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Published on: 11/20/2007
Last Visited: 9/26/2009
LEARNING FROM LITTER: Researcher Nick Wilson says 3.2 per cent of the 1310 cigarette packets collected were from foreign sources.
LEARNING FROM LITTER: Researcher Nick Wilson says 3.2 per cent of the 1310 cigarette packets collected were from foreign sources.
Sales of duty-free cigarettes should be banned for people entering New Zealand, say public health researchers, who calculate more than $36 million in potential tax revenue is going up in smoke each year.
In a study published in the international journal Tobacco Control, Wellington public health researchers from Otago University estimated the percentage of foreign cigarettes smoked in New Zealand by collecting discarded cigarette packets from streets in four cities and six towns nationwide.
Lead investigator Nick Wilson said 3.2 per cent of the 1310 packets collected were from outside New Zealand, which meant a significant revenue loss for the country.
"The $36m of missed revenue from tobacco tax and GST, if the cigarettes were bought in New Zealand, are funds that could be used for quitting campaigns."
The true amount of missing tax was probably much higher as it was impossible to determine which New Zealand-branded cigarettes had been bought duty-free when travellers entered the country, he said.
One of the three big tobacco companies active in New Zealand stated in 2008 that duty-free sales accounted for 7 per cent.
"The scale of this revenue loss and the health implications are a strong argument for the Government to consider ending the sale of duty-free tobacco on entry to New Zealand, and to remove any duty-free allowance for incoming passengers, as in Singapore," Dr Wilson said.
"A further possibility is to ban the carrying in of any amount of tobacco altogether."
Australia was the most frequent source of foreign packets (45 per cent), followed by China (16.7 per cent).
Dr Wilson said the team had given up their free time in summer to collect litter for the study, part of the International Tobacco Control Project and funded by the Health Research Council.
"This kind of research is important because there is no easy way to find out the movement of foreign tobacco products."
Every packet was analysed and entered into a database.
"There was the occasional scream from our colleague next door doing the data entry whenever a cockroach crawled out of a packet," Dr Wilson said.
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