Vikki Campion: Vaping crackdown all about tax revenue

Smokers and vapers are such an easy punching bag for the government and they will not miss their opportunity to once again demonise nicotine addicts in the budget, writes Vikki Campion.

If you had to guess which drug would be blitzed in a $737m crackdown in Tuesday’s budget, would it be ice, to which 56 per cent of police detainees test positive, involved in four out of five drug-related hospital admissions and its use attributable to the bulk of crime of those in remand?

Or would it be nicotine vapes that the UK is supplying to stop people smoking and shaving billions of dollars from Australia’s income-tax take? Law enforcement has better things to do than run after kids with popcorn-flavoured vapes; in the hierarchy of evils, they are nowhere near the top. They don’t leave you with an STD, car wreckage or a shovel wound to the head.

Criminalising something doesn’t magically make it go away – otherwise, we wouldn’t have addicts at all. Next week’s move to force vapes further underground will mean it becomes part of Australia’s booming black-market drug trade masterminded by organised crime.

Remove vapes from being sold alongside breath mints, Winnie Golds and iced coffee, and you’ll find it in the same crew as those selling meth rocks and stolen oxycontin. As long as profit and demand exist, someone will sell them. The question to ask is who that will be – the local service station owner is unlikely to moonlight as a drug dealer.

SVapes are being targeted by the government in the upcoming budget. Picture: NCA Newswire / Gaye Gerard. Picture: NCA Newswire / Gaye Gerard

Any nanny-state interventionist will say you should not be taking any drug at all, but our national wastewater monitoring shows our appetite in Australia is insatiable – and most of our drugs come the same way as our vapes – through our borders that miraculously on this one item they are going to fix.

At this point, vaping’s greatest harm is to the tax take, which is why Health Minister Mark Butler is so enthusiastic about its policing.

If Australia’s 1.3 million adult vapers began smoking a pack a day, each paying $29 tax excise a pack, or $10,556 a year, that could add $13bn to the budget. On top of the $14.3bn collected in 2020/21, it would almost double. And Butler is set to kick it up 15 per cent over the next three years to generate another $3.3bn.

Not only does the government make billions from tax excise on cigarettes, but every public servant and politician with super in the Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation also invests in retailers who sell them. If they believe selling cigarettes is so evil, how about they ensure public service superannuation companies do not invest in Coles, Woolworths, IGA, BP, Ampol, Shell, 7/11 or any other retailer?

Health minister Mark Butler. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Kelly Barnes

You are happy to look down on the smoker while you rip them off with taxes, remove their choice to get on the vapes easily, instead forcing them to go to a doctor to get a script and import their own. Those who smoke are overwhelmingly older and poorer. The ones who can least afford it pay the most tax. A 25-cigarette-a-day smoker earning the minimum wage of $812.60 a week will spend nearly 40 per cent of their income on cigarettes before Butler increases excise again.

To be frank, most politicians and people have no problem looking down on the smoker. Addicts with no willpower deserve it, apparently. Trash is easier to target. Poor old smokers can be kicked around, while no one will pick on wealthy suits.

That’s why recreational drug users get state-funded testing in Queensland and the ACT, while Canberrans can legally carry more cocaine on their person than nicotine vape liquid. If you smoke, you are contemptible; take ice and you need compassion.

Saturday Telegraph columnist Vikki Campion. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

Butler’s crackdown is not about chasing drug deals; this is chasing money while kicking the smoker – the person you can enjoy pouring disdain on. No other drug addict has their quitting solution made more complicated to obtain.

There is sympathy for the opiate addict who gets government-funded methadone. Even the ice addict is cushioned by courts granting drug-rehabilitation paths for crimes that coldly calculating non-addicts would rot in jail for. Here, ex-smokers get no sympathy – and there is not an ex-smoker in the country who wants to be back in that nicotine trap. Using the prices of a convenience store in regional NSW that I visited selling illegal vapes and legal cigarettes, one $35 vape worth 3500 puffs is the equivalent of $550 of legal cigarettes.

Since the prescription model was introduced in 2021, the e-cigarette black market has exploded, causing a country-wide youth crisis. They buy cheap flavoured vapes because in the unregulated trade, that’s what is for sale. They are not selling regulated and quality-controlled vapes.

Butler’s approach is not to deal with the problem; it’s to deal with the media conference. It looks so laudable to say you will stamp out a drug when you have had zero success in stamping out ones already there.

It’s bad news for the mums picking up half-used vapes from their teenager’s floor: it’s not going to change. The difference to come is you can know your son or daughter has bought them from a drug dealer – who you can bet has other products for sale.