Are vapes behind NZ’s smoking rate falling faster than Australia’s?
A decade ago, New Zealand had a higher rate of adult smoking than Australia. Now it’s lower, with smoking rates falling much faster in that time than in Australia, despite our self-proclaimed world leadership on anti-smoking measures. What’s happened?
In 2013, 15.8% of Kiwis over the age of 15 smoked daily, compared with 12.8% of Australians over 14. In 2023, just 6.8% of Kiwis smoked, noticeably lower than 8.3% of Australians. New Zealand is on track to reach its target of 5% smoking by 2025 (though not for Maori populations).
A new study from a team of Australian and New Zealand academics explores why New Zealand has been noticeably more successful in reducing smoking despite sharing many similarities with Australia.
Could it have been different levels of tax on cigarettes? Australia actually increased its taxation on tobacco more quickly than NZ did between 2016 and 2022, which should have driven a faster decline, especially among lower-income smokers. Indeed, cigarettes are less expensive in NZ than in Australia. Plain packaging was introduced in NZ in 2018, later than here, but the Australian and international experience is that there was no change in smoking rates following the introduction of plain packaging. And the pandemic affected both countries, ruling that out as a key difference.
But NZ does have significantly more relaxed vaping laws compared to Australia’s highly prescriptive approach — and NZ health authorities tell New Zealanders that vaping can help them quit smoking. Vaping products are available through retail outlets across the Tasman. The New Zealand data shows both a faster take-up of vaping, and a steeper decline in smoking, than in Australia.
Smoking particularly fell rapidly among the lowest socio-economic quintile in New Zealand, which also had higher rates of vaping. Smoking rates fell fastest in NZ among 18-24-year-olds, who also had the highest vaping rates; 25-34-year-olds had the next highest level of vaping and the next fastest decline in smoking — and so on, across age groups.
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That also — again — demolishes the conspiracy theory pushed by anti-vaping activists and Health Minister Mark Butler that vaping is a Big Tobacco plot to lure young people into smoking. If vaping is any sort of gateway, it leads away from smoking, given smoking among young adults is now very rare and falling sharply.
Correlation isn’t causation, and the data don’t prove that taking up vaping reduces smoking. But whatever the New Zealanders are doing, it’s working better than in Australia, where Labor has doubled down on a prohibitionist approach to vaping, including repeatedly thrashing a straw man that vaping advocates claim it is harmless. In fact, no-one argues vaping is harmless. And the New Zealanders don’t either — New Zealand Health states “some say it’s as bad as smoking, others say it helps with quitting smoking. It’s actually somewhere in the middle. Vaping is not for people who don’t smoke, but it has the potential to help people who smoke to quit.”
There’s one other notable difference between the two countries. New Zealand has little in the way of any black market for vapes. Here, there’s a violence-racked black market worth hundreds of millions of dollars, driven by vaping restrictions and high tobacco excise.
The Coalition sensibly proposes to shift to a model more like New Zealand’s, where vapes will be available via retail outlets but regulated like tobacco products, at a stroke removing a key driver of the black market. The Coalition is following the evidence. Labor is stuck with its prohibitionist conspiracy theory.
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