The greater use of "vaping starter kits" is among the government's plans for a final push to achieve its smokefree 2025 goal.
Associate Health Minister Casey Costello announced the Smokefree 2025 action plan was a "reinvigoration" of efforts.
There would be no new funding, or products.
"We believe the $24 million budget that exists will be sufficient to fund the work we're doing, that's why we're really focused on ensuring we prioritise the things that are working and drive a greater level of accountability about what is being delivered.
"Getting to Smokefree 2025 will require effort on key intervention points along the smokefree continuum... That is reducing smoking uptake, increasing quit attempts, improving access to quit support, and supporting people to stay smokefree."
Costello said "we took our eye off the ball" in the last year, but the existing $24m funding was enough to achieve the goal.
"There's a missed product that's already being used, introducing vaping kits as starter kits. So it wasn't being uniformly provided across the board.
"(Some quit smoking providers) were funding them themselves, because they recognised that they were a good opportunity to get people through the door, so that's one of the things that we'll be looking at."
Costello said research showed vaping caused 5 percent of the harm that smoking did.
"We're talking about reduced harm."
They would also be looking to increase the number of referrals to quit smoking providers from the health system, she said.
"That had kind of dropped away, so that's a big part."
Costello was adamant the 2025 goal could be achieved.
"We need to have 80,000 people quit, roughly, 80,000 quit over the next year. We have achieved those numbers previously so yeah, I think we can."
And when you looked at younger people, the associate minister believed it was already reached.
"15-17-year-olds, less than 1 percent smoking, under 24-year-olds, 4.2 percent smoking. So in terms of that target audience, the smokefree generation, I would suggest that we're there."
That's at odds with the Annual Health Survey, released this week, which showed daily and current smoking rates failed to decrease from the year prior for the first time in a decade.
Vape-Free Kids NZ co-founder Charyl Robinson said they were concerned about the lack of information being provided about the harm caused by alternative tobacco products.
"Nobody wants people smoking... it just seems that every time the default reaction of this government seems to be to turn to the very people that have caused the problem, for alternatives."
She said vaping and other products did cause harm.
"There seems to be this real effort to hide that."
The government needed fulsome evidence when making these decisions, Robinson said.
She said claims vaping was 95 percent less harmful than smoking at been "fairly widely debunked".
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