Outraged on behalf of New Zealand smokers
IT’S finally going to happen. A pack of ciggies will soon cost over 20 bucks. I’m glad I don’t smoke. But I’m going to be outraged on smokers’ behalf. They’re so used to non-smokers being outraged by their smoking, I thought it might be nice just to flip the script and be outraged for them. Twenty bucks!
Tobacco excise taxes will rise by 10 per cent a year on January 1 for the next four years. That will lift the average price of a packet of 20 from about $14 now to $15.40 next year and $20.50 in 2016.
It’s estimated that will bring the Government an extra $500 million in revenue from $1.2 billion a year to $1.7 billion.
Tax generally makes up between 67 and 72 per cent of the price of a packet of cigarettes in New Zealand. That’s equatable with countries like Australia, Greece, Netherlands and Germany but below countries like Denmark where tax makes up 85 per cent of the packet.
There is a correlation between a high price of cigarettes and people giving up, which I guess is the whole point. That, and the desire to save on the cost of healthcare for tobacco-related illness.
Ministry of Health statistics show that before 1991, over 12 million packs a year were sold. By the early 2000s, as the price crept up over $8, that figure dropped to just under four million packs a year being sold.
Thankfully, the habit never got a hold of me. At high school I would retire to the back fields by the mangroves with my mates who smoked but it was mostly to hang out, absentmindedly study slaters and hope that a kotuku appeared.
The cost put me off too. Any money I did get back then went on pies, chips and soft drink.
I went through a phase in my 20s when I would annoy my smoking friends by bumming cigarettes off them and then just pointlessly puffing away. They’d get annoyed and say I was wasting them but I’d just want the posturing of smoking without the tobacco intake.
I have friends who used to have heavy habits but who have since given up. I have friends who’ve smoked for a long time and continue to do so.
I’m sure that even though cigarettes will soon cost over 20 bucks, it won’t deter the hardiest of smokers.
My friends who do smoke are sane, intelligent people.
They, like other smokers and non-smokers alike, fully comprehend the pictures of the rotting gums and teeth that accompany cigarette packaging as compulsory health warnings. Those pictures work on me. But it doesn’t do anything to them.
No other product in the world actually spells out to you the guarantee that if you consume it, it might cause health problems, affect pregnancy and actually kill you. And yet people still do it.
Some think the cost of cigarettes should be more like $50 to really make people want to stop.
I don’t know about that. I think smoking is declining and will continue naturally to do so as awareness grows along with the cost of living.
Higher prices will contribute to people giving up smoking but will also lead to more dairies being robbed for cigarettes.