Depending on your standpoint, new or increased taxes at budget time are a unwelcome sting, but few bring as little approbation as the new excises on smoking.
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These taxes are seen as principally a weapon in the fight to reduce smoking rates. Cost has proven to be a powerful deterrent, particularly to prospective smokers, and the untold millions saved in the health system further down the track from smoking-related illness need very little justification. But last year’s budget decision will have the result of meaning by 2020 the cost of an average pack of cigarettes will be in excess of $40.
While this could well make Australia one of the one of the most expensive places in the world to smoke, it also makes it one of the more costly luxuries (or vices depending on how you look at it). A pack-a-day smoker for instance, at almost $300 per week, would potentially absorb an entire welfare income or a huge portion of any lower scale wage.
Before the usual embittered clamour about tax gouging begins, it is worth recalling that this excise has a specific intention of decreasing tax revenue by acting as an overall deterrent and lowering smoking rates.
The World Health Organisation describes tobacco taxation as the single most effective way to encourage tobacco users to quit. It might also be argued that three years is not a bad lead in time to make a smoker reassess the monetary incentives.
But in some cases and in particular in regional areas where smoking rates are higher, these taxes are hitting lower income groups harder than anyone else. The issue is that the poor who smoke most and potentially are most dependent are the ones who can least afford the tax hit, have less resources or access to the means to quit and are more likely to forgo other essentials.
There is no doubt all these elements make the incentives of cost even stronger, but it has been argued simply making people suffer has little efficacy (or ethical merit) if it does fail to help them toward a solution. The problem is a price incentive alone doesn’t encourage healthier behaviour even if that is the indirect outcome.
So, rather than just blithely increase these taxes and sit back and collect the revenue, it is high time the federal government was more pro-active in making it easier for these targeted groups to quit; more of this money needs to be targeted at specific programs and communities, assistance for those who need it most.
