By Christopher Kennedy
It’s time Labor woke up and cut the cigarette excise.
The steep successive rises in tobacco tax have not delivered the public-health outcome that was promised. Instead they have created a thriving black market. Illicit cigarettes now arrive by the tonne, undercutting licensed retailers and flooding the streets with cheap product. The result is more organised crime, more violence around distribution networks, and a growing sense that the official system has simply been priced out of existence. Australia’s long-standing image of itself as an isolated island that can control what comes in has taken a visible knock; the supply lines from Asia are clearly open and efficient.
There is a certain irony here. One Nation once ran on the idea that greater openness to Asia would bring problems Australia was unprepared for. On this particular issue, that prediction has proved uncomfortably accurate.
I am not an advocate for smoking. I am, however, someone who lives with schizophrenia, and I have yet to meet another person with the same diagnosis who has managed to quit for good. Nicotine is one of the few reliable tools many of us have for managing symptoms, focusing attention, or simply getting through the day. When the government repeatedly raises the price of that tool far beyond the reach of people on disability support or low incomes, the message received is simple: Labor does not care about this group. The mentally ill already feel under-represented. Adding a policy that treats their coping mechanism as a revenue stream only deepens that alienation – at a time when every vote will matter.
The contradiction is glaring. On one side stands the medical establishment, which works hard to discourage smoking while the state continues to collect enormous sums from the remaining legal market. On the other side sits a large, angry, and largely ignored constituency of smokers – many of them dealing with serious mental illness – who are heading into the next election in no mood to forgive.
And then there are the children. No serious person wants kids to take up smoking. The single most effective way to prevent that is for them to grow up in smoke-free homes. That responsibility belongs first and foremost to parents. A coherent smoking policy should therefore centre on education, support for parents who want to quit, and realistic pathways for those who cannot, rather than on endlessly extracting money from the poorest adults. The price increases of the last decade have demonstrably failed to achieve the stated goal of protecting the next generation; they have mainly shifted consumption underground and left the most vulnerable feeling punished.
If Labor is serious about both public health and social fairness, it needs to confront the evidence on the ground: the black market is winning, the revenue model is feeding crime, and a significant group of voters has noticed. Cutting the excise would not be a surrender to smoking. It would be an admission that the current approach has produced perverse results and that a different balance is required.
See also
Coalition walks away after decades of bipartisanship in tobacco control policy
Prohibitive Puffing: How Australia’s Tobacco Excise Produced Crime
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So where are these illicit tobacco products coming from? And who are the lobbyists who want to expand the market that health professionals tried so hard to eliminate? Where does the money trail lead to? Surely illegal importation is an issue for the AFP – state police are powerless to combat it.
Thanks Christopher for an article that treats smokers gently. There is certainly a strong connection between smoking and self-medication of mental illness.
Oh dear ….. check out the biochemistry of nicotine addiction, it does not require about 4,000 carcinogenic compounds that occur in manufactured tobacco that cause the huge cost to the health system.
From hard family experience, death by emphysema and/or lung cancer is long, lingering and bloody painful. Naturally government should discourage cigarette consumption, is is simply bad business!!
Excise revenue from tobacco is about $600 million per year, compared to the cost of repairing the damage to smoking voters of about $3,500 million per year in ”mitigating” the impact of cigarettes. This data has been known by the BIG TOBACCO corporations for 60+ years!!
The current position requires the AFP to get off their corporate backsides and permanently close all the illicit tobacco shops, intercept the trade at the border, and jail the Australian resident middle class operators.
I agree with NE Cocky, this is an issue of stamping out criminal activities not reducing excise.
I’m not in favour of promoting the use of nicotine products for self medication be it for anxiety or other mental health conditions, but if medically recommended then surely legal vapes would be preferable to cigarettes?
Adults aged 18 and over can purchase therapeutic vapes directly from participating pharmacies without a doctor’s prescription. This includes Nicotine vapes as regulated therapeutic goods.
Hear, Hear to New England Cocky and Terry Mills. The criminals who run the illicit drug drugs, whether it be tobacco or Cocaine, or any other, avoid paying the taxes and other imposts on the drugs they trade in, the users are supporting criminal gangs.
And yes, I agree with Christopher, that some smokers smoke for the therapeutic benefits they seek from the drug. Perhaps tobacco can become a prescribed drug, like pain killers and other products which when ‘self-medicated’ can have severe impacts on long term health… and the same can apply to other illicit drugs, oh and they are available in one form or another through the pharmaceutical industry, but in controlled dosages.
The most successful actions taken to reduce smoking was through advertising the health effects of smoking…. the QUIT campaign comes to mind, as well as the messages on tobacco packaging. It appears the uptake of vaping and smoking is with young people, perhaps some targeted advertising may help a little.
The last thing we need to do is to criminalise users, whether it be tobacco, alcohol or other drugs, but to ensure that the products used are of a controlled quality thereby minimising harm.
FFS, we’re finally introducing Drug Testing at Youth activities, does that condone illicit drug taking? LETS NOT FORGET: Tobacco and Alcohol are still legal drugs, which have been utilised by communities for thousands of years. Who the F*** are these moralistic Anti-Smoking Lobby Groups apart from the (understandable) Medical Practice and the Christo-Fascist Superiority cults?
I as a smoker also object to the disgusting greed for wealth and material possession that renders less fortunate individuals in poverty. But that’s never going to get an Excise Tax is it?
Let’s face it, the government is addicted to Nicotine Tax as we are to Nicotine.
There was one memorable Anti-Smoker… I think you know who he was, and he managed to murder millions of non-smokers along with the few nicotine addicts in his Final Solution.
There has always been and there will always be drugs for those who don’t quite fit the system, but to exploit the poorest of addicts with a crippling tax, is just another display of government inability to tackle real tax cheats and make up for it by attacking those who are least able to Quit!
Bingo, Mark.
I believe in the Democratic legal system of Law and Order: But by Christ the Australian Government’s tax on smokers is far worse than the TollPuddle Martyrs ever had to face!!! (Not that I’ll vote for them but I can see why a plethora of angry anti-establishment right wing voters will unseat the lazy entitlement of the ALP in the next election.) Maybe it’s time?
@ Mark Shields: A smoker who is a little bit touchy about his self-destructive habit?? How sad!!
FACT 1: The US BIG TOBACCO industry has known since about 1960 that smoking destroys health.
FACT 2: SMOKING INTRODUCES ABOUT 4,000 CARCENOGENIC COMPOUNDS into the body via the lungs.
FACT 3: Smokers die slowly & painfully, not only from emphysema and lung cancer but the severity of many other diseases is made worse, require longer treatment and so more cost to the smoker, and also their families.
FACT 4: The cause of nicotine dependency is a shortage of the neuro-transmitter chemical acetyl choline that has exactly the same physical structure as nicotine (chemical homologue), and will fill the shortage …..for the about 20 minutes duration of the post-smoke high. Then the supply wanes and the depressive feelings return.
So, you appear to believe that given independently confirmed scientific evidence that smoking damages your personal health, that you are sensible to continue smoking so that your family can attend to your bed-ridden needs in your decrepit old age. Committing life long suicide is rarely a recommended procedure.
Yes, I have never smoked by choice …. because when I was a teenager my mother would smoke 100 cigarettes a day, gave up cold turkey in 1988 and never smoked up to her death in 2006 …..from having lungs that looked like she had been hit in the chest by a close range shot gun blast.
The tobacco excise earns about $600 million per year and the cost of repairing the damage caused by smoking costs about $3,500 million per year, which is hardly a satisfactory investment in public health.
Everything about Government policy is a contradiction!
We also had the same round robin arguments regarding Marijuana for health and pain management and it’s pretty simple; Government hates competition hence the regulatory rules and revenue raising rubbish that takes it away from where it belongs.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jvp.13163