Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has promised to keep the previous Labour Government’s plans to crack down on cheap disposable vapes, despite his government’s controversial decision to scrap the smoking ban.
New regulations to stop new specialist vape stores from opening up in the immediate vicinity of schools and marae, only allowing vape products and their packaging to have generic flavour descriptions, reducing the maximum nicotine strength in single-use vapes, and ensuring all vaping products will have removable batteries and child-safety mechanisms, are to be phased in from December 21, he confirmed during a post-Cabinet media briefing in Wellington.
His government also planned to create stronger penalties for those who sell vapes to under 18s, he added.
This was despite rolling back world-leading legislation which banned selling tobacco to anyone born after January 1, 2009 – creating the first smokefree generation – reduced the amount of nicotine allowed in smoked tobacco products and cut the number of retailers able to sell tobacco by over 90%.
DAVID UNWIN/The Post
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has promised to keep the previous Labour Government’s plans to crack down on cheap disposable vapes.
Luxon said he was keeping the “status quo” on smoking, because it was working and smoking rates had been declining over the past decade.
“We’re gonna stay focused on driving smoking rates down … we’re going to continue to drive those efforts,” he said.
But Marnie Wilton, who co-founded Vape Free Kids, said she would have named the group Tobacco Free Kids had she known the smokefree laws would be reversed.
She is lobbying for stronger action against the tobacco industry, and had banked on the National-led government keeping the gains which had been made.
”If the government is prepared to bow to tobacco companies for smokefree legislation, how can we expect them to stand up to those same companies in terms of vaping,” she said.
”We are trying to make the link that this is about big tobacco. This is about kids’ health and addiction.”
BRADEN FASTIER/Nelson Mail
The government also planned to create stronger penalties for those who sell vapes to people under 18.
Wilton has heard from parents whose primary-aged children vape, as well as young people who took up smoking after vaping.
The National-led government’s plans to repeal the smokefree laws were also met with condemnation and surprise from clinicians and health professionals.
National hadn’t campaigned on repealing the laws, which were among the toughest in the world, but Finance Minister Nicola Willis said the government’s coalition partners, ACT and NZ First, were insistent on reversing them.
The money raised from taxing tobacco sales would also be used to fund tax cuts, the central component of National’s election pitch. The cuts were to be partly funded by allowing foreign buyers back into the housing market for homes worth $2 million, and taxing them at 15%, but National was not able to get its coalition partners to agree to this, so had to find other revenue streams.
The portion of year 10s regularly vaping dropped to 16.4% in the past year, according to the ASH annual survey, while 10% were vaping every day. As many as 38.7% of Maori girls vaped every day, compared to only 13.6% of non-Maori, non-Pacific girls.
Asthma and Respiratory Foundation chief executive Letitia Harding said this was too high.
“Smoking rates were already on a downwards trajectory, so vaping certainly wasn’t the answer to quit smoking, and it never has been,” she said. “Unfortunately for our rangatahi (young people) vaping was just added to the mix – a new product that really didn’t need to be there.”
