In December 2022, NZ enacted world-leading tobacco control legislation \u2013 essentially creating a whole generation who\u2019ll never be able to buy a pack of cigarettes.<\/p>\n
But, with that plan up in smoke \u2013 what next?<\/p>\n
Tobacco control leaders are meeting in Auckland today and tomorrow to mark the end of Smokefree 2025 and discuss how to continue to bring down rates.<\/p>\n
H\u0101pai te Hauora chief operating officer Jason Alexander told The Front Page<\/a> that smoking rates for M\u0101ori and Pasifika are much higher. <\/p>\n \u201cThe last measure we had 14.7% for M\u0101ori, that\u2019s the highest. And our Pacific whanau are not far behind, they\u2019re sitting on just over 12.3%,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Recent figures show there are about 300,000 daily smokers remaining in NZ. <\/p>\n “\u200aIt really is a tricky one to quit. If it were easy, then the numbers wouldn\u2019t be this high, the tobacco industry wouldn\u2019t be this large, and we wouldn\u2019t have 5,000 New Zealanders dying from tobacco-related illness every year,” he said.<\/p>\n Alexander said repealing the law that would have banned sales to youths born after 2009 was a \u201cbig mistake\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cSome people flagged the difficulties around putting some of these things through, and I just think it would\u2019ve been worth it. They were aspirational; they were world-leading policies.<\/p>\n \u201cThere wasn\u2019t a lot of evidence for them because we were literally the first in the world. We were trying something different, but we were doing it for a good reason because we were trying to get rid of this insidious product,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Listen to the full episode<\/a> to hear more about:<\/p>\n Smoking statistics and targetsTrends and challengesPolicy changes and missed opportunitiesVaping Where to from here?<\/p>\n The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the NZ Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime\/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.<\/p>\n You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio<\/a>, Apple Podcasts<\/a>, Spotify<\/a> or wherever you get your podcasts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In December 2022, NZ enacted world-leading tobacco control legislation \u2013 essentially creating a whole generation who\u2019ll never be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":129904,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[836,1668,49154,111,43,139,1536,69,1118,3111,28630,19328,55401,89818,23933,223,3608,6923,1316],"class_list":["post-129903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-836","tag-front","tag-meant","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-next","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-out","tag-page","tag-reach","tag-remember","tag-slips","tag-smokefree","tag-the","tag-were","tag-what","tag-when"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129903\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}