OPINION
Rochester Puri
Te Ao News reports, in an article about a Waitangi Tribunal claim lodged over the government’s smokefree policies, that Te Ropu Tupeka Kore chair Sue Taylor is concerned about the tactics of the tobacco industry and says the government is listening to the wrong people. “We need to shift our focus away from making smoking an individual’s problem.” Whoa – so it’s not their own fault for lighting up? She continues, “The problem is the tobacco industry and its predatory tactics that keep our people addicted and recruit new people to smoking.” Sounds like a pyramid scheme gang or cult.
I see lots of junk food adverts on TV, and some people (learned in that area) argue sugar is addictive, but amazingly enough not everyone is consuming these products in great quantities so as to become diabetic and victimchondriacs (soon to be a new entry in Webster’s) then blame it on the advert that made the food look nice enough to eat (duh).
Given we haven’t had tobacco ads for decades and packaging now includes unsavoury pictures, I am not sure where the predatory tactics are that make people part with their hard-earned (or maybe not) money in favour of a cigarette. Are there tobacco company-sponsored militia donning balaclavas and forcing people to smoke? Is the Marlboro Man furtively clip-clopping around marae or school bike sheds with a saddle bag swag of durries forcing them on unsuspecting wahine?
On the plain packaging, now with a gory picture, I was amused to witness at a supermarket a lady asking for the packet to be changed to another gory picture as she didn’t like the one particular gory picture on the packet they were selling her. So not a deterrent unless the packets double as collector cards.
Late last year Smoke-free activists delivered a petition claiming a legal ban would stop a relative smoking. Here’s what one news media organisation says, “The health advice is explicit. It says the right to be smokefree is entrenched in Te Tiriti o Waitangi, specifically, Article 2 guarantees protection of taonga and the right to wellbeing falls under this and Article 3 sets out the right to equity before the law.”
I’m not sure where that health advice is from, but it isn’t health advice at all. Stop smoking is health advice. Political activist BS and woke government departments say, “The treaty guarantees [insert name of grievance sought here].”
In pandering to bi-culturism in lieu of facts and reality, government departments have set themselves up to be cited as a source of authority because they are government and are now being called to act upon what they thought were just words that made them feel good; and thought others, especially Maori, would like them too and they wallowed in the smugness of their bi-cultural (apartheid) identity.
In Professor Lisa Te Morenga’s opinion, per the news article, she can’t stop her dad from smoking but the smoke-free law could.
Lisa is co-chair of Health Coalition Aotearoa (HCA) and a nutrition and Maori health researcher based in the Massey University Research Centre for Hauora and Health, yet she is unable to provide a compelling argument to stop her father from smoking. Fair enough. It’s an addiction, so other than physically preventing him from obtaining ciggies and nicotine, then it is largely up to him to decide. But here’s a bit of comedy:
Under the Smokefree law, Dad would no longer be able to pick up a packet of smokes at the petrol station.
However, the smoke-free law wouldn’t have applied to him anyway as he was born before 2009 so that alone would not stop him, “but [he] would have to make a special trip into town to one of only two shops. He thinks this would be enough to help him quit.” So not a law, but a little bit of distance between him and the shop is enough to do it? Has she just called her dad lazy? And that he only smokes because the shop is nearby?! This is yet another ironic, self-indicting call from Maori activists for the white colonialists to make laws to stop Maori from being their own worst enemy.
It sounds ironically like a Treaty to help stop musket wars. And lawmakers should do this because it’s what a partner would do, even if the other person won’t do it for their own good and the good of their family and their pocket.
Do Maori, or at least these particular types of people of Maori ancestry, really want to be patronised as poor little helpless people who don’t know any better?
If you’re not sovereign over yourself, then what is all this talk about sovereignty?
How about they stop claiming victimhood and take some personal responsibility? It would be great if Lisa’s dad stopped smoking, but for some maybe it is one of the few ‘pleasures’ they are left, in which case let your dad enjoy his ciggies in peace.