Over at the Public Health Blog, Nick Wilson runs some numbers on the likely effects of the tobacco tax hikes.
Our BODE3 Programme Team have developed and published on a tobacco forecasting model (4,5). Running this model for the newly proposed programme of increasing tobacco tax by 10% each year until 2020 will see tobacco smoking prevalence reduce to 21.4% for Māori and to 8.9% for non-Māori by 2020 (compared to 22.7% and 9.3% if this taxation programme had not continued beyond January 2016 – see Figure 1). Assuming a continuation of ‘business-as-usual’ patterns in smoking uptake and cessation thereafter, the model suggests that prevalence will further reduce to 17.3% and 7.2% by 2025 for Māori and non-Māori respectively. Furthermore, the additional four rounds of tax increases have the potential to reduce the absolute ethnic gap in smoking prevalence observed in this country by nearly 1 percentage…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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