The Post: Backdowns on smokefree rules suggest tobacco lobbyists are in the House

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It is not an ideal start to one’s ministerial career to have misled the media. Yet that seems to be the situation in which the associate health minister, Casey Costello, finds herself.

Interviewed this week by RNZ’s Guyon Espiner, the New Zealand First MP denied having “sought advice on”, or even discussed, the idea of a freeze on tobacco taxes. Yet Ministry of Health documents show she “proposed … to freeze the excise on smoked tobacco for three years”. And when asked last year whether she would like advice on such a proposal, Costello signed off on a document with “yes” circled in response.

Quite apart from this apparent contradiction, freezing tobacco taxes would be an appalling policy: even as the price of staple foods rises rapidly, the Government would be taking steps to make tobacco more attractive relative to milk, bread and other basics.

Yes, tobacco excise helps empty the wallets of poor, addicted smokers. But the “weight of evidence”, according to Ernst & Young research, is that price rises are “the single most effective tool for reducing tobacco use”. The financial toll on the remaining smokers is surely best reduced by quit-smoking programmes, not continued addiction.

Costello’s move comes on the back of the extraordinary reversal of the last government’s smokefree plan, a move seemingly guaranteed to ensure that under National more people will die from smoking than they would have under Labour.

Ministers are apparently bemused by their hostile media coverage, privately bemoaning the lack of any “honeymoon” period. But much of the negative reporting simply echoes public shock at the smokefree reversal.

Although technically a NZ First manifesto pledge, it was not actively campaigned on by any party; indeed, National’s Shane Reti had promised to keep core parts of the smokefree legislation.

Commentators are also naturally asking how ACT and NZ First became so ardently opposed to legislation that would have saved thousands of lives and billions of dollars. Claims that it would have triggered a massive surge in black-market cigarettes, quite apart from not being a knockdown argument, appear unsupported by evidence, unless you count tobacco-industry-funded research as “evidence”.

While we will never know exactly what or who influenced David Seymour and Winston Peters, we do know that two former high-ranking NZ First officials, David Broome and Apirana Dawson, now work for tobacco giant Philip Morris. We know that Shane Jones invited Dawson to the Government’s swearing-in ceremony, and “took soundings” from him when developing policy.

We know that Costello used to chair the Taxpayers’ Union, a lobby group that has taken vehemently pro-tobacco-industry positions without disclosing that it receives money from British American Tobacco, one of the worst of the merchants of death.

We know also that another influential right-wing group, the New Zealand Initiative, is financially backed by British American Tobacco and Imperial Brands, which sells – ironically – “Winston” cigarettes.

So there are clear grounds for being concerned about the tobacco industry’s influence on current politics – and good reasons to reform our transparency laws so we can see whether tobacco firms, and indeed others, are lobbying government.

In New Zealand, lobbying is an entirely unregulated industry, despite its immense proximity to power. Aside from the publication of a few ministerial meetings, and some heroic reporting, we have no clear idea who is influencing whom.

Most developed countries have started letting sunlight into these closed rooms, requiring lobbyists to disclose contacts with decision-makers. Not New Zealand, though. We also lack a mandatory code of conduct for lobbyists and a ban on former ministers going straight into lobbying, as Labour’s Kris Faafoi notoriously did.

Indeed the issue caused Labour such trouble – especially following Espiner’s reporting last year– that it launched a wide-ranging review of our lobbying regulations, or rather their absence.

In opposition, National appeared to back a mandatory code of conduct, while advocating a one-year stand-down period for ministers before they can lobby and “a transparent, publicly accountable register of who's doing the lobbying and who they're lobbying for”, as Nicola Willis put it.

Has their resolve held? In a letter this week to Health Coalition Aotearoa, justice minister Paul Goldsmith said officials were still working on a code of conduct for lobbyists, but only a voluntary one. And the wider review of lobbying regulation was just “one of many priorities the Government must consider, and specifically in the Justice portfolio where it has a heavy work programme”, he added.

Such language often presages abandonment – but absolutely should not in this instance. It is vital to a democracy’s health that citizens can see who is influencing whom, so that pressure is brought to bear on ministers to hear from a broad and equitable range of voices, not just those of the powerful.

Labour had enough problems with its integrity. It would be a terrible shame if the new Government failed at the first chance to prove its own.