Here is the number National does not want you dwelling on. In 2023, the year before this coalition tore up New Zealand's world leading smokefree laws, Customs seized 8.5 million illegal cigarettes. By 2025, the first full year under the repeal, that figure had climbed to 14.8 million. That’s a shocking 74 percent increase in illegal cigarettes flooding the country, on this government's watch, as a direct consequence of decisions this government made.
Christopher Luxon told the country the opposite would happen. On the day he was sworn in, he defended the repeal by warning that cutting the number of licensed tobacco retailers would create an untaxed black market, ripe for ramraids and organised crime. It was a confident, specific claim, and it was wrong in exactly the way public health researchers warned it would be at the time.
Yesterday, 1 News reported:
Five arrested, 1.38 million illegal cigarettes seized in raids
Five people have been arrested and 1.38 million illegal cigarettes seized in a series of raids at dairies and homes across the North Island.
Authorities carried out 21 raids at eight retail outlets and six residential addresses in Rotorua, Waikato and Auckland as part of the six-month operation.
The operation, dubbed Operation Clarify, was led by Customs, with support from police and Health New Zealand
Customs estimated that 1.378 million cigarettes, representing more than $2 million in evaded tobacco excise, were seized. Around $170,000 in cash was also seized.
The trouble for Luxon is that none of the measures he blamed in advance ever got the chance to operate. Denicotinisation, the retailer cap, and the smokefree generation clause were repealed within his government's first hundred days, before any of them could plausibly have caused anything. What has actually driven the explosion in illicit tobacco is the environment National itself created once those protections were gone.Start with the money. This coalition of chaos government set aside $216 million to fund a 50 percent cut to excise tax on heated tobacco products, a change that mainly benefits Philip Morris, whose New Zealand external affairs staff include former senior figures from NZ First's own political operation.
Customs Minister Casey Costello has since told media the reason for the surge in seizures is that excise increases breached a threshold, creating a big price differential. Health researchers have called that explanation straight out of the tobacco industry playbook.
Then there’s the enforcement gap this government left wide open. It took until May 2026, more than two years after the repeal, for Customs, police and the health sector to even be combined into a single Illicit Tobacco Action Group. By the time that group carried out its first major operation this week, arresting five people and seizing 1.378 million cigarettes across Rotorua, Waikato and Auckland, investigators found the network they broke up had been actively recruiting more retailers to expand. National had years of warning and years of rising seizure data. It moved only once the numbers had become impossible to ignore.
None of this is abstract. Modelling of the repealed legislation found it would have cut smoking deaths by 1,170 within ten years and by 8,150 within twenty, including 2,811 fewer deaths among Māori, who continue to carry a wildly disproportionate share of this country's smoking harm. Every one of those numbers represents a New Zealander whose death this government could have prevented.
The Cancer Society estimated that within the first hundred days of the coalition alone, roughly 585 New Zealanders would die from tobacco related cancer, a toll the repealed law was specifically designed to start bringing down.
As Otago University public health researcher Andrew Waa put it at the time, one death from this toxic product is one too many. Health Coalition Aotearoa co-chair Boyd Swinburn was blunter still, accusing the coalition of putting the profits of the tobacco industry ahead of the health of New Zealanders.
Back in November 2023, RNZ reported:
Smokefree legislation would have driven cigarette black market - Christopher Luxon
Luxon told Morning Report there were "some practical issues" with the amendments to legislation passed last year that National, ACT and New Zealand First disagreed with, such as reducing the number of retailers that could sell tobacco.
The amendments, parts of which are yet to come into force, would also have created a generation of young New Zealanders who would never legally be able to buy cigarettes.
"To say that actually, you can concentrate all that distribution in a few shops and you have one smoke shop in one small town in New Zealand, you can't not tell me that will be a massive target for ramraids and crime; there will be an increased black market - an untaxed black market - for cigarette smokes," he said.
This isn't a government that got the settings wrong through incompetence. It repealed a law on the advice of arguments that mirrored tobacco industry submissions almost word for word, funded partly by a tax break that happened to suit Philip Morris, and then took two and a half years to build an enforcement response to the entirely predictable consequences. The illicit market didn't grow despite National's choices. It grew because of them.
Luxon promised that repealing the law would prevent a black market in tobacco products. Instead he built one, funded the industry driving it, and let it run largely unchecked while people, disproportionately Māori, kept dying of a disease this country was on track to end.
