Personal liberty arguments and all that aside, this comes across like the NZ government actually wanting people to smoke, so the tax income can fund tax cuts elsewhere. Quite sinister.
It's also wildly hypocritical regarding cannabis, which is just as much a drug and could provide huge tax windfalls besides cutting out the gang profits and enforcing safety/quality standards, but nooooo, just can't do that, simply impossible.
(Also New Zealander here, weird how many of us suddenly appear to post!)
I won't say it's not sinister, but surely it's not surprising? Every government with public health care is currently balancing the costs of treating smoking related illnesses with the amount of tax money tobacco brings in.
It's pragmatism rather than anything truly evil. Countries are big things to run ;)
wanting to get young people addicted so that they can be taxed.
it’s awful without the taxation, but that detail extends a message they didn’t have enough sense to hold back or at least sanitize - citizens live and die for the state, it does not exist for them, and the youth aren’t special in that regard - they were just an overlooked resource that wasn’t fully squeezed yet. and why wait until adulthood?
That's exactly what it is; the money they plan to acquire through this will be used to pay for the flagship taxcut policy of the largest of the three parties in the new coalition government (the National Party).
I have my share of issues from a personal liberty standpoint, but I know what selling us out to the tobacco companies looks like. (3rd rank National Party member is a former Philip Morris employee, and the second largest party, the ACT Party has a cutout org called 'NZ Taxpayers' Union' has been exposed in the past for taking tobacco industry money, which would be bad enough, but doing so while simultaneously running campaigns related to e-cigarettes)
Pretty much - the new gov campaigned for tax cuts and refused to tell anyone how they'd pay for it... and now we know.
Tax cuts for most will be negligible amounts, and the long term health costs seem to be ignored (even though we have a public health system!).
Very short term thinking to the benefit of tobacco companies and some short term increase in tax revenues (cigarettes are highly taxed in NZ).
Oh, they've also decided to bring back pseudoephedrine tablets too - which prior to being banned had meth cooks paying swarms of people $20 a pack for a quick trip to the pharmacy.
> they've also decided to bring back pseudoephedrine tablets too
I dislike many of their policies but I'm not convinced this one is wrongheaded.
While meth (called 'P' in New Zealand) was often manufactured from pseudoephedrine tablets here, the outright ban on this medication did not seem to have succeeded in lowering the availability of P in the country; after an initial rise in price and reports of lowering of purity, the street price has overall dropped from around 700 NZD / gram in 2009 to around 400 NZD / gram today, as described here[1]
It's just a strange policy for the parties to bring out as soon as they get into government - kind of like a back-door to taxing meth production (not sure how the economics work, but am I wrong?).
Especially given Act and National's "hard stance on gangs and crime" you have to wonder where their incentives lie.
Over here in the States our FDA has finally admitted that the pseudoephedrine replacements are medically ineffective and only work to generate pharma profits.
“For a long time, over-the-counter decongestant products like Sudafed had pseudoephedrine in them. Pseudoephedrine is effective at reducing sinus congestion during colds but is also an ingredient that can be used to make methamphetamine. As a result of abuse of pseudoephedrine-containing products by manufacturers of methamphetamine, federal legislation was passed moving those products behind the pharmacy counter, which made them harder for people to get ahold of for routine use. Since companies would prefer to sell products that people can just easily grab off the shelves, Sudafed and other well-known brands introduced new formulations with another very old over-the-counter active ingredient, phenylephrine. The problem is that phenylephrine doesn’t work, as the FDA finally concluded, unless you directly spritz it onto your nasal passages as with Afrin or products like that.”
But they would have profited anyway with the pseudoephedrine tablets.
I understand they're an effective treatment, the problem I see is that they end up in the wrong hands and pharmacies end up being broken into.
In NZ we've had a problem in the past couple years of people doing "ram raids" which is basically people stealing cars and smashing them through buildings to steal things as well.
Taking everything into account, to me it seems the downsides outweigh the upsides of selling these tablets.
What actual evidence do you base this on? The South African government banned cigarette sale during the lockdowns. Evidence suggests that black market cigarette sales surged and failed to return to previous levels after the ban was lifted.
The economic concern with banning cigarettes is you will have similar numbers of people smoking, but now you've lost the tax revenue on sales while you still have to carry the healthcare costs. You also have increased costs related to policing and adjudicating the ban.
New Zealand has public healthcare. Around 5000 people die here per year as a result of smoking, which reduces any taxes those people would have paid had they not died, as well as costing tax payers for the time they spend in hospital.
The ban on cigarettes here wasn't to be an outright ban but one staggered over a number of years.
There's been a gradual decline of smokers in NZ over the years, so there is some evidence that such laws could be helpful rather than simply creating a black market.
I'm a New Zealander too. I don't really see that this is going to improve their tax position much. How many folks turning 16 are going to take up cigarettes over vaping?
I mean, I agree, their position is stupid and if they already had a problem where they were reversing every policy of the previous govt regardless of merit, this compounds it by taking on a broadly popular idea.
However, I'm not all that comfortable with the ban. I don't smoke, I don't want my kids to smoke... but it still doesn't sit that well with me that you aren't allowed to.
I hate that we've voted in this awful right wing coalition because Labour was underdelivering. I don't see that either big party has any answers to the problems in NZ society right now - housing everyone and being able to see a doctor in good time. They both just piss around at the edges making inconsequential changes and messing with the curriculum. So I either have to be annoyed we have a govt that wants no change at all or a govt that wants change but cannot actually implement anything.
(Also New Zealander here, weird how many of us suddenly appear to post!)