Ae Marika! 26 Nov 2013

Posted on November 26, 2013 by admin in Ae Marika

When I first got to parliament I pushed hard to get rid of tobacco because of the devastating effect smoking had on my own whanau, and being an MP I naturally assumed that the best place to take it to would be the Parliamentary Health Select Committee. Unfortunately however, whether because of the influence the tobacco industry had over political parties or because they didn’t think it worth worrying about, I got turned away – twice.

So I got together with a small group of Maori tobacco control campaigners – Skye Kimura (Cancer Society), Shane Bradbrook (Te Reo Marama) and Mere Wilson (Health Promotion Agency) – and we refocused our intentions into an investigation into the impact of tobacco on Maori, and managed to get the Maori Affairs Select Committee to take it over.

The Committee travelled all around the country to hear hundreds of submissions from cancer sufferers, whanau, medical practitioners, researchers, international experts, and even the tobacco industry itself, and by the end of the exercise even the media had come solidly on board with the campaign against tobacco. The Committee’s report, released in November 2010, proposed a raft of world-leading recommendations to achieve the ultimate goal of making Aotearoa smokefree by 2015.

Well, at the recent Oceania Tobacco Control Conference I learned that on current trends we will reach our goal of only 5% of NZers still smoking by 2015, which is great news. The downside though is that the Maori smoking rate will still be 20% and that’s bloody disappointing.

Disappointing because our inquiry was specifically about Maori, and yet, unless we take urgent action to up the game, Maori will be still left holding the dirty end of the cigarette.

So last week I got together with the original crew to discuss what we might do to keep the acid on the tobacco industry as well as taking action to get the statistics for Maori trending to 5% by 2025.

Luckily the Select Committee’s original report included a wide range of recommendations covering quit smoking programmes, nicotine replacement, taxes, smokefree campaigns, and other areas that we can build on.

So we’re going to take a look at which ones might best help us get traction for Maori and then try to get my colleagues in parliament to put resourcing in to getting Maori statistics to the same point as those for non-Maori by 2025.

Too many people have put too much effort into this for us to not do that little bit extra to complete the task.

Oh yeah – I thought my Feed the Kids Bill would be coming up on 4 December 2013, but it won’t. Other bills have pushed it back, so I expect it to surface early in 2014. Watch this space!

AE MARIKA is an article written every week by Hone Harawira, leader of the MANA Movement and Member of Parliament for Te Tai Tokerau. You are welcome to use any of the comments and to ascribe them to Mr Harawira. The full range of Hone’s articles can be found on the MANA website at www.mana.net.nz.