New Zealand to ban smoking from 2027

The government plans to introduce a law that, starting in 2027, will lift the smoking age by a year every year. New Zealand plans to raise the legal smoking age by one year every year effectively banning the sale of tobacco to people born after 2008.

“We want to make sure young people never start smoking so we will make it an offence to sell or supply smoked tobacco products to new cohorts of youth. If nothing changes, it would take decades till Maori smoking rates fall below 5 per cent, and this government is not prepared to leave people behind” New Zealand Associate Minister of Health Ayesha Verrall said in a statement.

Only 11.6 per cent of all New Zealanders aged over 15 smoke currently, a proportion that rises to 29 per cent among the indigenous Maori adults, according to government figures.

The restriction will be gradually rolled out in stages from 2024, beginning with a sharp reduction in the number of authorised sellers, followed by reduced nicotine requirements in 2025 and the creation of “smoke free’ generation from 2027, which will make New Zealand’s retail tobacco industry one of the most restricted in the world, just behind Bhutan where cigarette sales are banned outright. Australia was the first country in the world to mandate plain packaging of cigarettes in 2012.

Smoking kills about 5, 000 people a year in New Zealand, making it one of the country’s top causes of preventable death with four in five smokers started smoking before the age of 18 according to the government.