was the subject of quite a bit of the submissions in the select committee, and that was the issue of extending this legislation to include what's, effectively, the modern ingestion of nicotine: vaping and heat-not-b... |
Now, I'm ambivalent about whether or not this bill be amended to include vaping, but I am much, much more concerned at the complete absence of any regulatory controls on these devices. We had a court case, which may now be three years old, that said, actually, that the Smoke-free Environments Act doesn't apply to these... |
Now, I find it, also, incredibly ironic and another concern that we have with this bill, and that is the use of police resources to police this process. Isn't it outrageous that we have a Government that says, in respect of this, it becomes law and we rely on police to use their discretion about their position of the l... |
The Minister himself has said that the reason that the bill is not going to become effective sooner than 18 months after Royal assent is because the police need time to upgrade their systems to ensure that infringements and breaches of this law can be recorded in their police database. That is a completely incongruous ... |
So I am disappointed that not a single change was made to this bill, and it does cause us some concern. But, on balance, we continue to remain of the view that this will, at the margins, benefit our young by encouraging people not to smoke in very close proximity to them. The evidence of the health harms is unequivocal... |
So I look forward to the committee of the whole House because I think there are some technical aspects of this bill that we should debate, that the National Party will be putting amendments up to provide sensible, straightforward improvements to this bill in the interests of the health of our young. I encourage the Gov... |
LOUISA WALL (Labour—Manurewa): Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. Tēnā koutou katoa. It was my absolute pleasure as the chair of the Health Committee to be involved in the deliberations on the Smoke-free Environments (Prohibiting Smoking in Motor Vehicles Carrying Children) Amendment Bill. The reason I enjoyed that proce... |
I implore colleagues to read the select committee report. In highlighting the 147 written submissions and the 19 oral submissions, I want to read a list of groups that incorporated the voices of our children. So in addition to Cancer Society Northland, it was Wellington community justice, Holistic Action Sustainable Th... |
So this bill—if you ever were to look at one which puts children at the centre of a piece of legislation that actually listens to the voices of children, it is this particular piece of legislation. Underlying what they told us was—I used that in the select committee—#wecantbreathe and #pleaseprotectus, and it was also ... |
So there are no changes to this piece of legislation; that is a truism. There were a whole lot of other things discussed, including the differential between what is public space and what is a private space, and us being very clear in the smoke-free environments bill that we would never infringe on people's private spac... |
Dr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): Thank you, Madam Speaker. It's a pleasure to speak to this in the second reading of the Smoke-free Environments (Prohibiting Smoking in Motor Vehicles Carrying Children) Amendment Bill. |
Clearly, the goal of this bill is to protect children from second-hand smoke. What we know we already sort of knew going into the select committee, but what was reaffirmed to us through the select committee process was that the benefits here are clearly for young children and clearly for Māori in deprived areas. They s... |
Again, for under-two-year-olds, 15,000 glue ear operations will be prevented. I hadn't really sort of thought on it before as to that relationship. I knew the relationship existed between smoking and glue ear; not quite sure around the physiology. I mean, how does that work? So I sort of tried to look at it over the pa... |
If we look at these submitters to the select committee, there were 120 submissions: 19 of them were oral submissions, 95 percent were in favour of the bill, and the other 5 percent were more just saying "We think education is a better solution." Submitters had six groups of concerns. Some didn't understand the bill, an... |
A number of submitters wanted vaping to be included in this bill and thought it was appropriate. If I could read here from the departmental report from officials addressing this, it says "The Smoke-free Environments (Vaping) Amendment Bill,"—and this is the departmental report from September 2019, September last year—"... |
Hon Maggie Barry: Still no date. |
Dr SHANE RETI: Still no date. |
The third of the six concerns that submitters had was the exemption for young people to smoke in a car. Officials again pointed to clause 37, where they said "A person under the age of 18 who is smoking in the motor vehicle, either on their own or while people over the age of 18 are in the vehicle, is not committing an... |
I think this bill is a good example of lost opportunities. We seem to have lost the opportunity around vaping. Here we are, we are losing the opportunity to address and help young people directly who are smoking. In officials' own words, it's a lost opportunity. |
The fourth concern that submitters had, as my colleague the Hon Michael Woodhouse has discussed, was the issue of stationary vehicles being considered a dwelling and being able to smoke as if it was a private dwelling in that vehicle. We've got issues with that. We're going to raise that as a Supplementary Order Paper ... |
The fifth was reducing the lead-in time, an 18-month lead-in time. Again, substantively, that is for the IT requirements for police to be able to prosecute, if they need to, those who are caught. Wow, what a resource this is going to be for police. As, again, Michael Woodhouse said, how do we align that with the hands-... |
The sixth was submitters thought that enforcement shouldn't be punitive, that there needs to be some reflection around how we might change behaviour, but that it shouldn't substantially be punitive. |
So there were these six things that submitters—six themes, if you like—talked to in this bill. They were thoughtful, and I acknowledge what Louisa Wall the chairperson was saying. I think some of the early start-off to this was the young folks under the help of the Cancer Society in Northland, who brought down a petiti... |
Look, it beats for all of us too, and that's why we're supporting it. But we think there's some parts here that can redress these lost opportunities, and we think we should take that ability that we have to fix it and get it right. There's a few things here we can do to make it better. So, with that, we're happy to sup... |
JENNY MARCROFT (NZ First): Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. It's a pleasure to rise and take my call on behalf of New Zealand First on the Smoke-free Environments (Prohibiting Smoking in Motor Vehicles Carrying Children) Amendment Bill. It was a pleasure to sit on the Health Committee as we took a good look at this piece of le... |
I'd just like to, really, point out that this bill is very narrow in its focus because it is all about protecting children, and that is the sum total about this bill. It is sensible and practical and very pragmatic to take care of our tamariki. The first and foremost thing we must do is to change the social norm around... |
A couple of things that struck me through that process in select committee were that when we put our focus on children, children absolutely add value to our thinking. They enhance our policy development. So it was an absolute pleasure to hear from all of the rangatahi, all of those that came to speak to us in the commi... |
We also heard about their concerns about vaping. I haven't really come across a lot of vaping, and it was interesting to hear from them how so many young people are vaping and it's all about the biggest cloud you can create. So they had concerns and actually wanted to have vaping included in this legislation. |
All in all, really, it is a very narrow bill which is all about taking care of the health and wellbeing of our children, because when they're in a car and an adult or a person is smoking, they do not have a choice. This now gives them that choice. I commend the bill to the House. |
DAN BIDOIS (National—Northcote): It's a pleasure to rise and take a call on this bill. Just to pick up where the previous speaker, Jenny Marcroft, left off, I think there's a lot of the purpose of the bill and the goals of this bill that we all agree on. We all want to make sure that our most vulnerable Kiwis, being ou... |
I don't sit on the Health Committee, but I've had a chance to digest some of the key themes. I want to just pick up on, I think, a really important aspect from the select committee, which was around vaping, because I can't understand why we're advancing this bill to protect our young children, yet we're not making any ... |
You know, for the last two years we've had calls on this Government to introduce some framework around vaping that would regulate it and protect our most vulnerable New Zealanders, our young children, from accessing and getting hands on these products, but this Government hasn't given us a date on, in fact, where we're... |
So, we'll be putting up some Supplementary Order Papers around this in the committee of the whole House, but I ask and I call on the Government to act on this issue now. Introduce your legislation around vaping. We've even given you a helping hand. There is a member's bill in the ballot that, effectively, regulates it.... |
Hon Nicky Wagner: I'll give it to you. |
DAN BIDOIS: She'll give it to you. This is such an important issue for New Zealand. |
It's an important issue for my community in Northcote, where I've got half a dozen vape shops around my area. They don't have the certainty of knowing how to go about their business. The people who are using these products don't have the certainty, and, as a result, the issue of the welfare of our young children in New... |
So, on balance, we're supporting this legislation in the House. There are a lot of flaws with this legislation, but I commend this bill to the House. |
Hon JAMES SHAW (Minister for Climate Change): It's a pleasure to rise on behalf of the Green Party to support the Smoke-free Environments (Prohibiting Smoking in Motor Vehicles Carrying Children) Amendment Bill. The submissions were largely in favour of the bill. We know that passive smoking, particularly in closed env... |
Given all of that, we commend this bill to the House. We're looking forward to its rapid passage through the committee of the whole House stage, and on to its hasty conclusion—it's that simple. Thank you, Madam Speaker. |
Hon NICKY WAGNER (National): Thank you, Madam Speaker. This is an interesting bill. There's no doubt about it, we should not be smoking in cars. If we want to look after our young children's health—anybody's health, actually—we shouldn't be smoking in cars, but it's unfortunate that we actually have to bring this bill.... |
It is such an obvious thing to anyone that's involved in smoking and who has any knowledge at all about the effects of smoking that of course you wouldn't smoke in your car. It's a shame that we have to spend time on this, because I think one of the issues about this is how you enforce it. If people are still smoking i... |
I would like to echo what Dan Bidois said. I would far rather be sitting in this House tonight debating a bill that regulates vaping. We've got to the stage where, if we want to achieve Smokefree 2025, we really have to make sure that people have options to give up smoking. What we've got left in our community is peopl... |
Now, the issue that we have with vaping is: how do we get the balance right? We want to encourage anybody who is a smoker to quit, and to use vaping to quit is a good option. For people who haven't been able to quit any other way, and who've tried every other option—they've tried abstinence and they've tried nicotine p... |
But what we don't want is young people taking up vaping. We understand that vaping is up to 95 percent less harmful than smoking, but we still don't want our young people taking it up. If you don't smoke, you shouldn't vape. So how do we promote vaping to people who are smokers to help them quit while not encouraging y... |
Actually, it's interesting. The research that's come out most recently has said that even though young people do try to vape, very few of them actually continue to do it regularly, particularly on a daily basis. That makes sense. Young people are absolutely wired to take risks—to do things that their elders don't appro... |
I think if we reflect on what's happening around the world, we have the UK, which has had vaping for about at least a decade, or maybe 12 years. They've had good, strong regulations around that and they don't seem to have had any problems, whereas we look at places like the US, which had very little regulation, and the... |
Now, my bill, which I developed when I was the Associate Minister of Health, and I do have to point out that back in 2017—it seems a long time ago now; about May 2017—the National Cabinet passed a paper that endeavoured to produce that bill for Parliament. That bill was written up and it was ready to go. If we'd been i... |
So I would like to suggest that we should take up that bill, that we should use it, and we should get regulation in New Zealand, because at the moment it's the wild west. At the moment, young people have got the ability to vape, with no rules around it. If we have clear regulations to make sure that we look after the q... |
ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): This is a split call. |
ANGIE WARREN-CLARK (Labour): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I'm delighted to stand and speak in the second reading of the Smoke-free Environments (Prohibiting Smoking in Motor Vehicles Carrying Children) Amendment Bill. I'm going to leave aside vaping and talk about the bill. I do also acknowledge what the member Nicky Wagn... |
One of the things, I guess, that is really important that we all understand about this bill is that it is set up specifically to support the most vulnerable in our country. It's around those young people who are absolutely unable to make the choice to get mum or dad or someone else in the car to stop smoking. So this b... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.