Considerable costs in Smokefree repeal

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

The new Government wants to crack on with important work but it will find itself dealing with distractions if third-time deputy prime minister Winston Peters keeps grouching at the media and entertaining conspiracy theories. The sooner he jets off on foreign affairs business the better for new Prime Minister Christopher Luxon.

Another “distraction” for the Government is its controversial decision to repeal the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Smoked Tobacco) Amendment Act 2022 — which was going to make it illegal to sell cigarettes to people born after January 1, 2009, reduce the number of dairies that sell cigarettes from about 6000 to 600, and slash the amount of nicotine in cigarettes.

None of the coalition parties publicly campaigned on this, although it was in NZ First’s manifesto and Act’s fiscal plan after Treasury’s fiscal update a month before the election (because reversing the plan to cut nicotine levels to very low levels adds about $1 billion in revenue to cigarette taxes over four years).

That revenue implication will have been gladly banked by National after losing its foreign buyers’ $2m-plus house tax, but last term it supported denicotinisation as a means to achieve the 2025 Smokefree NZ target (of under 5 percent of Kiwis smoking) that it initially introduced in 2011.

It is also being labelled immoral, to fund income tax cuts by continuing to rake in this money — despite the health and financial consequences that fall disproportionately on Māori and Pasifika, who smoke at much higher rates (19.9 percent and 18.2 percent, compared with 7.2 percent for “European/other” New Zealanders).

There is no denying that a generational smoking ban from 2027 was a novel approach. It was popular, though, and excited public health researchers and government interest internationally. A survey in 2018 of 1020 New Zealanders who smoked or had recently quit smoking, on strategies that in part became the 2022 amendment bill, found more than three-quarters supported a smokefree-generation policy. Last month Britain’s Conservative government picked up the policy as its own.

Modelling studies estimated the smokefree-generation policy would halve smoking prevalence within 14 years among people aged 45 and younger; it was also predicted to achieve a 5.5-fold health gain to Māori, compared to non-Māori — thereby helping to address disparities in smoking prevalence, and to reduce the health inequities they cause.

But it was not popular with free-market champions Act and the woke-busting NZ First party: apparently young people should have the choice to be able to legally pick up a habit that has a good chance of killing them.