Abstract
The results of a Health Coalition Aotearoa survey of political parties on the priority prevention for tobacco, alcohol, unhealthy food and public health infrastructure has found generally the parties are deeply split along ideological grounds. This is despite the evidence pointing to the
savings in lives and health dollars from prevention measures. These three harmful products are responsible for almost a third of Aotearoa New Zealand’s health burden and demand serious, evidence-based policy action.
Ahead of the 2023 Election, Health Coalition Aotearoa (HCA) has developed its top prevention priorities for reducing harm from tobacco, alcohol, and unhealthy food and strengthening public health infrastructure. Our four Expert Panels on those topics identified 12 prevention priorities for the next term of government by scoping the existing literature, tapping into national and international content expertise and experience, and understanding the current policy contexts. These agreed priorities are published in our Prevention Brief 2023.
We surveyed political parties currently in parliament about their level of support for the 12 priority policy areas. The scale we provided for rating was: very supportive; generally supportive; neutral/undecided; generally unsupportive; not supportive at all. In addition, there was space
for parties to respond with any comments or other priority actions they have for these priority prevention areas. All parties returned responses, although National failed to answer the survey on alcohol policies despite multiple requests to the health and justice spokespeople.
There was a marked diversity in the level of support for HCA’s priority policy areas from the political parties. The responses fell largely in line with the left/right political spectrum with Te Pāti Māori and the Green party largely being very supportive and ACT being very unsupportive.
Labour and National responded with a variety of levels of support.