Leading public health researchers have stressed the importance of governments setting a date for the end of cigarettes sales through retailers, reports The Guardian.

A survey conducted by the Victorian Cancer Council and published in the Medical Journal of Australia (MJA) showed that 52.8 per cent of the respondents were in favour of banning the sale of cigarettes in retail outlets such as supermarkets.
“Sometimes the public is ahead of the policy,” associate professor Coral Gartner, an international expert in tobacco control policy with the University of Queensland, responded to the results. Gartner and her colleagues are calling on governments to move beyond current measures such as plain packaging and set a date for banning the retail sale of cigarettes and find new ways of boosting revenue without relying on tobacco excise taxes, reports The Guardian.
The researchers say that cigarettes do not meet consumer product safety standards and argue that other products that do not are removed from retail.
“It is normal for governments to remove unsafe products such as contaminated food, asbestos, and lead paint from the market,” said Gartner.
She went on to say that Australia needs to look to other countries such as the Netherlands, who have passed laws preventing supermarkets from selling cigarettes from 2024 or New Zealand where proposed new measures include significantly reducing the number of tobacco retail outlets and possibly removing nicotine from cigarettes.
“We are expecting the New Zealand government to announce their smoke-free action plan in the next few weeks, and the policies that they have consulted on are really innovative and make Australia look like we are lagging behind,” Gartner said.
“The government will continue to work with state and territory governments to explore a range of new evidence-based measures to further reduce smoking prevalence having regard to both supply reduction and demand reduction measures,” a spokesperson for the federal Department of Health told The Guardian.