Mike’s Minute: Was smokefree a failure or partially successful?

There seems to be increasing reportage, based around some new research, that our dream of being smokefree is up in smoke. 

2025 is the year when we were aiming to be smokefree. By smokefree, it would have been reduced to 5% left smoking. 

To meet that goal, the research says about 80,000 more people need to quit. They won't.   

As always, the fact they haven't, or won't, is somehow the Government's fault, who haven't done enough. Or worse, this particular Government, who they say have been shocking, led by New Zealand First and Casey Costello who is a devil and in the pocket of the tobacco companies – or some such gibberish those like the Labour Party spend a lot of time trying to suggest. 

Where it went wrong was twofold. 

The first was the belief, and this was classic Labour under Helen Clark, that you could force people to do something they didn’t want to, and there were always going to be people who didn’t want to. 

Where it worked, and we can be grateful, was in the public space part of it. No longer are you forced to inhale if you don’t want to, or smell like a smoker, or stand in a group, or be trapped by it. 

But beyond that, once the hardcores were on the footpath, some were never giving up. 

The second thing that went wrong was vaping, a shocking miscalculation that it was a cessation tool, when what it really was a gateway for kids. A whole new generation got easy access, and the slippery slope was never going to get stopped. 

Governments could have nipped it in the bud but didn’t. They could have made vapes script only like Australia, but didn’t. 

The Labour Party under Ayesha Verrall, a medical professional from the party who invented smokefree, hurled their best wet bus ticket at the vaping market. So nothing happened. 

History will show they were out of the gates, Clark-style, with gusto. There was early progress on public spaces and a general change in attitude to the habit, followed by the predictable malaise and hardcore resistance, leaving us 25 years on with a change in society but well short of what was envisioned. 

Good crack, failed on the follow through. 

I'd give it 7 out of 10. 

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