WELLINGTON: Its New Zealand Customs’ New Year resolution time again and if you decided at midnight to quit smoking, Quitline is on deck to help you along the way.
Quitline’s Wellington office expects to be a hive of activity as staff support smokers to beat their addiction.
There may be another incentive too, in the form of a 10% increase in tobacco tax which takes effect today. It’s expected to push the price of an average pack of cigarettes up to $20. Chief executive Paula Snowden says the usual motivation in January is a new year’s resolution, but this year the price increase might also contribute to people wanting to kick the habit.
“The reasons to want to quit are your health and your family,” says Ms Snowden. “The trigger to make you try and have another attempt to quit, or your first attempt, is increasingly the cost.”
Today’s tax increase pushed the cost of a 20-pack of tailor-made cigarettes over $20. It’s part of the Government’s goal to make New Zealand smokefree by 2025, but some smokers say the cost won’t make them quit.
“I’d probably pay $100 for a smoke, it’s the addiction,” says one smoker. “Taxing makes you more stubborn, you’re not going to quit because they keep taxing it – I don’t think a price rise is going to stop it.”
The rate of smoking has declined nearly 10 percent in as many years. About half-a-million New Zealanders now smoke daily, or around 11 percent of the country. But to get that number below 5 percent of the population, Ms Snowden says more radical changes are needed.
“Australia’s had plain packaging now for two years, they’re already getting the benefits of that,” she says.
The Government introduced a plain packaging Bill last year, and Ms Snowden’s convinced that with measures like that a smokefree New Zealand can be achieved.
“We’ve got to keep our foot on the throttle of those changes that work, so do more and do it faster and we will get there.”
