Smokefree 2025: A Plan Without A Clear Path For Māori And Pacific Communities

Associate Minister of Health Casey Costello recently released the revised 'Smokefree 2025' plan. While it offers glimmers of hope for our efforts to see smoking rates decrease, there are concerns around its effectiveness for priority populations.

The plan focuses on reducing smoking uptake, increasing quit attempts, improving access to quit support, and ensuring people remain smokefree. Putting these focuses into action will include intensifying social marketing, providing more incentivisation to quit, and working with the health sector to target referrals. However, the plan leaves the details concerning priority population focus frustratingly ambiguous.

Hāpai Te Hauora understands the centrality of implementing a thorough plan that provides the framework and steps toward achieving a Smokefree Aotearoa 2025. With the deadline on the horizon, the importance of prioritising Māori and Pacific populations who are overrepresented in smoking statistics must be stressed. The plan in its current state will not have the substantive impact that Māori and Pacific communities desperately need.

‘Getting to Smokefree 2025: The Final Push to Achieving the Smokefree 2025 Goal’ presents data, saying, "between 2011/12 and 2023/24, daily smoking among Māori dropped from 37.7% to 14.7%, and among Pacific peoples from 22.6% to 12.3%."[1]. If we follow this general trend in the data over the last 12 years, by 2025, smoking rates for Māori would project to sit at around 11.8% and Pacific people around 11.0% both well shy of the 5%< goal.

Jasmine Graham, Māori Public Health - Tobacco Control Manager says, "If we are serious about achieving Smokefree 2025 then we need a detailed plan with actions targeted at Māori and Pacific populations to address the unacceptably high smoking rates and ensure that no one is left behind."

Note : [1] "Getting to Smokefree 2025: The Final Push to Achieving the Smokefree 2025 Goal," Health New Zealand - Health New Zealand | Te Whatu Ora, last modified November 27, 2024, https://www.tewhatuora.govt.nz/publications/getting-to-smokefree-2025-the-final-push-to-achieving-the-smokefree-2025-goal.

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