SMOKING (PROHIBITION IN CERTAIN PLACES) (AMENDMENT) BILL

Order for Second Reading read.

The Minister for the Environment (Mr Mah Bow Tan): Mr Speaker, Sir, I beg to move, "That the Bill be now read a Second time."

Sir, it has now been clearly established and recognised that smoking is harmful to our health, and that it is addictive and therefore in our national interest to curb smoking. The Ministry of Health (MOH) is responsible for the National Smoking Control programme. MOH organises an annual campaign and enforces measures to curb smoking like banning tobacco advertisements, health warning labels on cigarette packs, prohibition of cigarette sales to under-18s' and so on. The Ministry of the Environment's role is to protect the public, the overwhelming majority of Singaporeans who are non-smokers, from the harmful effects of tobacco smoke.

There is now enough scientific evidence to prove that a non-smoker who breathes in second-hand tobacco smoke also faces serious health risks.

The US Environmental Protection Agency has a classification system for carcinogens, in other words, substances that cause cancer in human beings. They classify carcinogens into four groups: Group A, which is a known carcinogen with sufficient human and animal evidence. Group B1, which is a probable carcinogen with limited human evidence but sufficient animal evidence. Group B2, a probable carcinogen with inadequate human evidence but sufficient animal evidence. Lastly, Group C, a possible carcinogen with inadequate human evidence and limited animal evidence. Mainstream smoke or smoke that is inhaled by smokers is classified as a Group A carcinogen. The second-hand smoke that is inhaled by non-smokers is also classified as a Group A carcinogen, in other words, in the same category as mainstream smoke.

When smokers light up, they know the risks that they face. But when non-smokers are exposed to the same risks, sometimes even despite protests, then the Government has a responsibility to step in to protect them. The debate on banning smoking in public places was initially characterised by loud protests from smokers, about abuse of their rights. The debate has now swung around to the belief that non-smokers have as much right to smoke-free air, especially when the dangers of second-hand tobacco smoke have been so clearly established.

Sir, my Ministry is committed to creating a tobacco smoke-free environment. The current legislation allows my Ministry to prohibit smoking in public places as well as in public service vehicles. Over the years, we have progressively prohibited smoking in a number of enclosed public places where people congregate, in other words, places like air-conditioned restaurants, cinemas, departmental stores, and so on. Today, many of our air-conditioned public places are smoke-free areas.

There are, however, many offices and factory floors that are not smoke-free. We have tried to encourage managers of offices and factory floors to introduce house-rules to control smoking within their premises. I am afraid not many managers have introduced such rules. Non-smokers, who are in the majority, have had to continue to suffer the harmful effects of tobacco smoke. Many of them find it very difficult to persuade their colleagues not to smoke in the office, especially when the CEOs or managers themselves smoke.

The proposed Bill will allow my Ministry to prohibit smoking in any commercial, industrial or recreational premises. This is to protect our office and factory workers. With its enactment, we can proceed to prohibit smoking in all air-conditioned offices and factory floors. The new law will make managers responsible to ensure that employees do not smoke in the office or factory floors. The management or employer will be required to put up signs and inform his employees not to smoke.

Any employee who believes that the no-smoking rule is not being observed may bring the matter up to the manager of the workplace. The manager will then be required to investigate the complaint and warn the offenders to cease smoking. If the manager is unable to resolve the matter, he can then refer it to my Ministry. Managers who fail to take action may be prosecuted. Managers themselves are also not allowed to smoke in an air-conditioned workplace. Employees may lodge complaints to my Ministry if they find their managers not complying with the no-smoking rule.

The new law will also allow the smoking prohibition to be extended to the common property of residential premises. My Ministry recognises the problem faced by residents in private residential premises using facilities provided in enclosed or air-conditioned common areas. By this, I mean the lobby areas, function rooms, reading rooms or games rooms in condominiums. Non-smoking residents, especially children, using these premises have a right to be protected from second-hand tobacco smoke. Non-smokers frequently suffer in silence for fear of offending smokers, especially if they are their neighbours, should they tell them to stop smoking.

We will continue to monitor developments in other countries which recognise, like us, that second-hand smoke is a serious health hazard, and countries which are prepared to act to protect their citizens from the dangers of second-hand tobacco smoke. Such countries include the US, Canada and Australia, which have already introduced laws to prohibit smoking in workplaces. We will constantly review our own laws to keep abreast with the developments in these countries.

In conclusion, Sir, I would like to reiterate that the Bill is first and foremost intended to protect the interest of the majority of Singaporeans who do not smoke. The Bill will ensure that non-smokers will not be forced to breathe in harmful second-hand tobacco smoke against their will. If, at the same time, it also encourages some smokers to give up the habit, perhaps because of sheer inconvenience, this will be a bonus. If smokers still choose to smoke, they should do so in a place where no harm can be caused to non-smokers. They should be considerate to those around them who share the same space but who do not share the same desire to smoke, by refraining from smoking in the prohibited areas.

Sir, I beg to move.

Mr Low Thia Khiang: Mr Speaker, Sir, can I seek a clarification from the Minister?

Mr Speaker: Can you let me put the motion to the House first? The Member is advised to be patient.

Question proposed.

Dr John Chen Seow Phun (Hong Kah GRC): Mr Speaker, Sir, Kevin Sullivan, a Business Times (BT) journalist, got it wrong when he opined in the OPINIONS column in the last weekend edition of BT that the Bill before us would not achieve its purpose of getting smokers to stop smoking. The objective of the Smoking (Prohibition in Certain Places) Bill is very clear. It is not aimed at trying to get smokers to quit smoking. As the Minister has said, that is the job of the Ministry of Health. This law is about protecting non-smokers and championing their legitimate rights.

However, the existing law is not wide enough to cover certain places where smoking should be banned if the legitimate interests of the non-smokers are to be protected. It does not cover places such as air-conditioned commercial offices, reading rooms of condominiums, and even sports stadiums, etc. Should these places be included in the prohibition list? I think they should. The reason is obvious. If a non-smoker is affected by someone who smokes in the office, he or she cannot say, "I am not going to work in the office." Likewise, in a sports stadium packed with people, non-smokers who are affected by someone who smokes cannot move away from their seats. A non-smoker who has to leave the reading room of his condominium because someone is smoking in there is obviously being deprived of his privileges. Of course, one can argue that in these instances the non-smoker can always ask or request the smoker to stub it out. But we know that such requests will not always work, especially in places where smoking is not banned.

Amending section 3(1) of the principal Act, as shown in the Bill, will allow the Government to gazette the places that I have just mentioned. The amendment, in my view, will then make the objective of this law fully realisable.

However, the amendment will also, in theory, enable the Government to gazette any premises or building except private homes. But I do not think, and I hope the Minister will clarify, that it is the intention of the Government to do just that. For every place that the Government gazettes, it must also back it up with good reasons.

Sir, I am therefore surprised, reading from the Straits Times and Business Times, that the Government intends to ban smoking in all public places, including car parks and HDB void decks. In fact, many of my friends are having the impression that the Government will be doing just that after reading the press report. They thought that the Government is unreasonable in these instances and are asking where the justifications are. Will the Minister clarify?

I hope the Minister will also let us know what additional places he will be gazetting after the passing of this Bill and the rationale behind them.

Mr Chew Heng Ching (Eunos GRC): Mr Speaker, Sir, I agree with the Minister that there is sufficient medical evidence that links smoking with morbid illnesses like lung cancer. So over time, the Government has tried to persuade people in Singapore to reduce, if not stop, smoking altogether. At the same time, legislation was progressively introduced to add more bite to the effort. Nobody would quarrel with the Government of its intention that seeks to give every Singaporean the best and, today, the best includes ensuring a smoke-free environment.

Sir, I agree with the objective of the Bill, particularly in so far as it seeks to protect the majority, the non-smokers. I support the Bill, particularly when it is targeted at teenage smokers and those who are about to start smoking or who are marginal smokers, about to take up the kick of it. I think the Bill should come hard on them, clamp down on this group of people to discourage them from ever wanting to start smoking.

Sir, I feel that clause 3 of the Bill is a bit harsh in the sense that it curtails the home further to exclude common areas outside one's home. Under the amendment, if I interpret it correctly, a smoker would have committed an offence if he smokes in a place for recreation or in a park, or even at an HDB void deck below where he lives, or if he steps out of his car with a lit cigarette in his mouth in a car park.

I speak, Sir, for a small minority of habitual smokers. To this group of people, I think the Bill may be an overkill. Our current measures to discourage smoking through anti-smoking campaigns, education, excise duties and prohibitions of smoking in certain air-conditioned areas have been very effective. In fact, today we are proud that the percentage of smokers in our population is perhaps one of the lowest in the world. I believe this percentage continues to drop. Therefore, Sir, I was not surprised when I met some residents recently in my constituency walkabout, who are themselves smokers, and even a small group of non-smokers who expressed their displeasure to me on the Bill. And I must say that their impression was based on what they have read in the Straits Times. They felt that such prohibitions, as good as a total ban, is an overkill. They argued that in recreation as well as in social gatherings after a hard day's work, they want to be able to let down their hair and be merry. So why can they not be allowed to enjoy themselves and smoke, say, in a private function room in a hotel, in a HDB void deck, or in a designated area in the National Stadium when doing their Kallang roar in supporting the nation's soccer team?

Sir, I have one concern also, and this is through personal experience. I am sure some Members of this House share the same experience. The publicity given to the Bill may have some adverse impact on the tourist industry. I think this may impact also on our effort to promote Singapore as a business centre. I have experience and I am sure my colleagues in this House, who are in businesses, would have the same experience. Today, one of the most onerous and most difficult tasks in trying to entertain foreign visitors in Singapore is to be able to select a restaurant that allows smoking, and there are not many such restaurants left in Singapore. Will this amendment not mean that visitors to Singapore will not be able to enjoy a meal followed by a smoke? We can be lenient to these foreign visitors. But if we do so, then would we not be accused by Singaporeans for not applying the law fairly?

Sir, I want to say that I am not against the Bill. I think the Bill is good in the interest of the majority - the non-smokers. I think it will be effective, particularly in discouraging more and more Singaporeans from ever wanting to take up the smoking habit. But so long as smoking is not completely banned in Singapore, it is reasonable to assume that smokers should be given just that little more room to breathe and to exhale. I therefore urge the Minister to implement the law flexibly, sensitively and with compassion and sympathy on this group of habitual smokers.

Mr Low Thia Khiang: Mr Speaker, I am equally concerned with clause 3 (new section 3(1)(b)) which reads "any common property of any residential premises or building". What does this mean and what does it cover? I hope the Minister would clarify.

The Minister in his speech also said that the Government aims to create a tobacco-free environment in Singapore. Would the Government consider banning the import of tobacco to Singapore altogether one day?

Dr Toh Keng Kiat: Mr Speaker, I rise to speak in support of the Bill.

Dr John Chen had asked the Minister to draft a list of additional places where smoking will be prohibited. I hope when the Minister does this, he will also include hawker centres, because these will be places visited by families with children and it can be a most annoying experience to be having one's meal in front of a smoker.

The question is: how do we implement this? One way of doing so is to urge hawkers or to ban them from providing ash trays. And if the smokers are so inconvenienced, they will face being served with CWOs for indiscriminate disposal of cigarette butts and cigarette ashes.

The other point that I would like to raise is that while this amendment Bill provides for punishment of managers and proprietors of establishments, who do not take up complaints against smokers, it also does not give them sufficient protection against offensive smokers. While the Act, section 6(5), has provided a $1,000 fine and/or six months' jail sentence, I would also urge the Minister to consider a caning order on people who are abusive and use physical assault on managers who try to stop them from smoking. We have done this with offensive drivers and road bullies, so why can we not do it with smokers?

Mr Mah Bow Tan: Mr Speaker, I thank all the speakers for their comments and support of the Bill. I presume Mr Low Thia Khiang also supports the Bill because I do not think there was any point raised against it.

First of all, let me address the concerns of Dr John Chen. He made the point that the existing law is not broad or wide enough in that the places that have been gazetted do not sufficiently cover those areas of concern. Let me clarify that the current legislation already allows the Ministry to gazette open-air public places where smoking is not allowed and this includes the place that he has mentioned - the sports stadium. In other words, under the current legislation, we could gazette open-air sports stadiums as places where smoking is not allowed. However, the current legislation does not allow us to do so for air-conditioned premises, workplaces, recreational areas, and so on. Hence, the Bill that is before Parliament today.

Having made that clarification, let me say that the Ministry uses three general guidelines when it comes to gazetting places where we believe that smoking ought to be banned. Firstly, they are places where families and children gather. Secondly, they are places where the majority of people who go to such places are non-smokers. There are of course establishments where for one reason or another smokers tend to congregate. I think, for obvious reasons, it is not the business of the Ministry to go and ban smoking in places where smokers want to go. Thirdly, we only gazette places which are enclosed or places where it is obviously difficult for non-smokers to get away from the smokers. In other words, it is places, for example, like air-conditioned workplaces, where it is unreasonable to expect the non-smokers to move out because the smoker wishes to have his puff.

These are the broad guidelines. And within these broad guidelines we gazette specific places where smoking is prohibited. So you will notice in the notification, each and every department store where smoking is prohibited has to be named. This provides sufficient protection, as it were, to make sure that we do not willy-nilly gazette all sorts of places where smoking is to be prohibited. And this is where I think the report in the Straits Times, which created quite a lot of apprehension, and which stated that we are going to ban smoking in HDB void decks, car parks, tennis courts, and so on, was a misunderstanding and misrepresentation of Government's intention. There is no intention whatsoever for us to prohibit smoking in HDB void decks, HDB car parks, and so on and so forth.

While the Act says we can prohibit smoking in public places, we have to gazette these public places. So this is a distinction that I would like to make.

If we were to ban smoking in HDB car parks and in public places, that would be tantamount to banning smoking completely in Singapore. Mr Low Thia Khiang asked whether it is the intention of Government to do so. Currently, because we allow smoking, we allow the sale of cigarettes, it is not tenable for us to ban smoking in all the public places in Singapore. But there is already discussion in some countries, for example, the United States Food and Drug Administrator is already thinking or talking about prohibiting the sale of tobacco as a controlled drug. There is currently discussion going on in the United States. There is already representation made to the US Congress as to whether tobacco should be classified as a controlled drug. If and when that occurs, it follows then that tobacco sales will be restricted, and it therefore follows that smoking will not be allowed in the open. But until such time, it is not tenable, it is futile for us to ban smoking in all these places because the enforcement exercise alone will be quite unthinkable. So that is a clarification that I would like to make.

Mr Chew Heng Ching, while supporting the Bill, speaks, as he says, on behalf of the small group of smokers. As I said, it is not the intention of this Bill to stop the small group of people who insist on smoking from doing so. As I have already explained, we do not have any intention of prohibiting them from smoking in HDB void decks and car parks or making it illegal for them to have a smoke as they step out of their car. So I think that fear can be allayed. But, nevertheless, let me make the point that we would like to gradually extend the areas where smokers are not allowed to smoke, where such areas are also areas frequented by non-smokers for the reasons that I have stated at the outset of my Second Reading speech, which is, that we have to protect the non-smokers from the harmful effects of tobacco smoke.

So while Mr Chew would dub this Bill before Parliament as an overkill, perhaps it might be better in such an instance to have a little bit of an overkill if we are able to protect non-smokers from the obvious hazards of tobacco smoke. I think that is an overkill which I do not think any thinking Singaporean, who is a non-smoker, would object to.

As far as the tourist industry is concerned, the current legislation already prohibits smoking in many of the places that are frequented by tourists. The proposed amendment to the legislation does not affect tourists in any way. It merely adds places like air-conditioned workplaces, factories, recreational areas, and so on, areas which tourists do not normally frequent. So therefore the impact of this Bill on the tourist industry is minimal. But, nevertheless, we do recognise that there is already current gazette notification of many places that tourists go to, and this is something that I think most tourists have already accepted. They know that there are places in Singapore where smoking is not allowed. There are provisions made. In restaurants, for example, there are places where if you wish to smoke, there are open-air areas that you can smoke. There are no air-conditioned restaurants in Singapore where smoking is allowed. But there are many non-air-conditioned restaurants, open-air restaurants which such tourists can visit. Mr Chew can look for such places and he can bring his businessman friends to such places.

As far as sympathy is concerned, I think if we have sympathy for the smokers, it is also incumbent on the smokers to have sympathy for the non-smokers. So if they wish to smoke, please do so, but not in front of non-smokers. That is all we ask.

Finally, Dr Toh Keng Kiat asked for the list of places to include hawker centres. At the moment, based on the criteria that I indicated earlier, we do not intend to include hawker centres as part of the list. It is an open-air eating area. Yes, there are many families who go there. Yes, the majority of the people are non-smokers. But I think the current design and the current operation of our hawker centres do not really lend itself to the definition that we have followed so far. So at the moment, it is not the intention of the Ministry to include hawker centres. But if there is a genuine need and if there is a demand for it, we will certainly consider to do so.

As far as the National Stadium is concerned, I would like to inform the Member that the Ministry of the Environment has discussed with the Singapore Sports Council to introduce house rules for the National Stadium. We hope that these house rules which prohibit smoking, which discourage smoking in the National Stadium, will work. We have done so in certain other places, for example, in the queuing area of bus interchanges and, so far, their reports seem to indicate that the commuters are respecting these rules. So we hope that similar response will be obtained from the people who go to the National Stadium. But if it does not work that way, then my Ministry will work towards gazetting the National Stadium and other open air stadia as places where smoking is prohibited as well.

Question put, and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read a Second time and committed to a Committee of the whole House.

The House immediately resolved itself into a Committee on the Bill. - [Mr Mah Bow Tan].

Bill considered in Committee; reported without amendment; read a Third time and passed.