New Zealand’s parliament (the New Zealand House of Representatives) began the first reading of the “Smoke-Free Environment and Regulated Products Amendment Act” on February 27, which aims to repeal the previous Labour government’s measures to control tobacco sales, including banning tobacco sales to future generations.
The previous government set the goal of “smoke-free 2025” with the goal of reducing smoking rates below 5% in all population groups.
To achieve this, the previous Labour government implemented the world’s first legislation to ban the sale of tobacco to future generations. This legislation included a 90% reduction in the number of retailers allowed to sell smoked tobacco products, reducing their number to 600 from 6000, a low nicotine threshold for smoked tobacco products, and a ban on sales of smoked tobacco products to people born after 1 January 2009, which would take effect from July 2024.
The current coalition government that emerged on November 24, 2023 has proposed an amendment aimed at cancelling all three policies before they are even implemented.
According to Associate Health Secretary Casey Costello, the previous government failed to recognise the effectiveness of previous initiatives to reduce the smoking rate in New Zealand. Results from the New Zealand Health Survey show that the current proportion of daily smokers in the country has fallen to 6.8%, down from 8.6% the previous year and 16.4% in 2012.
Casey Costello stressed that, even without the additional measures sought to be repealed by the government of the coalition of three parties, National Party, New Zealand First and ACT, New Zealand was still on track to meet its smoke-free target by 2025. That year has been set as 2030 by most governments in other countries, and as 2035 comprehensively for the EU block, but in Australia and New Zealand it has been set as 2025 and given the statistical data it is materialising sooner than later in New Zealand whilst the government and state can watch this happen possibly by next year instead of obtaining the biased reduced figure yielded by a generational tobacco ban which is non-organic.
Defending the repeal of restrictions introduced by New Zealand’s previous Labour government on December 13, 2022, that would have banned the sale of tobacco to adults born after 2009, including increasingly older people alongside children and adolescents who would belong to the same category among each other, Casey Costello reiterated that the coalition government is opting for a regulatory approach rather than a prohibitive one; focusing on providing adequate support to smokers to quit. “I will soon be taking a package of measures to cabinet to increase the tools available to help people quit smoking” she said.
Bring Back Smoking Freedom 