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New Zealand scraps world-first smoking ‘generation ban’ to fund tax cuts
(www.theguardian.com)
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Makes you wonder how much lobbying Big Tobacco did.
They just had an election and the government flipped from centre-left to centre-right. It could just be the classic conservative “our position is whatever is the opposite of the left!”
Winston Peters (NZ First leader) is a total alcohol, tobacco, and racing (horse, greyhound, whatever) industry shill. I doubt he exactly needed to be bought, but this is certainly part of his price for being part of the coalition government.
ACT (secular libertarian free market folk) probably mildly supported it, and National (general centre right; largest party) is probably much the same.
No I blame Seymour for this. Luxon went for it because Winston cock blocked him on foriegn ownership and he needs to fund those tax cuts.