The small print tells us the Smokefree 2025 goal was to reduce the smoking rate to “less than 5 per cent, and as close as possible to 0 per cent, by December 2025″. Neither zero per cent nor 5 per cent is achievable in just two years and 25 days.
In the United States, according to public information, the smoking rate has declined from 20.9 per cent in 2005 to 11.5 per cent in 2021. In New Zealand in 2021, after 40 years of anti-smoking policies, the smoking rate was 2.1 percentage points lower, at 9.4 per cent. The Māori smoking rate is 19.9 per cent and for Pasifika people it is 18.2 per cent.
Smokefree’s failure to lower the Māori smoking rate led Labour to double down. In 2022, a gradual prohibition was legislated. As the law stands, it will become illegal for anyone born after the start of 2009 to buy cigarettes. In the future, it will be legal for a 35-year-old to buy cigarettes, but not a 34-year-old. No one knows how that could work.
During prohibition in the US, alcohol consumption continued and crime increased. In this country, P is prohibited but sewage testing reveals 45,000 adults are P users and organised crime has increased.
The Minister of Health, Shane Reti, is correct. Reversing Smokefree 2025 will not stop the steady decline in smoking rates. Smoking is reducing because it is uncool. Even smokers think smoking is dumb. Only the state can make smoking cool again by making it illegal, so smoking becomes an act of rebellion.
Instead of prohibition, Labour should have set stretched but achievable goals and commissioned some TikTok influencers.
Society’s addictions do change. When I was elected to Parliament, there were curious copper containers around the debating chamber. “What are they for?” I asked. The answer: “Spittoons for tobacco chewers”. Chewing tobacco died out without a “Chewfree New Zealand” campaign.
Last week, critics suddenly discovered the existence of tobacco taxes and claimed these taxes would pay for National’s tax cuts. But the $2 billion in tobacco tax revenue is already in the Budget. Successive governments have used tobacco taxes as a transfer from the poor to pay for policies like tax relief for Hollywood studios and the like.
The most effective way to reduce child poverty would be a reduction in the tax on cigarettes, so they are not cheap, but not ruinously expensive either.
In Auckland, a packet of Marlboro costs $40. About 70 per cent of that is tax. Smokefree New Zealand says: “We are not talking small amounts here – someone smoking a pack a day spends about $266 a week on cigarettes, which is over $13,800 each year.”
Tobacco taxes are a prime reason for child poverty and homelessness. Photo / 123RF
The Jobseeker allowance for a 22-year-old is $294.18 a week. A packet a day would leave $28.18 a week. Last week, a beneficiary told me she has just $30 a week for food. She smokes. I have visited households where there was no food for the children, but all the adults smoked. An addict will always feed their habit first.
Tobacco taxes are a prime reason for child poverty and homelessness.
Poverty kills. A study on WebMD states that as many people in the US die of poverty as they do from Alzheimer’s. As well as counting the lives saved by cigarette taxes, we should count the lives lost through increasing poverty.
A Ministry of Health report is often cited in order to claim smokers are a burden. The report reaches its figures by inflating the Treasury’s measure for the quality of life by 3.6 times. Other impacts are ignored. I believe it is not smokers, but caring for people with Alzheimer’s that threatens to overwhelm the health system. Smokers are not causing the unsustainability of New Zealand Super.
Smoking is a leading cause of death. The major cost falls on the smoker. The fact that smokers are likely to suffer premature death is not a justification for reducing them and their children to poverty.
Then there are the unintended consequences of Smokefree New Zealand. Do the critics think dairies are ram-raided for candy?
Anti-smoking group Ash admits there has been a “steady rise” in the black market for cigarettes.
Tobacco taxes have caused a rise in crime.
The Ministry of Health is alarmed at the explosion in vaping.
Smokers tell me it is easier to buy P than tobacco. The P epidemic has coincided with the prohibitive price of cigarettes.
Perhaps if they taught economics at med school, our public health policies would not be so socially damaging.
It is ironic that Te Pāti Māori, which blames all ills on colonialism, is demanding the Government impose smoking policies on Māori - a form of 21st-century colonialism.
Surely there will be a future Waitangi Tribunal claim that by levying so much tax on tobacco, governments knowingly reduced many Māori to poverty.
Richard Prebble is a former leader of the Act Party and a former member of the Labour Party.
