Kilda.
I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. Remember when we were meant to be smoke free by twenty twenty five?
New Zealand's goal.
To have fewer than five percent of people smoking by the end of the year looks unlikely to be met.
The target was introduced in twenty ten, and while.
Smoking has dropped significantly since then, from sixteen point four percent and twenty eleven, for example, to six point nine percent in twenty twenty three twenty four, there are still hundreds of thousands of people in Altaioa smoking every day. In December twenty twenty two, New Zealand enacted world leading tobacco control legislation, essentially creating a whole generation who'll never be able to buy a pack of cigis.
But with that up in smoke, what's next?
Today?
On the front Page, hard by teh Or, Chief Operating Officer Jackson Alexander is with us to discuss how we might be able to reach our goal of being smoke free. So, Jason, what do our smoking statistics look like at the moment?
So it is twenty twenty five, obviously a big year for us. We've been aiming for five percent smoking rates across all of our populations, but we're not quite there. We won't know the official end of year data until next year. But the last rates we had was sitting just shy of seven percent for all populations, and unfortunately our Mary and Pacific rates are much higher than that.
What are the rates for Mali and PACIFICA.
So last measure we had fourteen point seven percent for Mardi, that's the highest, and our Pacific final are not far behind us, sitting on just over twelve percent twelve point three percent.
What do you think the reasoning is behind that?
There's a whole lot of reasons. We started off higher to start, so, before we embarked on this journey of trying to drive towards this twenty twenty five goal, that Mary and Pacific rates were much higher. They were slower to move in the beginning, although they have accelerated over the last few years. But yeah, there's a whole lot of historical reasons why Mary and Pacific rates have traditionally been higher than the rest of the population.
Are we continuing to trend downwards or do you think the statistics have really stagnated in recent years.
So the MARTI rates actually have been dropping quite a bit over the last sort of five ten years, I guess, but the general pop rates have there was little, well basically no change. I think it might have gone up a point one of a percent between the last two years. So it is tricky to know until we get this year's data, which will which will drop next year.
Recent figures I saw a show about three hundred thousand daily smokers remain. What do you see is the biggest challenges of getting those numbers down, especially by the end of the year.
Look, it's yeah, by the end of the year is really tricky. So that's a lot of people that have to quit. Just for Mary alone, I think it's about sixty two thousand that we need to see quit smoking over the course of this year. Just to put that in perspective, we're getting about ten to eleven thousand quit each year based on recent trends, so it's huge. It's based off that it's pretty obvious that we're not going to get there,
definitely not for all populations. We are still hopeful that we'll get there for the general population, but definitely not for Mariya and Pacific only something drastic changes over the next couple of months, or something's happened that we're not aware of over the past year, And.
What are some of the biggest challenges there for those last remaining three hundred thousand.
I suppose yeah. I mean, it's an addictive product, so I don't think we should skirt around that. Neicatines are highly addictive. It's tricky to get off. A lot of people have tried, a lot of people sort of try and come back, to come back and try again. But it really does get us hooks into you, I guess, and it really is a tricky one to quite I
feel it was easy. Then the numbers wouldn't be this high, tobacco industry wouldn't be this large, and we wouldn't have five thousand New Zealanders dying from tobacco related illness every year.
Do you reckon?
I know that because excise tax has gone up over the years, right, and it's now really really expensive to buy a pack of smokes at the dairy. I used to actually be a smoke in my early twenties, and I remember when the packets went up from I think it was like twenty bucks to twenty five bucks. And that's you know, in my early twenties wasn't earning a
whole much bunch of money. So that's when I kind of tape it off and thought, right, I need to change what I'm doing because I just don't have the money. So those people who still smoking today are spending about fifty bucks a packet, say, that's obviously not stopping them. The price isn't stopping them. Hey, so do you reckon we've kind of reached the ceiling I suppose in excise taxes.
Yeah, cigarets are very expensive. What we do have to do, though, is make sure that we are increasing them in line with everything else. Otherwise, relatively they become cheaper. So we don't want them to become cheaper in relation to other products because that could sort of drive demand the other way. But certainly, I know in the early days we did get some good gains through the rising of the prices of cigarettes to drive a lot of people to try
and quit. But once again, it's such an addictive product that it's not that easy. So, yes, that is costing smokers a lot of money. They obviously would much rather have the money in their back pocket. But because it's such an addictive product, it's not that simple.
And there's also the situation of illicit tobacco coming through that we've got to worry about now as well.
Ay, and it's hard to get engaged on exactly how big that is. We've got one of the best customs in the world here in New Zealand. Our borders are pretty tight. So yeah, whenever you increase the price of something and something, especially when it's addictive like this, then you are going to see people try to bring it through other means, to try and dose those excise taxes and try and get them to people who require them because they're are so addicted through other means.
Well.
So we can probably agree that the smoke free twenty twenty five goal is not going to be hit right. It's twenty twenty five now, obviously, But when they envisioned it in twenty ten, do you think it was overly ambitious then, or if we made the right steps, could we have actually achieved it by the end of this year.
It was ambitious, without a doubt, but it was ambitious because it needed to be. It is the biggest killer here in New Zealand. It's not something that you can sort of lightfoot around and just hope it gets better. You have to sort of go after it aggressively. And it was so embedded within within our society, I guess that we needed these big steps to try and get rid of it and start reducing some of the harm
that our communities have experienced over the years from it. So, yes, it was it was super optimistic, but there were some steps in there that could have got us there.
And what are some of those steps?
I mean, yeah, probably the probably the big three are the ones that were in the Curcal legislation that were proposed. They were a little bit late to the table, but they were three sort of I guess, just logical things that would have made a huge difference. So, first of all,
making cigarettes less addictive. That obviously is going to make if people try cigarettes and they're less likely to get addicted to them, and if they want to try and get rid of them, then it's going to make it a bit easier for them to move on from cigarettes. Can reducing the number of outlets. You can get cigarettes everywhere here, Every single area has got them. Some streets have got three dairies and all of them will have
cigarettes like that's totally unnecessary. If we look at the saturation of tobacco outlets, particular and ow in some of our poorer, our underserved communities, then there's even more there than there are now more affluent suburbs, and the smoking rates in those suburbs, which are mostly Malori and Pacific suburbs by the way, are reflective of those So reducing those numbers right down just to make them less available and less prevalent in our communities would have made a
huge difference. And the third would have was the smoke free generation measure, which would have stopped anyone born I think it was jan one, two thousand and nine. They never would have been able to buy cigarettes so progressively increasing their age, and that would have made a huge difference. It would have obviously cut off the flow of new smokers coming in, so then we can just focus on
looking after those that currently smoked. And I would have made particularly a huge difference for Mardi communities, which we know Mali population is a lot younger than the general population, so it would have it would have been a game change. Of those three well, it.
Made international headlines when it was first announced. We were seen as being world leading, but then it was scrapped obviously last year.
Do you reckon that was a huge mistake?
Look, I think it was. There was some some people flagged the difficulties around sort of putting some of these things through, and I just think it would have been with it once again, like it was, they were aspirational, there were world leading policies. There wasn't evidence a lot of evidence for them because we were literally the first in the world, so we were trying something different, but we were doing it for a good reason, because we were trying to get rid of this incitious product from
from Altiora. So yeah, I honestly do think it was a big mistake to get rid of those and I think we should still look at those or some very on those three areas that we need to do if we're going to shift this.
The idea that more young New Zealanders should take up smoking in order to pay for tax cuts is morally reprehensible. I don't think New Zealanders thought that's what they were going to get. I don't think that's the change they were voting for when they voted at the last election. Mister Speaker, National's decision to wind back the smoke free alter or agenda as a disgrace to New Zealand as
a country. It is an international embarrassment and it is making headlines around the world for all the wrong reasons.
How do you feel about vaping?
Yeah, vaping is a tricky one. Obviously, Dylan Ever wanted it to have sort of the grip on some of our kids that it does now. It was never intended to be for children. It was never intended to be for non smokers to use. It was always intended to be an option to help people shift from tobacco, and in the beginning, well even even still now, it has worked for a lot of our long term smokers that have tried other methods and it and just haven't been
able to break away. So I think it does have a place, But we didn't roll it out how we should have. We weren't careful, we didn't look after. I don't say that it was too accessible. Even now you can see how many of these vape stores are around. It's ridiculous and once again saturated in those same neighborhoods that I was speaking about earlier with the tobacco outlets.
It just seems to be everywhere. And if you speak to any sort of intermediate high school principal, if you ask them what the top issue affecting them is, it's faithing. That's crazy.
Yeah, I guess it's seen as I suppose, trendy to young people. Obviously they've never tried a cigarette in their lives, but then they pick up a vape. Do you ever wonder because when I was thinking about this and when I was younger, smoking was quote unquote cool, right, And that's probably why I started when I was so young.
In terms of trends are cyclical.
Do you ever think that smoking there's a chance of smoking to become cool again once all the vaping has worn off?
And is that a real worry?
Yeah? I think it's always a worry. We don't know how trends are going to go. I mean, but even when it comes to tobacco, like making it a truly it didn't just happen. It was very purposeful, was very intentional by the tobacco industry. They were putting cigarettes into music videos, onto MTV like all these different places, and
like it wasn't it doesn't. It didn't just happen. So that's why we need to make sure that we're very purposeful with any measures that you put in place, because stuff doesn't just happen, but we do have to make sure that those protections are there.
In terms of vaping, I know that the advertising is watered down quite a bit now, but is there anything further that we can do to try and stop youth from picking up a vape or maybe banning specific flavors altogether, or something like that, making them all black and boring and you know, tobacco flavored or something.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of measures that we could still employ, and a lot of them are similar to the approach that we took with tobacco. So we can make the packets least appealing, we can make the flavors, well, that's not a tobacco on, but we can make the flavors less appealing to children, even the name all those sorts of things. Once again, the amount of outlets there are, it's crazy, silly little things, like it's almost like that's
circum meanting the rules, but they're not. It's sort of like the store within a store at a dairy where they sort of have two doors, but it's the same store or the same person and there's like a piece of timber up there that separates the two, and then they're allowed to be a vape store. Like that just doesn't make any sense to me, and I don't think it's in the spirit of the law. So we need to sort of tidy up all those little things. The
placement of ape stores. We've got them still close to schools, Like we brought in some rules around the placement of them, but it didn't apply to any of the ones which are already close to schools, And there was even a delay from the announcement until then it was rolled out, and a whole lot more of vape stores popped up within those zones that we know we don't want vape stores in the meantime, So there's lots of lots of things we could and we should be doing to make
sure that we don't end up with another problem. Well, I think the problems already here, to be honest, but we need to trying to actively work against those things.
So, Jason, where do we go to from now?
Do we kind of need to smoke free twenty thirty five or something.
That's a very good question, I guess. For so long we've always been focused on the Smoke Free twenty twenty five gold, but it's not it's not a thing that we miss and then we stop. I think we sort of we really do need to double down on our efforts now because people are still dying from this product. We need to get it out of out of New Zealand. It's sort of sort of serves no purpose. It's almost like a wasp if you're like, it's sort of it's
there's no redeeming qualities to it. I think the only thing you ever hear is someone saying that it helps me relax, but that's usually from smokers, and it's because they're addicted. So it's sort of curbing that that nagging sound in the back of the head that telling them that they need nicotine.
Were you ever a smoker?
No, I couldn't afford it when I was a kid, to be honest, probably wasn't cool enough either. Tried it a couple of times, tasted like rubbish, so I never sort of pursued it.
It does, man, it's awful, and after I think because I stopped smoking because I picked up the vapes, so I am actually a converted smoker. And you know, and then you tape it down from over time. But I remember thinking, once you're over that that push, you go out.
And you're like, oh my god, did I smell like that all the time.
I remember like dowsing myself with perfume after going for a smoko and you think.
Wow, like you are.
Really it's an addiction, and when once you're in that bubble and you can only see it when you're out of it exactly.
Oh, thanks so much for joining us.
No problem, Thank you for your time today.
That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at NZHERLD, dot co dot MZ. The Front Page is produced by Jane Ye and Richard Martin, who's also our editor.
I'm Chelsea Daniels.
Subscribe to The Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts and chew you in it tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.