By the time she'd finished her reign in the Beehive smoking had been banned from the Parliamentary precinct.
When she arrived there in 1981, the RSA generation ruled the roost and smoking was virtually compulsory.
Parliament's elaborate Grand Hall, now a favourite gathering place for public functions, was off limits.
It was an eight table billiard room with the magnificent lead lights and domes blacked out, while the three piece suits clacked their way around the tables under a haze of smoke.
Sitting in the members' dining room over breakfast there wasn't an ashtray in sight.
The anti smoking lobby group ASH was in the chair, surrounded by defence personnel, not that they needed protection, they were there to make a point.
The military, which once upon a time used tobacco as currency drawn from tobacco rations, declared it wants to be smoke free in three years.
With ten to 12 percent of their fourteen thousand personnel partial to a durrie that's a big, if not impossible ask.
Just as it is to make this country's more than half a million puffers smoke free by 2025.
Few, including those who indulge, really like smoking.
Most, if you talk to them would like to give up but unfortunately they're addicts and they're paying the price, not just through massive excise taxes to the Government, growing by ten percent a year, but through their health.
Unfortunately the financial costs generally fall on those who can least afford it, 35 percent of Maori, and 22 percent of Pacific Islanders.
Every time the price goes up, so too does the robberies of dairies.
Surely then the answer then isn't unrealistic objectives, or constantly raising the price of a pack, or turning puffers into pariahs, it surely should be about education.
And don't say it won't work, raising the price doesn't either.
