The bill amends the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Act 1990 to remove measures introduced by the 2022 Smoked Tobacco Amendment Act relating to retail reduction, nicotine limits, and a smokefree generation.
Parliament advanced this bill under urgency (committee of whole house, first reading, second reading, third reading) — moving it through faster than usual, with less time than normal for public submissions.
These are claims MPs made in Parliament’s debate — not verified facts.
This bill amends the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Act 1990 to repeal three tobacco-control measures that had been legislated in 2022 but were not yet in force. The measures removed are: the smokefree generation rule, which would have permanently banned the sale of tobacco to anyone born on or after 1 January 2009; a large cut in the number of retailers permitted to sell smoked tobacco (a roughly 90 percent reduction in outlets); and denicotinisation, a requirement that smoked tobacco products contain only very low levels of nicotine. By repealing these, the bill keeps the existing tobacco-sale framework - age-18 purchase rules and current retailer numbers - rather than moving to the stricter regime. It affects smokers, tobacco retailers and manufacturers, public-health services, and the country's smokefree goals. The government has said it intends to pursue tobacco harm reduction through other tools, including support to quit and tighter vaping rules, handled separately from this bill.
The three measures being repealed came from the previous government's landmark 2022 smokefree legislation, which was internationally noted as a world-first plan to phase out tobacco sales to future generations. Repealing them was a coalition commitment. The government argues the 2022 regime was untested and risked unintended consequences - such as fuelling a black market, crime targeting a small number of remaining outlets, and harm to small retailers - and says it prefers proven, practical quit-support tools. Opponents, including many public-health and medical groups, argue the repealed measures were evidence-based and projected to save thousands of lives and hundreds of millions of dollars in health costs, that they would most help the communities hardest hit by smoking (including Māori and Pacific peoples), and that removing them abandons a chance to make the country smokefree. The dispute centres on the trade-off between bold prohibition-style measures and incremental, service-based approaches to reducing smoking.
See the Parliament.nz ↗ site for the full bill.