Campaign: SmokeFree with dairies is doable
SmokeFree 2025 proposes to:
Reduce number of retailers able to sell smoked tobacco products from 8,000 to 600 by 2024.
Prevent young people from taking up smoking by prohibiting the sale of smoked tobacco products to anyone born on or after 1 January 2009.
Reduce the nicotine levels in smoked tobacco products to make it less appealing and addictive.
Our Concerns:
The SmokeFree 2025 regulations are well intentioned but misguided. If implemented in full they will cause the destruction of New Zealand’s dairies.
Our margins are already thin. Most of us pay ourselves, and our people, minimum wage. Removing more than half of our revenue will mean we’ll have to close our doors.
That’s a terrible outcome for New Zealand. For many communities we are the last business standing. Kiwis will lose the convenience and choice for buying goods locally.
It’s another example of just how detached the Wellington bubble is from ordinary New Zealand. It’s more nice sounding ideas that when implemented have very real consequences for people.
Our issue is not with the intent of the SmokeFree 2025. More needs to be done to help Kiwis choose healthier lifestyle options.
But banning sales from most dairies is not going to help this. It will drive most, if not all, of us to closure.
If dairies close, communities lose their last business.
We question the purpose of the legislation when a decades long war on smoking has in effect been won. Young adults are choosing not to smoke with fewer than 5% taking up the habit and the proposed ban on sales of cigarettes to people born after 2009 ensures there will be a smokefree generation.
The rest of the regulations however are punitive. They’re about punishing smokers and dairy owners under a misguided belief that smokers can easily quit. We know how tough it is for them.
Which is why we know many of those regulations will not achieve the desired outcome from Wellington.
Decades of outdated tobacco control policy measures have not work for this cohort. In fact, they cause more harm by forcing them into deeper impoverishment (though excise) and into criminal networks (unchecked growth in illicit tobacco).
The new laws will exacerbate these problems. If smokers can’t get their tobacco safely and conveniently, they will look elsewhere. Most likely they will go to the black market.
We’re up for transitioning our dairies to a new revenue model. We have done so many times over many decades. But this is going to take many years and so long as the demand is there for tobacco, we’d like to keep meeting that.
Vaping is one possibility; however, the new laws do not give the freedom for dairies to be able to offer choice and convenience to vapers.
We want:
Freedom to continue selling tobacco lawfully. It makes no sense to force closure of dairies when the government has in effect banned sales of cigarettes to anyone born after 2009 and youth have rejected smoking.
To offer our help / expertise on ways to transition smokers to vaping and / or to quit altogether. We know smokers. We can help.
The removal of unnecessary restrictions on sales of vaping products so that we can communicate the benefits and offer choice to smokers.
If the government must proceed, then it needs to give us time. We need it to figure out how we can find new sources of revenue to make up the 50-60% revenue hole we will be in.