Harawira calls tobacco decision 'ludicrous'

Hone Harawira

Maori Party MP Hone Harawira has slammed a judge's decision that an international tobacco giant does not owe damages to the children of a lung cancer victim.

Brandon and Kasey Pou wanted $310,966 compensation from WD & HO Wills and its owner, British American Tobacco.

Their mother, former fish and chip shop worker Janice Pou, who smoked 30 cigarettes a day from 1968, died of lung cancer in September, 2002, aged 51.

She had brought a damages claim against British American Tobacco and Wills before she died, and her children continued the claim on her behalf after her death.

They argued in a five-week trial in the High Court at Auckland in February that British American Tobacco and Wills owed Mrs Pou a duty of care to warn her in the late 1960s of the potential risk from smoking.

However, in an 111-page written judgment released on Wednesday, Justice Graham Lang dismissed their claim.

"Liability would have been negated in the present case by the fact that the dangers inherent in smoking cigarettes were a matter of common knowledge when Mrs Pou began smoking in 1968," the judgment said.

"On the balance of probabilities Mrs Pou herself would also have known of those dangers at the time that she took up smoking."

Mr Harawira yesterday said Justice Lang's verdict was "ludicrous".

"Telling us that she was well aware of the dangers to her health that smoking posed ignores the fact that back when Janice Pou started, the dangers of smoking weren't well known at all," he said. "In fact, back in those times, everyone thought smoking cigarettes was glamorous and cool - movie stars smoked, even big-time sports stars smoked."

Justice Lang also seemed to have ignored the addictive nature of tobacco, he said.

"It should have been the tobacco industry on trial," Mr Harawira said.

"There will come a time when the people who sell this poison to our people will be held to account, and that time won't be too far away."

- NZPA