OPINION

The man was waiting for the foodbank to open. A journalist asked him about his circumstances.

He said he was in his early 60s and on a benefit. He bemoaned the rising price of
food. He managed to keep his head above water but it was a constant struggle.

He’d done all sorts of jobs over the years. He’d also had a spell in prison. It was a long time ago but it didn’t help when looking for work.

He came to the foodbank every week to take a little pressure off his budget and perhaps to free up some money for a treat. By a treat he meant tobacco. ‘I know people will judge me for that,’ said the man. And my question is how we got to this point.

Forty or 50 years ago most men smoked, especially men who worked manually. Every break from work was named for the habit. Smoko, it was called and still is.

Back then it was already well known that tobacco caused cancer but most men didn’t much care. We are short-term creatures. When young and strong we couldn’t imagine ourselves as old or vulnerable, let alone dead. And we could sense no harm accruing from smoking.

It was also such a calming thing to do. Less because of the effect of the drug, and more because of the act itself. The business of lighting a cigarette and drawing the smoke down and then slowly exhaling was a meditative thing, a break from the frenzy of being and doing. Every cigarette was an island of peace on a busy day. It felt like a reward, a good thing in a hard world, an indulgence. And who doesn’t want, who doesn’t need, a little indulgence?

You could smoke anywhere – pubs, restaurants, the back of aeroplanes. This was tough on non-smokers. The unwelcome smell of other people’s smoke clung to their clothes and their hair. And when it was discovered that there was such as thing as passive smoking, the authorities, quite rightly, acted. They banned smoking indoors in public places.

By doing so they effectively freed anyone who didn’t want to from having to breathe cigarette smoke. (It still seems to me that they could have offered pubs, in particular, the choice to be smoking or non-smoking pubs, which decision they would advertise outside their premises, but that is by the by.)

Fairness of a sort had been achieved and the authorities had followed the great edict of John Stuart Mill: the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

But having prevented harm to others, did the authorities stop there? They did not.

Excited by their crusade, and feeling on the side of the angels, they planned to make New Zealand the first non-smoking country in the world. Without consulting smokers they ramped up the tax on cigarettes by 10 per cent every year, over and above any price increase. Ten per cent on 10 per cent on 10 per cent rapidly raised the cost, bringing in extra revenue for the Government at the expense, by and large, of poorer people, for smoking remained primarily a working-class habit.

I was an eager smoker and kept going on 30 or so a day until I found that I was spending as much at the supermarket on cigarettes as I was on groceries. So I gave up a habit of 40 years. There you go, the authorities might say, we saved your life.

But it is not, never has been and must never be the responsibility of the state to save us from ourselves. And anyway, that is not the point.

Nor is it the point that certain consequences of the Government’s plan were entirely predictable – that cigarettes have become so expensive that there is now a flourishing black market in tobacco and dairies are ram-raided solely for the purpose of stealing cigarettes.

Nor yet is it the point that the smoker has always been an economic benefactor of society, paying vast amounts of additional tax in the form of excise duty throughout his working life, and then dying conveniently around retirement age and not collecting the pension that he’s paid for.

No, the point is the gentleman at the foodbank. He has been made to feel like a social leper. And he has been all but priced out of a pleasure that does no harm to anyone but himself. And it’s happened at the behest of people who reckon to know what’s good for him better than he does himself.