Editorial: Tough love should work for smokers

Tariana Turia. Photo / Anthony Phelps

If anyone but Tariana Turia had pushed through Parliament a punishing increase in the price of cigarettes there would have been an outcry from people who call themselves compassionate.

Attacking smoking with tax, they would protest, hurts those who can least afford it, some of them with young families who stood to suffer for the higher cost of a parent's addiction.

But probably nobody in Parliament knows those people better than Mrs Turia, Maori Party co-leader and Associate Minister of Health. She acknowledged that raising the excise on tobacco, including loose tobacco for roll-your-owns, would predominantly affect the young, the poor, Maori and Pacific Islanders.

But she showed no hesitation in driving through legislation that will ultimately increase the tax on cigarettes by more than 30 per cent and loose tobacco by more than 44.

Every MP except four of Act's five members supported her. It is hard to imagine the Labour Party doing so if National had initiated the measure, or vice versa. Either would have assumed a moral high ground to condemn the other.

The presence of the Maori Party punctures the kind of compassion that underrates people.

Mrs Turia knows the vulnerable groups well enough to be certain that higher prices will be effective, and we can be confident she would not advocate such an increase unless she knew the families of smokers can cope. She probably knows their budgets have to cope with several expenses they would be better off without.

Her party has caused National to partially renege on an election promise that benefits and pensions would be automatically adjusted for increases in the consumers price index.

A bill to exempt the tobacco tax increase from that calculation will also be passed, for the very good reason that compensation for a deterrent price negates its purpose.

Anti-smoking campaigner Murray Laugesen sounds less confident that the deterrent will be lasting.

When the tax was last increased in 2000, raising the price of a packet by 20 per cent, about 80,000 people who quit smoking resumed the habit within four months, he said. But he notes that the tax increase did not apply to roll-your-owns, and nicotine replacement therapy was not subsidised.

It is now, and there should be no shortage of funds for more help for smokers trying to quit if the $205 million a year that the Government expects to reap from the extra excise is dedicated to health services that deal with tobacco's damage.

Campaigners such as the Smokefree Coalition would have liked the Government to go further, imposing a 20 per cent price increase annually for the next five years.

They will be impressed by the Australian Government's decision this week to increase its tobacco excise by 25 per cent and impose severe restrictions on cigarette packaging.

Packets will have to feature expanded graphic health warnings and contain nothing of a promotional nature beyond the brand and product name, printed in a stipulated type, size, colour and position.

Cigarette companies here have reason to fear similar marketing restrictions might flow from the parliamentary inquisition mounted by another Maori Party member, Hone Harawira.

The party is clearly reflecting the scourge that tobacco continues to represent for Maori and others whose health problems differ somewhat from the mainstream.

An overall view suggests the war against smoking was won long ago.

The habit persists among a diminishing minority who huddle outside workplaces and are banished from bars, restaurants and public enclosed spaces. But too many of those remaining in the huddles are Maori, Pacific Islanders and poor.

Mrs Turia's taxing tough love could work where soft public health programmes have failed.