While the Labour Party of Great Britain was the first government to enact initial counter-smoking legislation being a smoking ban and the Labor government of Australia in 2012 was the first government having the audacity to rob the use of the trade marks for tobacco cigarettes and sell them in plain packaging the current Labor government of New Zealand is setting itself for breaking the record of raising the age limit for buying cigarettes progressively each year until no one will eventually be allowed to legally purchase tobacco.
The age limit the Arden government draft legislation perceives for buying tobacco from the market has been set to whoever was born before 2008 and it seeks for this to take effect from 2023. The draft furthermore reduces the number of retail outlets selling cigarettes and tobacco from 8,000 down to only 500 and reduces the nicotine level of those cigarettes by 95% down to 0.05 to confront their addictive use which occurs in repetition. The American VLN King maker 22nd Century has welcomed this part of the legislative draft and VLN King has been approved by the F.D.A. as a low-risk tobacco product or cigarette, the first in its kind. Thus similar products would be sold at the lowest or cheapest price from within the range of $30 to $35 of both Australian and New Zealand dollars.
However, the main opposition National Party has serious reservations about the effectiveness of further newly introduced restrictions to the rest of the world and the Green Party are worrying in terms of the countries in Oceania becoming police states more than they already happen to be by raising concerns about penalising smokers and prospective smokers.
However, the main opposition parties have not declared that they will not vote for the legislation. The ACT Party is openly opposed to the Jacinda Arden government legislation and its leader said there is no longer a public interest from imposing further restrictions on tobacco in New Zealand and from further regulating smoking. In spite of this the draft law passed its first hearing in the NZ House of Representatives on the 30th of July 2022 almost unanimously and is set to go under the next hearing later this year during the autumn of 2022.
Less than one in ten of the five million of their native New Zealanders and Anglo-Saxon settlers regularly smoke as a crowd of 450,000 people, but the New Zealand government, setting the target that other countries are considering by 2030 for 2025, intends to reduce the 9% rate to 5% by 2025 possibly talking about its possible elimination by isolating the last smoker and burdening him with the above measures and restrictions.
Bring Back Smoking Freedom 