Associate health minister Casey
Costello has labelled New Zealand’s recent
plummet in global tobacco control as “ridiculous” and
“ludicrous”.
It comes after the country plummeted from
second in the world in 2023 to 53rd in the 2025 Global
Tobacco Industry Interference Index.
The main factors
damaging New Zealand’s standing are the repeal of the
smokefree generation laws, the tax break benefiting tobacco
giant Philip Morris and the movement of staff between
politics and the lobbying industry.
Costello told
Morning Report she had been fully
transparent.
“To suggest that someone who once worked
for an organisation that once got donations at one time from
a tobacco company means that they are corrupted in some way
is absolutely ludicrous.
“I can give 100 percent
assurance, I have been completely transparent in everything,
my diary is fully released, every meeting, every paper has
been released and every piece of work I have continued to
engage.”
She said the report was a “pointless” and
“ridiculous document”.
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“It was absolute nonsense –
they were comparing us to countries who have three times the
smoking rate of us, and yet said that we had greater
influence in the tobacco industry and yet our smoking rates
were one of the lowest listed.”
Earlier, Vape-Free
Kids, an advocacy group, said the “staggering drop” of 51
places in two years was the most dramatic fall of any
country in the history of the report and an “international
disgrace” for the government.
“New Zealand has become
an international embarrassment and an example of how quickly
a government can be corrupted by the tobacco industry,”
Vape-Free Kids co-founder Charyl Robinson
said.
SmokeFree 2025?
New Zealand’s smoking
rate has been dipping throughout the last decade, but has
somewhat stagnated the last three years and is sitting at
6.8 percent, just above the 5 percent target.
In 2024,
the government scrapped laws which would have slashed
tobacco retailers from 6000 to 600, removed 95 percent of
the nicotine from cigarettes and banned sales of cigarettes
to anyone born after 2009.
The prevalence of daily
vaping had increased slightly from 11.1 percent last year to
11.7 percent this year.
Costello said told Morning
Report SmokeFree 2025 was an “ambitious” target, and
getting through longer term smokers a challenging part of
the process.
She said the data was only to the end of
June 2025, so the entirety of the year’s data wouldn’t be
known until the next survey.
Under 25s were already a
“smoke-free generation” with smoking rates of around 3
percent, she said.
When asked about alternatives to
smoking, she said there was evidence vaping was safer than
smoking.
“Vaping is safer than smoking, we have never
said it’s safe, it is less harmful than smoking.”
She
said there was no evidence that supported reducing nicotine
levels.
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