NZ First MP Casey Costello under fire over cigarette pricing document leak

Thursday, 25 January 2024

Health Minister Dr Shane Reti has thrown his support behind Casey Costello as she faces pressure from advocacy group Health Coalition Aotearoa after leaked documents suggest she sought advice on a policy which would stop cigarettes going up in price.

Reti said he was enjoying working with associate health minister Costello, a NZ First MP, despite documents suggesting she had sought the advice which goes against evidence linking high cigarette prices with the motivation to quit.

Reti, in a statement, also renewed his coalition government’s commitment to reducing smoking rates and tobacco consumption, and in “being a world leader in this important area of health”.

However, he did not answer specific questions about how New Zealand would reach its smokefree goals, whether a freeze on tobacco excise would go ahead, or if the tobacco lobby has any influence on the Government.

Costello denied seeking “specific” advice on a three-year freeze on CPI-related excise increases, a tax imposed on cigarettes, after documents leaked to RNZ suggest she asked for advice on the issue in December.

But Professor Boyd Swinburn, an expert in population health who started Health Coalition Aotearoa - a health policy advocate group which represents dozens of individuals and organisations - said Costello was following the “tobacco industry playbook” and had lost all credibility.

Any moves to lessen the tax imposed on cigarettes was going to make cigarettes cheaper.

“That is going against all evidence if you are wanting to help people quit,” he said.

Swinburn, who has worked for the World Health Organisation and graduated from medical school in the late 1970s, said he has never known a government to have so many links with the tobacco industry.

Senior Minister Chris Bishop was a lobbyist for tobacco giant Phillip Morris before becoming a politician, but has said the role doesn’t define him.

Swinburn has also never seen a health minister involved with what he described as “anti-health” policies, he said.

“I have dealt with many health ministers in my time and I have never come across one who has come out so hard with so many anti-health policies. It is extraordinary really, and they are all from the tobacco industry play book.”

He said Costello’s stance lacked evidence, but that Reti was responsible for health policy.

“Even if he boots some of that responsibility with associate ministers - it all comes back to him,” he said.

“He is a doctor, he has seen patients with emphysema and lung cancer,” he added.

Costello stood down as chair and board member of the Taxpayer’s Union, which has taken positions aligned with the tobacco industry, in July, after several years with the low-tax lobby group.

Reporting in the Guardian revealed it had received financial contributions from British American Tobacco.

Reti faced broadsides over the Government’s plans to scrap the radical anti-smoking legislation that would have cut the amount of nicotine in products and stopped anyone born from 2009 from ever purchasing tobacco last year, but deferred questions to Costello.

Labour Party health spokesperson Dy Ayesha Verrall, who brought the world-leading smokefree legislation into law in 2022, said there was strong evidence increasing the price of tobacco has helped bring the smoking rate down.

People also had the option to take up vaping, a cheaper alternative, as a way to quit cigarettes too, she added.