Taking millions in tax from smokers is hypocritical. Just ban it | Peter Goers

Labor’s high-priced tax attack on smoking worked wonders for health. It’s a shame about the gang wars, writes Peter Goers.

Don’t smoke. Don’t start. If you are a smoker – give up.

I wish I’d never started.

For years now I’ve smoked just one or two a day, down from 30 a day, not for health reasons because we know it’s a slow suicide but because it is ridiculously unaffordable.

I’m now addicted to nicotine chewing gum as a substitute.

Non-smokers are always mortified to learn how expensive tobacco is in Australia.

By law, our country sells the most expensive tobacco in the world. A packet of 20 Marlboro Gold cigarettes costs (are you sitting down?) $57.86.

My brand, Davidoff Gold costs $53.95. In Britain that same packet is $32.77 and in Japan, $4.

About the cheapest packet of 20 you can buy is $35. Roll your own? Well, 25 grams of loose tobacco is $75.

Addicts have to pay this.

Nicotine is regarded as one the most addictive substances on the planet.

It’s more addictive than heroin and at this rate will become more expensive than heroin and other illegal drugs in Australia.

Recently, I was sitting with three smokers and all of them brandished packets of illicit cigarettes. They are readily available. An illegal packet of Marlboro Gold can be bought for between $17 and $27 – very easily. How can smokers resist this bargain?

The then Federal Health Minister, Nicola Roxon introduced a raft of anti-smoking measures in 2011.

Thus, by law, tobacco prices automatically increase bt 12.5 per cent yearly. Tobacco – a completely legal product – could no longer be displayed at point of sale or anywhere.

Nicola Roxon, former health minister turned Bupa board member. Picture: Hollie Adams/The Australian

Tobacco has to be hidden in drawers and cupboards in shops and the entire packet is a health warning.

Even the ancient and celebrated art of the cigar band must be covered.

Where once (in blessed memory) you could import two cartons of duty free cigarettes, that became one carton and now one single packet.

These punitive measures worked. Smoking rates plummeted.

In two generations smoking went from something sophisticated, socially encouraged and ubiquitous to being reviled.

Smokers are now pariahs and we can smoke almost nowhere. Kids once hid their smoking from their parents now parents hide their smoking from their kids.

I’m often wrong but on these pages all those years ago I was right when I asserted that these punitive measures against smoking would lead to crime.

Employees at convenience stores and servos are being held up at knifepoint for tobacco.

Now there’s an epidemic of cheap, illicit tobacco and organised crime is involved and legitimate vendors who won’t pay protection money are having their shops firebombed.

Tobacco has become a street drug.

Vaping has been completely banned mainly, methinks, because governments couldn’t work out how to tax it.

Vaping was hugely successful in getting people off tobacco.

Now that vapes are illegal young people, especially, are taking up smoking and for the first time in years the smoking rates of 18-24 year olds is rising.

The great hypocrisy is that Australian governments make nearly $13bn a year from tobacco which kills people.

Tobacco in Australia is the highest taxed product in the world. A massive three-quarters of the price of a packet of smokes is tax.

Imagine if your $9 glass of beer was taxed at this level. It would cost nearly $40. Imagine if all alcohol (which causes vastly more social and personal damage than tobacco) had to be hidden from view in bottle shops and was completely covered in health warnings. There’d be sly grog everywhere.

In 2011, the only truly honest broker was Senator Chris Back, Liberal WA.

He responded to Nicola Roxon’s regimen by exposing the hypocrisy of governments making a vast fortune from something which kills citizens by calling for a complete tobacco ban.

He suggested Australia become, by law, the first non-smoking country. Of course, there are 13bn reasons why governments oppose this.

Other countries have so-called grandfather clauses so that only people over the age of 40 can buy tobacco. Australia resists this.

Our governments prefer to make money as merchants of death and the punitive measures against tobacco seem to have encouraged crime.

I like smoking. More fool me. I’ll be buried in a flip top coffin … ashes to ashes. More fool me.

If smoking was completely banned – as it should be – I’ll have to finally and happily give up. And so will everyone else.

Senator Lidia Thorpe stages a protest as Britain's King Charles and Queen Camilla attend a Parliamentary reception in Canberra. Picture Victoria Jones/Pool via Reuters

HOT/NOT

HOT

Kym at Battery World, Hilton. Great service.

Teachers

The Hunchback Of Notre Dame at the Shedley and The Boy From Oz at the Arts Theatre. Bravo!

Senator Lidia Thorpe should be thanked and celebrated for truth telling.

Woolworth’s reward program

Agriculture is always more important than mining. You can’t eat yellow cake.

NOT

King Charles III is a foreigner who is the Australian Head Of State.

The Coalition wants to weaken building standards

Parliament House, Canberra serves Anzac cookies. Shocking.

Originally published as Taking millions in tax from smokers is hypocritical. Just ban it | Peter Goers