A few weeks before Christmas, as ministers in the just-formed National-led government were settling into the Beehive, a set of notes was sent from the office of new Associate Health Minister and NZ First MP Casey Costello to a group of health officials.

A year prior, under the previous government, New Zealand had passed smokefree laws that were hailed as a world first.

They included slashing the number of retailers allowed to sell tobacco, mandating very low nicotine cigarettes from 2025, and making it illegal to sell tobacco to anyone born in 2009 onwards (today’s 14 and 15-year-olds).

Repeal it all, the notes from Costello’s office said.

Then, the notes outlined a new set of proposals.

They included removing excise tax from smokeless tobacco products, and adding heated tobacco products into the definition of vaping.

The intention to do these things had already been signalled in coalition agreements signed a few weeks earlier between New Zealand First, ACT and National.

But the notes from Costello’s office went even further than that.

After years of tobacco tax hikes, under both Labour and National-led governments, they asked for advice on freezing tobacco excise tax for three years.

And the document took frequent swipes at the previous government.

“The [Labour-led government] policies were ideological nonsense that no other country had been stupid enough to implement,” the notes said.

Read the full set of notes from Costello's office here.

Despite coming from her office, Costello denied requesting the advice, writing the notes, or even knowing who collated them.

RNZ’s attempts to follow up exactly who did write the notes, and where suggestions such as freezing excise tax on cigarettes came from, have only raised more questions.

Costello’s office declined an OIA request for reports, briefings and communications on the issue, on the basis that it would breach officials’ ability to provide ‘free and frank’ advice to ministers.

The tobacco industry has long since moved on from the days when it tried to discredit or distract from a mounting body of evidence that smoking kills.

But researchers say it’s now applying the same tactics to a raft of next-generation alternatives to cigarettes.

Otago University Professor of Public Health Janet Hoek says a really important part of that strategy is to “shape the discourse” and normalise the industry’s new products among members of the public, media – and politicians.

“People have picked up on that [discourse] without realising how it’s been socialised and seeded.”

RNZ compared the notes Costello sent to officials with a range of documents produced by the tobacco industry and its supporters.

Costello has said she has no prior links with the industry and she’s committed to the 2025 smokefree target.

But whether intentional or not, there are frequent – and striking – similarities between the language and themes from the document that came out of her office and those used by the industry.

Janet Hoek says words like ‘experimental’ are used by the tobacco industry and its supporters “in any context where a country is going to be leading the way in policy innovation”.

“‘Experimental’ suggests that it’s untested, it’s unproven – and it’s only a couple of steps from that to thinking, well it’s high risk, we don’t know what the outcomes are going to be.

“And then it’s just a small step to think, well, does the government really know what it’s doing? And it raises general questions about competence. That’s been an industry strategy all along.”

‘Radical’ has a similar effect, she says.

“It suggests that it’s extreme and it’s unnecessary and it lacks proportionality.”

It’s important to note that other submitters on the smokefree amendments – including smokefree group ASH – used similar language.

“The evidence for the proposals is based mainly on experimental modelling with all the assumptions and limitations that come with this science,” ASH's 2021 select committee submission stated.

But unlike the industry, ASH supported the Bill.

“We want to be clear that we consider this a world-leading and bold piece of legislation.”

The smoke-free generation policy was immediately framed as a ban, Hoek says, “which of course ties into this industry discourse of something being prohibitionist and it’s taking away rights and removing freedoms”.

In a 2014 document outlining its 10-year global corporate strategy (and leaked to Reuters in 2017), Philip Morris International specifically identified “age-phased prohibition” and “nicotine ceilings” as issues to address.

One strategy the company identified was this:

Claims that illicit tobacco trade will increase as a result of sales restrictions or higher tax are another long-standing industry strategy, tobacco control researchers say.

The University of Bath’s Tobacco Control Research Group maintains a website, tobaccotactics.org, which collects evidence of the tobacco industry’s historical and current strategies.

The industry’s claims about illicit tobacco are “not borne out by the evidence”, the website says.

“In 2019, a World Bank review of country experiences with illicit tobacco trade demonstrated that tobacco taxes play only a minor role in illicit trade, with countries with higher cigarette prices often having lower levels of illicit trade than countries with lower prices.”

Health officials here warned Casey Costello, in a briefing paper obtained by RNZ, that “a common tobacco industry tactic is to assert that tobacco control policies will increase an illicit market”.

A multi-year study the Health Ministry commissioned at the time the smokefree laws were being considered “has so far found evidence of a decreasing illicit trade in tobacco in New Zealand over the past 10 years”, despite continued increases in tobacco tax, the paper said.

Tobacco companies have identified high tax as a threat to sales for many decades, and argued that increasing tobacco tax will disproportionately affect the poor.

That’s because poor people are more likely to smoke, which also means they are disproportionately harmed by smoking-related disease.

Even leaving aside the greater burden of disease, though, a body of evidence contradicts tobacco producers and retailers’ claims: rather than wearing the cost of tax increases, people in lower-socioeconomic groups are more likely to quit smoking in response, because they have the least ability to keep paying.

“There is overwhelming evidence that price and price increases reduce smoking prevalence and uptake, especially among young people, those who have less education, and those experiencing greater deprivation,” a group submission, led by the New Zealand Cancer Society, to the government’s Tax Working Group, said.

Harm reduction is an established public health approach to risk-taking behaviour like drug use where stopping the behaviour altogether is difficult – needle exchanges are one example.

As vapes and other alternatives to smoked tobacco have been developed, there has been a growing body of research and debate about whether these products have a role to play in tobacco control.

The concept of ‘tobacco harm reduction’ has become “controversial and, some feel, divisive in public health,” Tobacco Tactics says.

“Tobacco companies use harm reduction to try to get a ‘seat at the table’ and influence policy, while attacking their critics and undermining public health.”

A 2014 British Medical Journal article, which reviewed internal industry documents along with public statements, warned: “Transnational tobacco companies’ harm reduction discourse should be seen as opportunistic tactical adaptation to policy change rather than a genuine commitment to harm reduction.”

Tobacco companies lean on “a tight definition of harm” that includes only the physical harm caused by smoking, Janet Hoek says.

“If you think about that, then it’s not the nicotine that has the carcinogens – they’re what’s created through the by-product of combustion [of tobacco].”

E-cigarettes and vapes do not contain tobacco but do still contain nicotine, which is a highly addictive substance, Hoek says.

“Nicotine is what makes people addicted – and addiction is a very harmful psychological state. We know that by talking with people who smoke … who talk about how their days are controlled. It’s not a good place for many people to be.”

Caffeine is not like that, Hoek says.

“Most people can stop drinking coffee. You might get a bit of a headache, but you just don’t have that terrible compulsion that people who smoke have to continue smoking.”

Her comments echo a 2019 BMJ Tobacco Control article, which concluded that "the available tobacco industry documents describe a consistent and long-running effort by tobacco companies and their industry-funded scientific collaborators to promote nicotine while minimising its health risks by comparing it to caffeine and coffee".

That strategy “reappeared at the time novel tobacco products like electronic cigarettes were introduced”, the authors wrote.

New customs tax categories for smoked tobacco alternatives, and tax breaks for those products – two of the proposals in the notes – are outcomes that tobacco companies have directly targeted in their internal documents and then publicly requested.

‘Proportionate regulation’ for new products is a common refrain from the industry and research that it funds, tobacco industry watchdog organisation STOP claims.

The Costello notes conflate several different products under the umbrella term ‘vaping’. ‘Smokeless tobacco’ is normally used to refer to oral nicotine products like pouches, which sit discreetly in the user’s mouth, rather than something that is inhaled.

‘Heated tobacco products’ refer to devices like Philip Morris’ IQOS. The devices resemble vapes and can get included in umbrella descriptions of vaping. However, unlike most vapes or e-cigarettes – which only contain nicotine – they contain tobacco sticks that are heated to create a vapour.

Product producers describe heated tobacco products as ‘reduced risk’ but this claim “has yet to be fully supported by independent scientific evidence”, Tobacco Tactics says.

A 2022 UK Cochrane review found that all 11 of the randomised controlled trials of heated tobacco products to date were industry-funded, and all of them were at risk of bias.

In 2020, the World Health Organisation warned of the “unknown long-term health impact” of heated tobacco products and recommended that countries regulate them in the same way as other tobacco products.

Vaping itself “is not a risk-free practice”, Janet Hoek says.

“Most people don’t want to be addicted… We do need to have alternatives for people who simply can’t quit smoking, but we shouldn’t treat them as an end in themselves.”

When asked how tobacco industry and retail arguments and aims came to be mirrored in the government’s policy proposals, Janet Hoek says: “I don’t have any more insights than you have.”

But she believes the similarities deserve further scrutiny.

“It’s time that we start asking some really hard questions about this government's compliance with the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.”

The convention, which New Zealand ratified in 2004, includes a clause that obliges its parties to protect policy from tobacco industry influence and be completely transparent in its dealings with the industry.

Hoek says she was alarmed when New Zealand First deputy leader Shane Jones confirmed to media that Philip Morris director of external relations, Apirana Dawson, was involved in “soundings” about the party’s tobacco policy.

Regardless of whether that happened prior to NZ First being in government, “you just don't go taking soundings from the tobacco industry”, Hoek says.

“When Christopher Luxon talks about being available to people, and you need to hear from different voices – and again, he's on record as having made a comment along those lines – well, actually, that's not what you do when you're complying with [the Convention]. You recognise that you engage with the industry only if you absolutely have to, and you make all dealings with the industry completely transparent.”