New jobs are always hard, but most people get a day or two to find out just how bad they are going to be. As Christopher Luxon was sworn in as New Zealand’s new prime minister last week, his government was already deep in the throes of its first communications crisis.
The new governing coalition of three rightwing parties had agreed, at the reported insistence of the two smaller ones, to scrap a series of hardline anti-smoking measures the previous government had been planning, including controls on how many stores could sell tobacco and a rising legal age of purchase that would mean children born after 2009 would never be able to buy cigarettes.
