Keith Melville

When enjoying my morning coffee fix at my favourite Strand cafe, I often see three or four people desperate for their own fix searching the gutters for cigarette butts outside the bars next door and the pub across the road.

As one who was once addicted to nicotine, I cannot help but reflect that those poor sods, often in bare feet and filthy clothes, and some showing signs of mental health distress, are probably the unintended consequences of New Zealand’s self-righteous obsession with ridding the country of an unhealthy habit.

The tobacco issue has also become a political football, with the unforgiving puritans of the left, who always think they know what is good for everyone, firmly asserting the best way to deal with tobacco is to tax nicotine in all its forms into oblivion.

On the other hand, the government parties have adopted a less dogmatic approach, by reducing the tax on heated tobacco products (ie vapes) in the hope that this will wean people off the much more highly taxed, and allegedly more harmful traditional tobacco products.

If you look at the statistical evidence of New Zealand’s approach compared to the hardline Aussie approach, our softer approach seems to be working.

Watching those outcasts on The Strand I mentioned before, stripped of their dignity by the demon that is nicotine, searching the gutters for any small tobacco-tainted takeaway I cannot help but think the left’s support for a tax truncheon is hardly the solution to an insidious social problem. I suspect those nicotine addicts might well have other issues to deal with too such as homelessness, marijuana, and a retreat from social interaction and the help that could bring them.

The Australian model for discouraging nicotine consumption with a high tobacco tax (vape tax included) offers New Zealand a clear warning of the dangers of taking such a rigid and extreme approach.

More than half the cigarettes in Australia are said to be bought on the black market, bleeding the Aussie taxman of billions annually, and encouraging a flagrant disregard for the law.

In New Zealand the black market figure is reportedly much smaller.

The disparity between approaches and their consequences suggest that the Australian model is a failure while the New Zealand model has somewhat better outcomes.

According to emeritus Professor Ruth Bonita of the faculty of health and medical science at Auckland University, having smoke-free nicotine products widely available in New Zealand, is helping prevent the illicit trade in cigarettes take hold as it has in Australia.

She says the illicit trade is estimated to be 5 to 10 percent of the New Zealand tobacco market, but in Australia, the figure is over half, while 90 percent of vapes come from illicit sources.

In a recent Newsroom article, Professor Bonita says the situation in Australia is so bad that there are suggestions that smoking is increasing again, especially among young people.

She says data from the New Zealand health survey shows that daily smoking has fallen from 16.4 percent in 2012 to 6.8 percent in 2025, with about 300,000 New Zealanders still smoking cigarettes. Vaping (smokefree nicotine) has risen to 11.7 percent with about half a million adults now vaping daily.

Professor Bonita says it’s the smoke from burning tobacco at very high temperatures that kills people “not, as far as we know, the nicotine”.

“These smoke-free alternatives to cigarettes provide a legal substitute for those who would otherwise continue to smoke.”

As I approach my milestone – my 38th anniversary for giving up smoking – I remember the effort that it took.

I had tried several times previously to give up smoking and on two occasions I enrolled in courses, one in Australia when I lived there, and one in New Zealand when I returned, both run by the Seventh Day Adventist Church, to help me achieve my smoke-free goal.

Although I managed to give up for six months on each occasion I returned to smoking because of life’s stressful circumstances on each occasion.

Despite that, the two charitable courses (non religious) did prepare me for the time when I did manage to quit.

The answer was to avoid stressful and distracting situations such as alcohol, too much food, anger, and disagreements.

Three or four weeks of no alcohol, tea or coffee, plenty of fruit juice and sleep, moderate helpings of food, and a wife away on holiday, worked for me, even though it seemed I was living the life of a Trappist monk (without the prayer sessions) at the time.