Most smokers in Australia think that a September 1 excise tax increase was a tax grab by a greedy government aimed at exploiting and punishing smokers for their addiction rather than a genuine attempt to reduce smoking rates, according to a story at news.com.au.
The story, by Colin Mendelsohn, the chairman of the Australian Tobacco Harm Reduction Association and Associate Professor of the School of Public Health and Community Medicine, University of New South Wales, said that cigarette prices had doubled in Australia since 2008 and were now the highest in the world.
Increasing tobacco taxes was a proven strategy for reducing smoking rates, Mendelsohn said, but it seemed to be having a diminishing effect at these ‘stratospheric levels’. Despite annual price increases, there had been no significant fall in Australian smoking rates from 2013 to 2016, according to the three-yearly National Drug Strategy Household Surveys.
Tobacco excise had delivered a massive $12.5 billion to government coffers during the past financial year. However, this tax was particularly cruel at a time of zero wage growth. High prices exploited the most marginalised members of the community, such as low-income groups, Indigenous people and people with substance-use and mental-illness issues.
Another unwanted effect of high prices had been the exponential growth in the illicit tobacco industry. Illicit tobacco from smuggling and illicit tobacco crops made up 15-28 percent of the total tobacco market and funded organized crime and terrorism.
‘Australia’s tobacco control policy has always focused on telling smokers to just quit, also known as the ‘quit or die’ approach,’ Mendelsohn said…
‘However, there is now a viable alternative: vaping. Nicotine vaporisers (e-cigarettes) provide the nicotine that smokers are addicted to but without the tar and carbon monoxide that cause almost all the harm to health. Importantly they also replicate the smoking ritual and provide some of the pleasure and habit that makes quitting so difficult.’
There must be another way
