New Zealand’s First Party has announced that they would lower the tobacco excise tax so that cigarettes would cost no more than $20 per pack, as well as remove the excise tax on safer alternative products.
Winston Peters, First Party leader, said that the aim is to stop punishing smokers with high excise taxes as a strategy to help them quit.
Peters said the party supports the Action on Smoking and Health’s (ASH) strategy to make smoking alternatives affordable and widely available, and that the government’s current Smokefree 2025 approach is not working. “We don’t think that young and, particularly, poor people should be screwed any longer on this matter,” he said.
“The reality is this country has been involved in a serious deception for some time, they say they want to be smoke-free by 2025 and meanwhile the excise tax is going up. Mainly poor people who can’t afford it are paying outrageous excise tax for something that they could be persuaded to go from with the right policy, to other products which are far more safe, as ASH says, and in the meantime not sacrificing grocery bills to persist with a habit that they can be taken from with a sound strategy.”
For the first time after four years, the government did not announce any tobacco tax increase as part of the 2020 budget.