NZ Smokefree Fag Ban
New Zealand has announced its Smokefree Aotearoa plans and has prompted British campaigners to announce similar measures
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by Dave Cross
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The government said: “Our Government's Smokefree goal is that by 2025 less than five percent of New Zealanders will be smokers. This was established in March 2011 in response to the recommendations of a landmark Parliamentary inquiry by the Māori Affairs select committee.”
The six game-changing focus areas:
- Making sure there is Māori leadership and decision-making across all levels of the action plan. As part of this focus area, we’re standing up a taskforce to make sure the action plan is on track to achieve the smokefree goal for Māori.
- Funding more health promotion and community activities to motivate and mobilise people across the country to get behind the smokefree goal and to sign-post support for people on their quit journey.
- Giving people the wrap-around support they need on their quit journey by investing in more tailored help such as a stop smoking service for Pacific communities.
- Making it easier to quit and harder to become addicted by only having low-level nicotine smoked tobacco products for sale and restricting product design features that increase their appeal and addictiveness.
- Making smoked tobacco products harder to buy by reducing the number of shops selling them and kickstarting a smokefree generation.
- Making sure the tobacco industry and retailers follow the law.
The government will ban young people from ever buying cigarettes in their lifetime – something the government calls “one of the world's toughest crackdowns on the tobacco industry”.
Anyone aged 14 or younger in 2027 (born after 2008) will never be allowed to legally purchase cigarettes. Also, the level of nicotine will be reduced in all cigarettes on sale and the number of places allowed to sell them will be cut.
"This is a historic day for the health of our people. We want to make sure young people never start smoking so we will make it an offense to sell or supply smoked tobacco products to new cohorts of youth," said New Zealand Associate Minister of Health Ayesha Verrall in a statement.
Commenting on new measures being introduced to end smoking in New Zealand, anti-smoking UK charity Action on Smoking and Health’s Deputy Chief Executive Hazel Cheeseman said: “In New Zealand they set an ambition to be smokefree and now have a plan to achieve this. Our government, with the same ambition, is yet to make any clear commitments to tackle smoking – despite pledging a new strategy a year ago.
“The New Zealand measures may not all be right for us, but we do need strong regulation and proper funding of services if we’re to, in the government’s words, ‘make smoking obsolete’.
“We should start by consulting on raising the age of sale to 21 and levying the money needed to help smokers quit from the tobacco industry.”
References:
- Smokefree Aotearoa 2025 Action Plan - Auahi Kore Aotearoa Mahere Rautaki 2025 - https://www.health.govt.nz/publication/smokefree-aotearoa-2025-action-plan-auahi-kore-aotearoa-mahere-rautaki-2025
Dave Cross
Journalist at POTVDave is a freelance writer; with articles on music, motorbikes, football, pop-science, vaping and tobacco harm reduction in Sounds, Melody Maker, UBG, AWoL, Bike, When Saturday Comes, Vape News Magazine, and syndicated across the Johnston Press group. He was published in an anthology of “Greatest Football Writing”, but still believes this was a mistake. Dave contributes sketches to comedy shows and used to co-host a radio sketch show. He’s worked with numerous start-ups to develop content for their websites.
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