The ACT Party has rubbished a suggestion the Government could ban smoking inside homes.
Louisa Wall made the suggestion to Newshub on Wednesday, saying it could be the next step after banning smoking in cars with children.
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- Smoking main cause of preventable child death - Plunket
"I'd like to see smoking, from my perspective, banned at home."
But she will have a hard time getting it past NZ First leader Winston Peters, who said a ban in the home would be excessive.
"That sort of invasion of people's privacy we are not going to support. The idea of interfering with people's homes that way is simply wrong."
ACT leader David Seymour had stronger words, saying the suggestion was the Labour Party's nanny state side rearing its head.
"The only rightful goal of regulation can be the prevention of harm to others. The state should not try to prevent actions that only affect the person taking them.
"Banning people from smoking inside their own homes would be a serious invasion of privacy. ACT believes that people are ends in themselves, not clay to be moulded in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats."
Earlier this year Plunket said smoking was the number one cause of preventable death and child health problems.
"In the enclosed space the smoking, the nicotine, the poisons - all of the toxins involved, but also the smoke - can affect children's health, [including] the unborn child as well as children that are present," Plunket clinical services manager Counties-Manukau Gay Ford told The AM Show.
"Their lungs are very small and still developing, and they do breathe a lot faster than adults - so if they're breathing in secondhand smoke, they're going to be breathing in a lot more of those particles."
Newshub.
