It's been almost seven years after the previous government set the goal of making New Zealand smokefree by 2025, but is it just a pipe dream?
Action on Smoking and Health's Boyd Broughton spoke to TVNZ 1's Breakfast about the government's "cherry-picked" Smokefree 2025 plan.
Mr Broughton says steadily increasing tax on cigarettes isn't working, saying it "was proposed that it be implemented as part of a sweep of strategies and a comprehensive plan" which "hasn't come to fruition".
"The [previous] government - while they actually announced this dream - they didn't put in a plan that had government timeframe goals, and they didn't implement everything that was in the plan, because the plan originated from a Māori affairs select committee report which had a number of recommendations."
Mr Broughton added that the government's strategy was "cherry-picked and followed up on, and that's probably a lot due to political palleteability at the moment - previous government and probably now."
"What we need now is some real strong cross-party consensus to develop a plan that's robust, that's brave, and that actually puts a lot of the burden back on the tobacco industry and the responsibility on them, rather than burdening our people who smoke with the added responsibility of having to find ways to quit.
"Tax was part of the strategy, but it needs to have a whole lot of other things happen in order for it to be effective as we imagined it would be."
He says "there was no plan, basically" for the "shock increase [in tax] every year" and, as a result, "not a lot of things came to pass that would have strengthened the resulting dissonance that it created with smokers and cigarettes."
The increased costs has resulted in $1.3 billion in taxes, and only three per cent was used for anti-smoking campaigns.
"It's about time that this government started reinvesting some of that money back into effective support structures, effective support alternatives and safer alternatives, and making a pathway to living smokefree more accessible and easy to the majority of people who smoke that actually want to stop smoking.
"I think the best thing they can do is to get a cross-party agreement and get a government plan in place that has some actual, real timeframes and accountability for the government. The first thing is to have an agreed plan."
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