Māori teens keen for smokefree lessons
The best thing teenagers could do for their health is not smoke.
That was the message delivered to Palmerston North’s Māori-centred Manukura School year 12 and 13 students by Labour’s health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall, who has been speaking around New Zealand against the National-led Government’s plans to repeal smokefree legislation.
The repeal would halt the three-pronged approach the Labour Government had written into law in the hope of creating a smokefree generation.
It would reduce the number of tobacco outlets from 6000 to 600, cut the nicotine content from cigarettes, and ban the sale of cigarettes to anyone born after January 1, 2009.
The students in the room were born in 2007 and 2008, so would retain the choice to buy cigarettes.
Verrall’s smokefree advice was reinforced by school principal Ilane Durie, who said Māori whanau were suffering more than people of any other ethnicity from the effects of smoking.
“What we know is that you are up against a multimillion-dollar industry targeting you,” Durie said. “They are there to make money.”
Verrall fielded a round of questions from students interested in why people smoked at all, whether restricting vaping would see more people smoking, whether there were MPs who vaped, and why Parliament did not have a conscience vote on the smokefree legislation.
Most of the students knew their grandparents had smoked, fewer said their parents did, and Verrall did not ask them about themselves.
“There is no judgment here. We don’t take the view that smokers are bad; they have an addiction, which is an incredibly powerful thing.”
That was why Labour, and 45,000 people who had signed a petition to halt the repeals, did not want young people to smoke in the first place. “The companies only need you to experiment, just to try, and then you are hooked.”
There was strong support from the students for a ban on vapes.
Verrall said apart from a recent ban on specialist vape shops setting up within 300 metres of schools, the regulations around the sale of vapes was not right yet.
She said there was an argument that they were useful for weaning smokers off cigarettes, but they could be available on prescription rather than at shops.
On whether the law change should be decided by a conscience vote rather than along party lines, Verrall said it was likely the repeal would not go through if that was the case.
She said there were National MPs in particular who would support the smokefree legislation’s retention, but they would almost certainly be bound by the coalition deal to vote the way the tobacco industry wanted them to, rather than in the best interests of the people who elected them.
Verrall and her host, Palmerston North MP Tangi Utikere, were continuing the campaign with a public meeting at The Globe Theatre last night.