Last year, New Zealand introduced a steadily rising smoking age to stop those aged 14 and under from ever being able to legally buy cigarettes in the world-first legislation to outlaw smoking for the next generation.
National’s unaffordable tax cuts to be funded by… (checks notes) …giving more people lung cancer.
I’m quite shocked at how willing Nicola Willis has been to say the quiet part out loud, i.e. “we’re only doing this because it will pay for our tax cuts”. In other words, they want to collect more tobacco tax from vulnerable people to pay for tax cuts for wealthier people. There were other ways to frame this, e.g. we don’t think this is the right way to cut back on smoking, there are better ways to do it, etc. etc.
I think this is already quite a bit miscalculation by National. This will not be a popular policy… it’s something nearly everyone can relate to and understand, and other than a few extremist libertarian nutters, no one thinks it’s a good idea to loosen up smoking laws. It’ll be one of the few things people still remember coming out of the coalition agreements in a couple of weeks time. They needed to think more carefully about how they sold it.
I’m quite shocked at how willing Nicola Willis has been to say the quiet part out loud, i.e. “we’re only doing this because it will pay for our tax cuts”. In other words, they want to collect more tobacco tax from vulnerable people to pay for tax cuts for wealthier people. There were other ways to frame this, e.g. we don’t think this is the right way to cut back on smoking, there are better ways to do it, etc. etc.
I think this is already quite a bit miscalculation by National. This will not be a popular policy… it’s something nearly everyone can relate to and understand, and other than a few extremist libertarian nutters, no one thinks it’s a good idea to loosen up smoking laws. It’ll be one of the few things people still remember coming out of the coalition agreements in a couple of weeks time. They needed to think more carefully about how they sold it.
Argh that’s such short-term thinking. Smoking costs a ton in hospital care etc.