Kiwis Shame Australian Attack
Kiwis lead the way towards reducing harm from tobacco due to the New Zealand Government’s progressive and welcomed stance on vaping
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by Dave Cross
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As we reported last week, Australian politicians are promising a fresh “crackdown” to combat a “new generation of nicotine addicts”.
They promised raft of new measures includes:
- A complete ban on flavoured e-liquids other than tobacco
- Plain packaging for all vape products – equating them with tobacco
- A pledge to stop the illegal imports they’ve been unable to stop
Australia’s Health Minister repeated the lie that vapes are “clearly aimed at children”.
CAPHRA says the only plausible outcome of this doubling down is less control on access and more risk to consumers who will either resort to the black market for their vaping needs or, worse, return to smoking.
“It defies logic that the Government of Australia has effectively banned the safer alternative to deadly combustible tobacco, and yet leaves the deadly product readily available to continue to kill almost 20,500 Australians a year,” said Nancy Loucas, a prominent New Zealand public health consumer advocate and CAPHRA’s executive coordinator.
“We are pleased that New Zealand Health Minister Ayesha Verrall has publicly come out and stated that New Zealand is not looking to follow Australia’s decision to ban all vaping products and support her comments that ‘vaping was an important tool to support people to quit smoking.
“Minister Verrall understands that prohibition has never worked and never will work. One need only to review the statistics from Aotearoa New Zealand to see that our smoking rates for both adults and youth have plummeted, and that while the daily vaping rate for youth has risen, it is still much lower than the daily smoking rate for youth from even five years ago.”
Ms Loucas continued: “We support Australian tobacco harm reduction advocates in calling for a balanced, evidence-based approach rather than a blanket prohibition policy, which discourages smokers from using legally regulated vapes to quit and greatly undermines Australia’s smoke-free efforts.
“It’s now left to New Zealand to lead the way in the Asia-Pacific region by recognising regulated nicotine vaping having an important role in helping people to quit smoking; whereas across the ditch, Australia’s announced policy is misguided, counterproductive and is ideologically- instead of evidence-based.”
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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