It should have been the most ambitious anti-tobacco law in the world. The New Zealand government had planned that in the future only non-smokers would grow up in their country. From next summer onwards – according to the plan – cigarettes would no longer have been allowed to be sold to anyone born in 2009 or later. At the same time, the number of sales outlets and the nicotine content of cigarettes would have shrunk drastically. The country would have become almost smoke-free.
Nothing will come of it. The new government announced this week that it would scrap the plans. And this for the most dubious reason in terms of moral and health policy: because the taxes on cigarettes are needed somewhere else. Due to other political turmoil, there is a gap in the state treasury, which means that a planned general tax cut is at risk. So protection against one of the world’s biggest health threats is suddenly of secondary importance.
The reversal sends a devastating message far beyond New Zealand. The state could have become a model for several other countries with similar projects. Instead, the tobacco industry can now triumph. It can strengthen their narrative that non-smoker protection is unaffordable and will tear huge holes in state finances, if not ruin the entire economy.
The residents would also have gained financially
But that is a grotesque exaggeration. The New Zealand project could also have been financed, like one in particular Journal Tobacco Control published modeling shows.
On the one hand, the state would have lost revenue because there were no tobacco taxes (which, mind you, are very high in New Zealand). In addition, non-smokers would receive longer pensions because they live longer. On the other hand, the state would have saved costs for treating smoking-related illnesses and collected more income taxes from the healthier population. The bottom line, according to the calculation, would have been a minus in purely monetary terms. However, a loss that, under favorable circumstances, would have totaled less than two billion US dollars by 2050, not even one percent of New Zealand’s annual gross domestic product.
That would be a very small price to pay for what society would have gained: more than 8,000 human lives according to estimates saved by 2040. The population would have gained hundreds of thousands of healthy years of life. Residents who no longer bought cigarettes would have become around $30 billion richer. This is money that would no longer have gone to transnational tobacco companies, but could have benefited the domestic economy.
Furthermore, the New Zealand plan would have made gains of inestimable value. These include the long overdue signal that it is possible to give non-smoker protection the priority that experts have been calling for for decades. The message that people can rely on their governments. The certainty that the long-term well-being of residents is more valuable than appeasing some short-term partisan squabbles.