“Dairy Owners should see relevance of their connectivity to Big Tobacco”
Selah Hart
Auckland, June 24, 2021
Late Tuesday (June 22, 2021) afternoon, Hapai Te Hauora sent a tweet in response to NZ Herald’s article: Revealed: Big Tobacco behind dairy owners postcard protest at Parliament.
The response from Hapai says, “Disappointed – yet not surprised, that Big Tobacco are using dairy owners to lead their agenda to continue to kill New Zealanders.”
I am not surprised that my team tweeted immediately after the reveal of Big Tobacco’s involvement with dairy owners lobbying activities. Yes. we are all disappointed because we have just spent the last few months supporting real whanau, hapu, iwi and communities to have their say with the Smokefree Action Plan and along comes Big Tobacco with Big Dollars to use dairy owners to push their agenda.
It seems dairy owners cannot see the relevance of their connectivity to Big Tobacco who have over decades devastated real whanau, hapu, iwi and communities and essentially our country’s ability to advance health and wellbeing.
Dairy owner Raj Patel said that the supplier of the postcard was not important.
He says, “if it is a situation like this (where) everyone is going to be together, if it is a British American Tobacco, or Imperial (Tobacco) or Philip Morris, we don’t think about it.”
“They are not allies”
The three companies that he has mentioned are the three largest suppliers of cigarettes to New Zealand. Philip Morris International was the largest tobacco company worldwide in 2020, with a global market value of about US$144.8 billion. British American Tobacco followed with a global market value of approximately US$91.6 billion.
Dairy owners should not view Big Tobacco as an ally, they just need to look at the track record of this industry to understand that they cannot be trusted to prioritise anybody but themselves. They know that they can manipulate these small business owners by making them fear for their livelihoods, they are putting dairy owners in an appalling position by pretending that their choice is between financial stability or the health and wellbeing of their customers.
We commend those dairy owners who have already taken the principled stance against Big Tobacco and we expect these underhanded tactics will make even more dairy owners think again about supporting this toxic industry.”
ACT Party and Smoking
ACT Deputy Leader Brooke van Velden received the petition of postcards from dairy owners at Parliament. Van Velden said that she did not know who had supplied the postcards. Hapai Te Hauora believe that if the ACT member understands anything about what Big Tobacco have done to Aotearoa New Zealand as a country and people then the suggestion is to bin the postcards.
Spokesperson for Tala Pasifika, Edward Cowley says, “She should throw out those ‘thousands’ of the same, duplicated, copied postcards as they are obviously pre-written and a waste of time and trees.”
Mr Cowley said, “We understand that there will be hurt for some dairy owners who need to stop selling cigarettes. However, it really is not much compared to the actual lives lost from smoking, in fact around 4500 lives lost….they simply do not hear that. and so our conclusion is that they begin to behave like their supplier with complete selfishness. This is not the cohort of sound advice we would consider when writing a National Smokefree Action Plan. I guess that the government has to receive all thoughts but public health policy writing should be about advancing a country’s health aspiration and not sending it backwards.”
Sustained campaign needed
We need to see a sustained campaign for Smokefree 2025 to ensure that everyone is clear as to why we need to achieve this goal. It does matter where the postcards come from because it is likely that is where their key messages have come from, they work together to make money. There is nothing wrong with working hard to make money but never when it concerns the lives and indeed the livelihood of others.
Hapai Te Hauora urges the Health Minister Andrew Little and Associate Minister Dr Ayesha Verrall to move quickly on the Smokefree Action Plan with raised awareness around lobbying activities from Big Tobacco through dairy owners.
Selah Hart is Chief Executive Officer of Hapai Te Hauora based in Auckland. The above story has been sponsored by
