Submission to the Committee Secretariat Health Committee
September 2024
Student Christian Movement Aotearoa (SCMA)
Tēnā koutou katoa:
Student Christian Movement Aotearoa is a progressive Christian group in tertiary institutions across the Motu. We write to give our partial support of the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Amendment Bill (No 2). As a Christian organisation, we value life, and visions of an abundant life (John 10:10) include physical health. We also write as rangatahi—whose welfare our tradition and sacred scriptures emphasise should be prized (Prov 22:6; Matt 18:6).
We thus support the spirit behind this new law that seeks to address the widespread harm that vaping can cause to human health, acknowledging that the health harms are felt inequitably throughout society, with Māori youth disproportionately affected adversely (DeMello & Hoek 2024), and especially Māori girls (Youdan 2023). We endorse the following recommendations from Public Health Communication Centre Aotearoa that the amendment bill include:
- “A formal licensing scheme could control vape store numbers and locations, and provide an additional enforcement mechanism (i.e., allow for licence removal from non-compliant retailers).”
- “Disallowing price discounting, loyalty schemes, giveaways and bundling promotions (such as buy-one-get-one-free)”
- “that no vaping product retailer (including existing retailers) may operate within 300m of any school, kura or early childhood centre”
- Finally, “the Government should introduce robust measures to reduce smoked tobacco products’ availability.”
We believe these changes would lessen the accessibility and thus harm of vaping products, especially among those impacted the most.
Ngā manaakitanga,
Michael Toy
publictheologian@scm.org.nz
Public Theologian
Student Christian Movement Aotearoa
Ben Youdan, “Youth regular vaping decreases for 2nd year in a row in ASH Year 10 survey, daily smoking remains very low,” Action for Smoke Free 2025, December 11, 2023.
Anna DeMello & Janet Hoek, “Underage vaping is on the rise: here’s how young New Zealanders are finding it so easy to access,” The Conversation, May 21, 2024.
Janet Hoek, Jude Ball, & Richard Edwards, “New Vaping Bill: Some important progress but critical gaps remain,” PHCC, September 20, 2024.