Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

The BulletinJune 17, 2025

Disposable vape ban begins as regulations tighten again

Contributing writer
Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller
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Starting today, single-use vapes are outlawed, advertising and displays severely restricted, and promotions banned. The new rules have young vapers in their sights, writes Catherine McGregor in today’s extract from The Bulletin.

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Strict new vaping rules kick in today

From today, it is illegal to sell or supply disposable vapes in Aotearoa, as sweeping new restrictions on how vaping products are marketed and displayed also come into force. General retailers like dairies can no longer display vapes at the counter, vape stores must keep all products out of public view, and online retailers are barred from showing images of vaping gear. Promotions, loyalty schemes and giveaways are banned. RNZ’s Nik Dirga has all the details here.

These changes build on a first wave of reforms introduced in December, including stiffer penalties for selling to minors and location restrictions near schools. Associate health minister Casey Costello said the changes are designed to target the cheap, brightly packaged disposables favoured by teenagers. “We are getting rid of vapes that are most popular among young people, and that can only be positive,” she said.

Experts cautiously optimistic but stress enforcement

Public health researchers have welcomed the new measures, comparing them to past initiatives to reduce youth smoking. “Logically, parallel measures that greatly reduce young people’s exposure to vaping products will have a similar effect, helping put vapes ‘out of sight, and out of mind’,” according to a briefing paper published by the Public Health Communication Centre.

One of the ban’s targets is the psychological hold of disposables on young people. Talking to The Spinoff’s Alex Casey in 2022, fashion student Jessica Kitchen observed that her peers prefer them because they “can kid themselves they’re not addicted” when they’re not buying refillable vapes. However, experts agree that enforcement will make or break the policy. “Youth vaping rates in New Zealand are among the highest in the world,” Dr Jude Ball, one of the briefing paper’s authors, told The Post’s Stewart Sowman-Lund (paywalled). “If these measures are going to work, the Government needs to implement robust enforcement and monitoring to ensure the law delivers on its promise.”

Vape waste: a growing environmental crisis

The ban on disposables is not just about public health. Around 844 million vapes are discarded globally each year, according to a UN report based on 2020 data. Five years later, the real number is likely even larger. In New Zealand, has vape litter become disturbingly common, with beach clean-ups reporting a sharp rise in vape and e-cigarette components. These products are an e-waste nightmare: each device combines toxic nicotine residue, plastic, and lithium-ion batteries that can spark fires in rubbish trucks or leach chemicals into the environment, Alex Casey wrote. While industry-led recycling initiatives like Vapo’s VapeCycle exist, they remain niche. For most users, there’s no easy way to safely dispose of vapes.

Comparing the NZ and Australian approach

While the rules on buying and selling vapes in New Zealand are now a lot tighter, they’re still weak compared to Australia. There, vape sales are restricted to pharmacies, with customers required to speak to a pharmacist about their vape use before purchase. Vapes are sold in plain packaging, and the only available flavours are mint, menthol and tobacco.

While most Australian health experts support the strict anti-vaping regulations, some warn they could backfire. A recent University of Queensland study found New Zealand’s more permissive regulations may have driven faster declines in smoking rates than the Australian model. Between 2016 and 2023 adult daily smoking rates in New Zealand dropped by 10% per year, while Australia’s decline was only half that. “The larger decline in smoking in New Zealand closely mirrors vaping rates: in 2023, 9.7% of New Zealand adults vaped daily, compared to only 3.5% of Australian adults,” said emeritus professor Wayne Hall from UQ’s National Centre for Youth Substance Abuse Research.​

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A hand holds a surgical tool above a blue cloth covered with various surgical instruments; an orange vertical banner on the right reads "THE BULLETIN.
High levels of outsourcing will prompt an exodus of medical professionals from the public system, senior doctors warn. (Photo: Getty Images)

The BulletinJune 16, 2025

Huge rise in surgery outsourcing prompts alarm among doctors

Contributing writer
A hand holds a surgical tool above a blue cloth covered with various surgical instruments; an orange vertical banner on the right reads "THE BULLETIN.
High levels of outsourcing will prompt an exodus of medical professionals from the public system, senior doctors warn. (Photo: Getty Images)
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The government’s focus on elective surgery wait times has driven thousands of outsourced operations – and fresh warnings about the risks of draining public sector expertise, writes Catherine McGregor in today’s extract from The Bulletin.

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Health targets to be enshrined in law

The government has unveiled sweeping amendments to the Pae Ora (Healthy Futures) Act, the 2022 law that dissolved district health boards in favour of a national system, RNZ reports. Health minister Simeon Brown says that “after years of bureaucracy and confusion, the health system lost its focus”, and the amendments will help anchor patient outcomes at the heart of decision-making. Under the changes, infrastructure delivery will become a core statutory function of Health New Zealand, and oversight of Hauora Māori structures will be clarified. Perhaps most importantly, the national health targets – which were scrapped by Labour in 2018 before being resurrected by the coalition – will be put into law.

Outsourcing to meet surgical goals

To help hit the target of 95% of elective surgeries delivered within four months by 2030, the government last week announced it had funded nearly 10,000 extra procedures since January – most of them through private hospitals. Health NZ’s plan is to outsource up to 20,000 low-complexity cases such as hip replacements, cataracts and hernias.

What may be good news for suffering patients is bad news for the public health system, many medical staff say. Last month RNZ reported on a Health NZ memo to the minister warning that the high level of outsourcing would hasten an exodus of medical professionals from the public system. Speaking to Morning Report, Auckland radiologist Colleen Bergin echoed that sentiment. “This will send the workforce into private. The pay is better, the parking is better, the transport is better, everything is better.”

Meanwhile anaesthetists warned that siphoning off low-complexity surgeries could dramatically slow the rate at which trainees accrue the requisite number of training hours, and there’s currently no system in place to have them train in private hospitals.

Who really benefits from outsourcing?

While outsourcing may bring quick wins on the government’s elective surgery scoreboard, critics argue it’s worsening the core problems. Writing in Newsroom, Ian Powell, former head of the Association of Salaried Specialists, says the approach ignores the main pressure point – chronic workforce shortages – while pumping taxpayer funds into for-profit hospitals and incentivising top specialists to shift their hours into the private sector.

In some cases, surgeons and anaesthetists are now being paid thousands per shift to take on extra weekend work through in-sourcing arrangements in their own public hospitals. “It beggars belief how much cash is being thrown around,” one anaesthetist, told Powell, who found that some in the sector could earn up to $15,000 for a single day as a private contractor. Powell argues the result is a system in which public hospitals are left with the more difficult cases and less capacity to treat them.

Primary care ‘second among equals’

While hospitals and wait times dominate headlines, the primary care sector remains underfunded and politically sidelined, GPs say. A recent study showed that despite years of political rhetoric about its importance, primary care has received a flat share of the health budget – just 5.4% on average over the past 15 years, far below the OECD average. Speaking to Mariné Lourens in The Press (paywalled), Christchurch GP Buzz Burrell said the visibility of hospital wins makes them more attractive to ministers. “It looks good if they fund a raft of very expensive drugs. It looks good if they fund more surgeries.” In contrast, “if primary care is doing its job brilliantly, it’s invisible.”

Asked to respond, the health minister said primary care was a “key priority”, pointing to recent announcements including new clinical placements for overseas-trained doctors to work in primary care, extra doctor training places at medical schools and a new 24-hour telehealth service.

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