Associate Health Minister Ayesha Verrall has certainly turned heads with her radical platform of proposals, geared at obliterating our smoking rates. It’s another impressively bold display from the fresh broom, hot on the heels of her decisive leadership on standardising the fluoridation of New Zealand’s drinking water.

The proposed Smokefree 2025 Action Plan includes significantly reducing the number of retailers able to sell tobacco, limiting the nicotine content of cigarettes, and raising the age of purchase every year, so that anyone born after 2004 could never lawfully be sold tobacco.