Heroes and zeroes

This sounds like it's going to be boring or just about numbers, but I hope you'll be surprised. As always, I'm writing in my personal capacity.

I started smoking as a teenager in the 1990s, but I gave up at age twenty-four when I figured out I was hapū. This wasn’t expected, and at first I thought the ache in my pelvis was my period coming. When nothing happened, I pissed on a stick and it turned blue. There was a single cigarette in my packet of Holiday 20s, and I decided it would do no real harm to smoke it, contemplating that it would be my last.

I’d wanted to give up anyway. Smoking had always made me feel a little guilty, but maybe not for the reasons you’d expect. By the time I got pregnant, I’d had stints on the benefit. Even though I was a committed leftie and defender of the welfare state, deep down I felt that spending other people’s money on cigarettes - both a luxury and a harm - made me a bit of a loser. A little of the political climate of the day had seeped into me, like the faint yellow tinge on the skin of the fingers of my right hand.

Fast forward: I had my baby, went back to study, then had another baby. I did a PhD looking at changes to the welfare state in the 1980s and 1990s. I learned that politicians sometimes dress up economics as morality, or morality as economics, and you’ve got to stay on your toes to spot the difference. But I promise I’m not going to bore you with that theoretical stuff.

A PhD takes you down all sorts of rabbit holes. Here’s the story of a slightly bizarre experiment our country once tried - and what it can still teach us today.

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Righto: some preliminaries. David Seymour was right, kind of. These may not be the words you want to hear right now. Stick with me a little longer.

A few days ago, Seymour gave a speech in London during which he called smokers ‘fiscal heroes’ who save the taxpayer money. The link’s below.

The ‘fiscal heroes’ line rubbed some people the wrong way - and maybe it was a bit flippant. But when you look at the context you actually see some pretty standard ‘classical liberal’ arguments:

• People have the right to make decisions, good or bad, and government shouldn’t stop them.

• Government should stick to stopping people harming others with their decisions (for example, by protecting others from passive smoking).

• People should meet the costs of their own decisions. (In this situation that’s happening, because smokers more than pay back what they take from the public purse.)

I don’t agree with this reasoning - I’d cheerfully see smoking phased out - but I wasn’t offended by Seymour’s words. It’s the underlying thinking we need to dig into.

The idea that smokers save taxpayer money is the kind of claim that’s hard to weigh up because it involves a bunch of assumptions. What kinds of costs should you count, and what kinds of benefits? How many humans should you estimate will smoke or quit, live or die? Poor researchers sometimes use rubbish assumptions on purpose, to generate the conclusions they want and push a political barrow. We’ll see an example of this later.

But reputable people have had a crack at the fiscal cost of smoking, including academics connected to the Public Health Communication Centre Aotearoa. Using a method that’s got the tick from international experts, they asked a question: What would have happened if we’d stuck with the previous Government’s plan to phase out smoking? Here’s how they did the maths:

• Less money spent on the health system, because people aren’t getting sick from smoking as often.

• More money spent on superannuation, because more people are living long enough to claim it.

• More income tax collected by government, because people are going to work instead of getting sick or dying.

• More GST paid to government, because people are buying stuff instead of getting sick or dying.

• Much less excise (the special tax on tobacco) collected by government, because people aren’t buying smokes.

And where did the academics get to with their maths? Well, the government wouldn’t just miss out on money if people stopped smoking. They’d miss out on a shit ton of money. By 2050, they’d have a $17 billion hole in the budget, and would probably have to do something fairly significant to plug it.¹

OK, you’re saying, fine. But smoking isn’t just about the government’s books. It’s also about human suffering. Classical liberals can live with this suffering if it pays its own way: people make choices and bear the consequences. Public health folks can’t live with it. People who’ve lost loved ones to smoking-related illness often side with the public health folks. There’s a difference of opinion - this isn’t news. Are we done yet?

No, we’re not. Right wing politics around smoking run much deeper - and they’re tied up with class, race and gender, social control and stigma. I’m now going to invite you into one of my PhD rabbit holes. Let’s take a trip back in time.

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It was 1998. This was a couple of years before I got pregnant with my first. I was still a smoker, living in a grotty flat on a grotty hill in Ōtepoti Dunedin. The fourth National Government was in power (although it wouldn’t be much longer), and I spent a lot of time stomping around in Doc Martens and being pissed off about it.

National had been elected in 1990, because people figured they couldn’t be worse than the Labour Government before them. Bless. National went to town, including on the welfare state. Benefit levels were cut, even though unemployment was high.² Employment legislation was overhauled to try to hold wages down. State housing rents went up to market rates. Charges were introduced for previously free health services like hospitals stays. This was the moment that economic inequality in our society began to take off (although we’d always tolerated colonial inequality).³ At about the same time, kiwis’ attitudes started shifting. Sympathy for poor people dwindled, and so did the idea the government should help them.⁴

National cast themselves as fiscal heroes, claiming that cutting government expenditure would boost the economy, benefiting everyone. I’m not saying there weren’t real economic problems - but the only trickle down from rich to poor seemed kind of warm and yellow. And after a while, the sheer social distress caused by the barrage of reforms couldn’t be ignored. Today, we simply accept these things as standard operating procedure: kids without necessities, foodbanks, homelessness, an appalling suicide rate, and an upsurge in diseases of poverty like rheumatic fever. But at the time these things were new, and it felt like waking up in a country not our own.

The government was forced to ask itself, what was going wrong? And it smugly answered its own question. Poor people were just a bit useless.

At this moment on the political right, different ideas were in play. On one hand, there were classical liberal views, like the ones above described by David Seymour. Government shouldn’t tell people what to do. You could make the choices you liked, within reason, but if it turned out badly then that was on you.

But enter New Zealand First. From 1996, they joined National as a coalition partner.

On the right of politics, there was (and is) a whole other way of thinking about people and their choices - especially poor people. This way of thinking is often talked about as ‘moral conservatism’, and it’s different from classical liberalism. To generalise a bit, moral conservatives think the problem with giving people choice is that they might choose things you don’t like - not middle-class folks so much, but poor people. And you can’t really reason with people who make bad choices. Sometimes you’ve gotta use tough love on them - for their own good, and everybody else’s.

These two ways of thinking - trust people and leave them with their messes, or treat people as messes you can’t trust - can lead to different places, as we’re about to see. Back to 1998.

It seems extraordinary now, but someone in the Beehive had an almighty brainfart. What Aotearoa needed was a national set of behavioural standards - like the kind of ground rules you set at the beginning of a work meeting when you know Judy hasn’t done her action points, Emily’s going to go full passive-aggressive about the dishwasher roster, and Alan’s only there for the biscuits. Our national morality was at stake. It was time for the Government to intervene.

In February that year, a discussion document signed by Prime Minister Jenny Shipley and Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters was sent to homes right across the motu. It was called Towards a code of social and family responsibility, and the contents were as bad as the name.⁵ The plan behind the document was to consult everyday people, as well as businesses and organisations, on how Aotearoa could collectively be less shit. Ideas for being less shit would be gathered up, turned into a code of conduct for the country, and even put into laws to punish kiwis who didn’t measure up.

[Imagine description: This is the cover of Towards a code of social and family responsibility. The imagery is a two-parent family, who appear to be Māori or Pacific, joining hands and skipping towards middle-class respectability. Sigh.]

The discussion document suggested eleven areas for the country to pull its socks up. I’ve popped a summary in a footnote below, but here are a few quotes from the introduction to give you the gist.⁶

Whilst New Zealand has a strong economy and is competitive internationally, social problems continue to be of concern. We need New Zealanders and their families to help decide what responsibilities are theirs and what responsibilities the taxpayer should pick up by funding programmes which will make a difference.

[Issues of concern] include:

• The abuse and neglect of children

• Unemployment

• Long-term reliance on benefits

• Violent crime

• Unhealthy lifestyles.

Some people see the answers to these problems as simple - more laws and more government spending. But laws alone won't turn bad parents into good parents … As individuals we all have responsibilities.

Yep.

And where does smoking fit into this? Well, it appears throughout the discussion document, but the best way to illustrate its role is with a few points from the document’s section on pregnancy care.

Facts:

• New Zealand's teenage birth rate is high compared with similar countries. Teenage pregnancies are linked with poor health in babies and cot death.

• Early pregnancy care has real benefits for mothers and babies. When pregnancy care starts after the sixth month of pregnancy, there is a higher risk of low birth weight babies and infant death (including cot death).

• Women who start pregnancy care late in their pregnancy tend to be young and single. They are also more likely to have left school early, or be on a low income, or be Maori [sic] or Pacific Islands women.

• A quarter of all pregnant women and half of Maori [sic] women smoke during pregnancy. Smoking is linked with premature birth, low birth weight, cot death, asthma, pneumonia and glue ear.

Towards a code of social and family responsibility doesn’t make you work too hard to read between the lines. The discussion document links a bunch of ideas to carefully paint a portrait of ‘failure’. People who are unemployed or on benefits don’t contribute. The women carelessly get knocked up and don’t get married. They waste their taxpayer money on booze and smokes - wasting even more taxpayer money when it makes them sick and they need healthcare. Uneducated themselves, they don’t bother sending their kids to school. Hell, they don’t even feed their kids, because the grocery money goes on booze and smokes. These people were the ‘fiscal zeroes’.

In Towards a code of social and family responsibility, like much of the political debate at the time, smoking was used as a symbol of poor people being useless, the mark of an ‘underclass’ (a word actually used at the time), and a reason to intervene in people’s lives. And I don’t need to tell you which ethnicities the discussion document had in mind. I’ve already shown you the cover.

By any definition, Towards a code of social and family responsibility was a crushing failure. The New Zealand Statistical Association (I paraphrase a little) called its methodology a sack of crap. Fewer than 100,000 responses were received, despite the Government extending the due date in desperation. People who did respond, even when they thought the goals were more or less OK, felt the Government needed to take some responsibility for the country’s social problems, not just blame poor people. Some pointed out that even though the responsibilities in the document were meant to be for everyone, the punishments proposed were for beneficiaries only. Feelings ran high - so much so that the public servants who handled the mailed responses to the discussion document had to open the envelopes with gloves.⁷

The tragic thing is that, for all Towards a code of social and family responsibility was an exercise in social control and stigma, it took for granted that smokers still had a claim to healthcare, even when it cost more than they paid in taxes. In short, the discussion document started from the premise that poor people deserved to be alive.

Ah, the good old days.

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OK, we’ve talked about the difference between two right wing approaches: classical liberalism and moral conservatism. One trusts people and leaves them with their messes, and the other treats people as messes you can’t trust. These are pretty crude ideas, especially when you apply them to smoking. Surely they’ve gone out of fashion?

Again, I sigh. These days, it’s rare to see moral conservatism quite as gross as Towards a code of social and family responsibility, not because politicians don’t think that way, but because outright social control is hard to sell (although getting easier). But classical liberalism? It’s had a strange kind of facelift - and now it’s the friend of the poor.

The Taxpayers’ Union, a right-wing lobby group I like to gripe about a lot, has been waging an ongoing campaign against excise (the special tax on tobacco), including a research report I won’t link to because it’s stupid and I’m angry.⁸ We’ve talked above about bad research using rubbish assumptions to generate foregone conclusions. The Taxpayer Union’s argument is literally:

• The tobacco excise doesn’t actually stop people from smoking.

• OK, now you point it out, smoking’s been going down. But how do we know it’s the tobacco excise?

• If smoking’s going down, then we don’t need a tobacco excise, do we? DO WE? Slam dunk.⁹

But the thing that bothers me is not the quality of the research, but the fake concern for equity in which it’s dressed up.

The Taxpayers’ Union has discovered Māori and Pacific people. Their central claim is that smokefree measures have been less effective for Māori and Pacific people, who therefore face more hardship when excise puts the cost of smokes up. These things are true, and they’re ethically complex, but there’s another equity story here - one that involves whānau and aiga still burying the ones they love at a rate that should make us all ashamed. Not that you’d guess this from the Taxpayers’ Union report. There’s a single reference to ‘smoking-related illness’ before they turn to the real issues.

Why is the Taxpayers’ Union putting out this rubbish? Brace yourself for the least surprising surprise that’s ever not surprised you. They’re funded by the tobacco industry.¹⁰ And the tobacco industry, like politicians, runs the numbers. If smoking excise wasn’t effective, and ultimately hitting their profits, they wouldn’t be fighting it through dodgy fronts like this one.

It’s the strangest thing, this new politics the Taxpayers’ Union seems to push. There’s no mention of smokers’ right to make their own decisions - even just to insist that they should bear the consequences. There’s no attempt at social control, no stigmatising or punishing smokers so they’ll stay healthy, keeping down the taxpayer cost of maintaining their lives.

There’s just a concern that smokers pay the Government too much in excise. Cost recovery is a fair equation, not more. People should be able to get sick and die for a reasonable price. Otherwise it isn’t humane.

Smokers, their lives and their deaths, are simply absent. It’s a new era of human disposability.

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I still remember filling out my own response to Towards a code of social and family responsibility, at the desk by the window in my grotty flat. I printed deliberately and forcefully, holding the pen in the faintly yellow fingers of my right hand. I can’t recall exactly what I wrote, but I know that I was angry - violently angry - at the social control, the stigma. At the cruelty of laying the failure of our political experiment on the very ones that it had harmed.

And I felt hurt too. I’d been a beneficiary and was still a smoker. In the thinking of the time, I was a loser. In a couple of years, I’d be a pregnant loser - proving the haters right. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a twinge of something when that discussion document, judgement on its every page, arrived in my letterbox.

In the end, giving up smoking was unexpectedly easy. Morning sickness meant the thought of a cigarette made me want to spew. I suppose that makes me lucky - but I would’ve given up anyway, easy or hard. I had found my motivation: I was going to be a mum. Scare tactics and shame didn’t work on me, but love did. A human was inside me, and I needed to be ready to meet them.

People find their own things. They find their own ways, too - and maybe their first attempt to give up won’t succeed, or their second or their third, but someday they might just get there. You will help them not by telling them they’re lesser, but reminding them they could be even more.

And even when they can’t give up or won’t, whatever the costs, people are still people.

1. New study on going smokefree – major economic gains for NZ society with manageable costs for government | PHCC

2. The savagery of these cuts was horrifying. I wrote about it in a piece called Reparation.

3. What is our history of inequality? – Inequality: A New Zealand Conversation

If you’re looking for an overview of this period, Jane Kelsey is pretty comprehensive.

4. Why New Zealand is unsympathetic towards the poor | Stuff

5. You can find a scanned copy of the discussion document here.

6. Towards a code of social and family responsibility had eleven ‘issues’, each with a ‘headline expectation’ and some ‘facts’. The issues and headline expectations were:

1. Looking after our children

Parents should love, care for, support and protect their children.

2. Pregnancy care

Pregnant women will protect their own and their baby’s health with the support of their partner. They will begin regular visits to a doctor or midwife early in pregnancy.

3. Keeping children healthy

Parents will do all they can to keep their children healthy. They will make use of free health checks and immunisations, and seek early advice and treatment for sick or injured children.

4. Learning for the under-5s

Parents will do all they can to help their children learn from the time they’re born.

5. Getting children to school ready to learn

Parents will take responsibility for seeing that their children are well prepared for school, and attend every day ready to learn.

6. Young offenders

Children must not break the law. Parents will take responsibility for bringing their children up to be law-abiding members of society. When children do offend, families, communities and government agencies will work together to prevent re-offending.

7. Sharing parenthood

Parents will love and care for their children, support them financially and, where possible, share the parenting responsibilities, even when they are not living together.

8. Training and learning for employment

People will take responsibility for developing the skills and knowledge they need to help them get a job, or take on a new job.

9. Work obligations and income support

People receiving income support will seek full-time or part-time work (where appropriate), or take steps to improve their chances of getting a job.

10. Managing money

People will manage their money to meet the basic needs of themselves and their family.

11. Keeping ourselves healthy

People will do all they can to keep themselves physically and mentally healthy.

7. The code of social and family responsibility | Family welfare | Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand

8. I’m not going to link to the Taxpayer Union’s work on principle. It’s crap.

9. The Taxpayer Union relies on a University of Otago study to make its case, which I looked up. The study found that ‘Regular increases in tobacco taxation could play an important role in helping to achieve tobacco endgames. However, this modelling in New Zealand suggests that a wider range of tobacco endgame strategies will be needed to achieve a smoke-free goal of less than 5% prevalence for all social groups’.

10. Taxpayers' Union backed by tobacco giant