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Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health 727 © 2022 The Authors The authors have stated they have no conflicts of interest. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. We have known for more than 70 years about the harms of commercial tobacco use, as and when used as directed: commercial tobacco use kills.1,2 Commercial tobacco has been used as a weapon of colonisation, embedded and exploited by colonisers in first encounters as a gesture of goodwill, and soon becoming a valued commodity; resulting in dangerous implications for Indigenous peoples. In Australia, commercial tobacco provided a link to trade and economic engagement,3-5 used in lieu of wages to elicit manual labour and to adopt European ways of living.4-7 Fuelled by the Tobacco Industry,8 the tobacco epidemic is still thriving today and results in smoking being the single largest cause of preventable death and disease in Australia9 and New Zealand, and a key driver of racialised health inequities.10 Still, there has been remarkable progress in tobacco control including significant declines in tobacco use, despite the ever present colonial presence, showing the ‘art of the possible’.11,12,p.1 The Smokefree Aotearoa 2025 Action Plan what is it and what does it offer?