Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of the Excise Tariff Amendment (2009 Measures No. 1) Bill 2009 and the Customs Tariff Amendment (2009 Measures No. 1) Bill 2009. The excise tariff bill increases the rate of excise in the Excise Tariff Act 1921 that applies to other excisable beverages not exceeding 10 per cent by volume of alcohol, commonly referred to as ready-to-drink beverages or alcopops, from $39.36 per litre of alcohol content to $66.67 per litre of alcohol content with effect on and from 27 April 2008. The amendments also increase the excise equivalent duty on the relevant imported equivalents of these products in the Customs Tariff Act 1995 to the same rate.

In 2004-05 the estimated social costs of alcohol abuse in Australia were over $15 billion. Those were estimated costs and that was five years ago. I would expect that today the costs would be much higher, with alcohol abuse featuring prominently in a number of areas: homelessness; domestic violence; marriage break-ups; general violence at nightclubs, front bars and other social venues; sporting events, amongst spectators, with many venues now banning alcohol consumption; child abuse and sexual assault cases; and motor vehicle accidents, where we hear, over and over again, that alcohol was a contributing factor. Alcohol abuse also featured highly in relation to the social problems in Indigenous communities and the need for government intervention in the Northern Territory. One has only to pick up today’s Age to see the headline on the front page ‘Judge’s plea for new Northern Territory booze curbs: alcohol crisis beyond comprehension’. There is substantial and overwhelming evidence that alcohol causes so much social grief.

The impact of alcopops drinks is most notable amongst young people, with binge drinking now a major social problem. It is a problem frequently referred to as an epidemic, with the alcopops industry admitting that their sales have increased by 250 per cent since 2000. When the measures in this legislation were introduced by the Rudd government, I asked a number of people who were associated with drug prevention programs in the Makin electorate—people such as Jo Baxter from Drug Free Australia—about alcohol abuse amongst young people. There was a universal response from all the people I spoke to that alcohol abuse amongst young people was the issue they were all most concerned about and that they supported this legislation. These are people who have to personally deal with alcohol abuse cases. They see the problem firsthand and speak from experience.

As the Minister for Health and Ageing outlined in her second reading speech on this legislation, there is widespread support for this measure from across a diverse sector of society that has expertise and credibility on this issue, yet the coalition continues to oppose this bill. In the face of overwhelming evidence, one has to ask why. One can only conclude that the opposition wants to protect the interests of the big distillers.

In my view, raising the alcopops tax achieves three important objectives. Firstly, it closes a loophole created by the previous government and now being exploited by the big distillers. Secondly, it increases the cost of alcopops drinks, with the intended objective of reducing consumption of those drinks—an objective that is working, with tax office figures showing that, in the first nine months since the increased costs came into effect, alcopops sales have dropped by 35 per cent, when compared with the previous year. Thirdly, people consuming those drinks will, rightly, make a greater contribution towards the social costs of the matters that I referred to earlier as being borne by society and related to alcohol abuse.

Given the opposition’s stance on this issue, one can only conclude that the loophole that they created in the original legislation was deliberate. If it was not then logically they should support the legislation. Or have they simply succumbed to the pressure from the large distillers? The large distillers have themselves embarked on a major campaign to convince us that the alcopops legislation will not have the desired effect. I am sure all MPs have received the distillers’ many publications refuting the effects of this legislation. The sales figures, however, speak for themselves. Clearly, the government’s strategy is working. If the strategy was not working, the distillers would not be concerned and would not be spending large sums of money campaigning against this measure.

We are dealing with an issue that can have a devastating effect on the lives of young people. It is a serious issue and to trivialise it as simply a tax-raising measure, as the opposition and the large distillers are doing, is a sad reflection of their lack of concern for young people. Alcohol destroys lives, and young people are particularly at risk. We know that young people are the main consumers of ready-to-drink products. I do not believe there is any disagreement about that.

This legislation was referred to the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs on 15 May 2008, and the committee’s report was presented to the Senate in June 2008. The Senate committee looked into this matter after a number of issues that opposition members say they are concerned about had already been put on the table. I point out that it was not government members who had the majority numbers in that committee; there were members from all parties. In fact, whilst it is true that the coalition members prepared a dissenting report, it was not just government members who put forward the recommendations of the final report. Firstly, I note that the Senate committee supported the recommendation to introduce the excise increase on alcopops. Secondly, I note some of the expert comments in submissions made to the Senate inquiry with respect to the effects of alcohol on young people. I want to quote a number of comments in the committee report. The National Health and Medical Research Council noted:

… both young people under 18 years of age and young adults up to the age of 25 continue to be greater risk takers than older adults, but still have poorly developed decision-making skills, which are reflected in the high levels of injuries sustained in these groups. Alcohol affects brain development in young people thus drinking, particularly ‘binge-drinking’, at any time before brain development is complete (which is not until around 25 years of age) may adversely affect later brain function.

It went on:

The Australian Medical Association … noted that excess alcohol consumption is ‘an issue of public health significance leading to an unacceptably high level of sickness and social disruption’. They added that the drinking behaviour of teenagers and adolescents was of particular concern as:

• young people were often involved in risk taking behaviours with little understanding of the potential effects of these choices;
• teenagers and adolescents were inexperienced with drinking and were at an earlier stage of brain and body development; and
• there was evidence that early onset of drinking was associated with long term alcohol consumption levels into adulthood.

The report on the prevention of substance abuse, risk and harm in Australia by the Ministerial Council on Drug Strategy found:

Alcohol causes the deaths and hospitalisation of slightly more children and young people than do all the illicit drugs combined and many more than tobacco … In other words, alcohol alone causes more hospitalisation and deaths of young people than all of the other illicit drugs put together.

The report also states:

These deaths are almost invariably caused by either intentional or unintentional injuries.

The Royal Australasian College of Physicians told the committee:

Young people are particularly vulnerable to the harmful effects of alcohol because of the combination of inexperience of drinking, and the frequent combination of high-risk drinking with high-risk activity and potential accidental injury.

The committee report noted:

Emeritus Professor Ian Webster of the Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Foundation (AER) advised the Committee that evidence showed the earlier young people started drinking, the more likely they were to have ‘continuing problems around alcohol and other drugs and to have subsequent mental health problems and that this in itself justified concern about RTDs and young people in general’.

The report went on to state:

Research conducted by the National Drug Research Institute (NDRI) showed that alcohol was a major contributing cause of death and hospitalisation for young people, with the majority of alcohol related harms caused by episodes of drinking to intoxication. It revealed that—

and these are some of the critical, stark and frightening statistics—

• in the ten years from 1993-2002, an estimated 2 643 young Australians aged 15 to 24 died from alcohol attributable injury and disease due to risky/high risk drinking (about 15 per cent) of all deaths in that age group;
• from 1993-94 to 2001-02 there were an estimated 101 165 alcohol attributable hospitalisations for young people, accounting for one-in-five (about 22%) of all hospitalisations in that age group.

That is the extent of the alcohol problem amongst young people. It is a serious issue, and those figures speak for themselves.

So I come into this place and ask the question: why do opposition members say that they share the government’s concern about binge drinking yet oppose this legislation? Firstly, I say this to them: the statistics that I have just read out were available to them some years ago—in the years that they were in government. They had those facts and figures. If they share the government’s concern about binge drinking, what did they do about it? They did absolutely nothing. It might be fair to say that they were not aware of the problem, but the figures were produced in reports that were made available when they were well in government. They had plenty of time to act before they were turfed out of government, but they did nothing, so, when they come in here and say that they share the concern about binge drinking, their actions speak for themselves. They will be judged on their actions, not their words.

Secondly, I say to the opposition: if they want to come in here and oppose this legislation, they should not rely on information which is flawed and which has been provided by the big distillers. It is the big distillers who have a vested interest in preventing this legislation from going through. If you want to come in here and put up opposing arguments, at least use independent material, not that provided by the very beneficiaries of the situation as it currently stands. Thirdly, I go back to the question of the loophole and say this to them: I have not heard one single member of the opposition come into this chamber and say whether they believe that there is a loophole or not. They avoid that question. Let them answer the question: is there a loophole there? If there is then it would seem to me that, if for no other reason whatsoever than to close the loophole, they should be supporting this legislation. It is good legislation and I commend it to the House.

Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is with pleasure that I join the debate on the Excise Tariff Amendment (2009 Measures No. 1) Bill 2009 and the Customs Tariff Amendment (2009 Measures No. 1) Bill 2009. On 26 April last year the government gazetted increases to the rate of excise and excise equivalent customs duty applying on selected beverages from $39.36 to $66.67 per litre of alcohol content. It is worth noting that the Australian Taxation Office and the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service have been collecting the excise and excise equivalent customs duty at the higher rate since 27 April 2008. I note that the Minister for Health and Ageing, in her second reading speech, commented:

No-one who reads the newspaper or watches television can be unaware of the problems caused by binge drinking. Community leaders, police and health experts alike agree that action needs to be taken.

I say from the outset that I believe that the minister is well intentioned in her attempts to address the plague of binge drinking and the associated violence. I say that most genuinely; I believe the minister is very concerned by the escalation in violence that we have seen on our streets. A lot of that has been related to the overindulgence in alcohol. What I do say, though, is that the stated objective of this legislation, which is to reduce the incidence of binge drinking and the associated violence, although well intended, has been misguided. The previous speaker just claimed that the strategy is working because sales of ready-to-drink alcohol products have dropped. But that is a flawed argument when the strategy is meant to curb binge drinking. Not one shred of evidence has been presented that in the period of the last 10 months there has been any success at all in terms of reducing the incidence of binge drinking in our community.

The success of this strategy should be measured in terms of less violence on our streets, fewer hospitalisations of drunks or less binge drinking amongst young people—not purely by whether the sales of any drink products have dropped. I will make the point further on that I believe that a lot of the problem is that people being involved in the excessive drinking of alcohol is more of a cultural issue. They are simply substituting one product for another and continuing to overindulge, and the increase in the alcopops tax is really just a tax-grab masquerading as a health initiative. Unfortunately, we have not seen any evidence to suggest that the alcopops tax has resulted in improved social behaviour, particularly in relation to young people and the incidence of binge drinking. There has not been a shred of evidence to suggest that this has actually occurred. People are still getting drunk, they are still causing the same level of mayhem in our community and they are unfortunately using different forms of alcohol. Even worse, I fear many are resorting to illicit drugs—in particular, amphetamines.

Doubts were expressed from day one as to whether this excise increase would actually work and, as I said, the government has no proof thus far that it has been effective. In introducing this legislation, the minister has attempted to address what I think everyone on all sides of this House would agree is a particularly important issue in our community. But it is an issue which is very difficult to address, and it is not going to be resolved by simply increasing the tax on one product. I fear that there is a drinking culture deeply embedded in Australian society. I am no wowser by any stretch of the imagination. I enjoy a drink—in fact, there are occasions when I enjoy several drinks. Some of them are ready-to-drink products and some are red wine or beer. But I think that I am fairly typical of a lot of people in our community in saying that the imposition of a tax on one particular form of alcohol, increasing the cost, will result in substitution. I have seen it amongst many of my colleagues, friends and family members. Instead of reducing their alcohol consumption, they have simply substituted one form with another.

Drinking is a cultural issue in Australia, and one of the areas that the government and our society need to tackle with far more enthusiasm is the leadership provided by our role models in the community. If we are serious about addressing cultural binge drinking, we have to start addressing it at a much more public level. I refer, particularly, to some of the buffoons that you see on our various football shows. In Victoria it is the AFL Footy Show and in New South Wales and Queensland it is the rugby league Footy Show. I have seen many occasions on which public drunkenness is actually celebrated on these shows. I have seen reporters associated with the shows attending awards nights intoxicated, and they think it is a heck of a joke to be interviewing someone else who is suitably inebriated. If we are serious about addressing the issue of binge drinking, we will need to start tackling these issues in a far more aggressive manner and make it very clear that there is a standard of behaviour that we expect from our community leaders and that our sportspeople are among those.

We need to lead by example, not just at that level but also on the home front. These are far more difficult issues than simply increasing a tax. No-one is prepared to talk in any great detail about the example we ourselves set in our own homes. Much of the attitude children develop towards alcohol is learnt on the home front, and if we as parents continually rely on alcohol to have a good time it certainly reflects on our children. These are some of the more difficult issues that the government is going to need to at least discuss and consider in its approach to binge drinking, and they go way beyond simply addressing the issue of the alcopops tax.

One of the areas that concern me greatly in regional communities is that we are not offering our young people enough alternatives to attend functions or be involved in community activities which do not involve alcohol. We have a cohort of people—probably aged about 13 to 18—in our community who are faced with a situation where there are very few options of entertainment or activities which do not involve some level of alcohol. Most community groups and sporting organisations are in a situation where they rely on sales of alcohol to fund their organisations. On the one hand, government—not just this government but many governments—refuses to fund sporting organisations to the full extent that is required for them to improve their facilities and run their organisations but, on the other hand, we tell them they must be involved in the responsible service of alcohol. It is a catch-22 situation for the sporting clubs. They need to make a quid and they choose to make it at the bar because that is the most likely place they are going to make it. Government suggests that they are doing something wrong in doing that but is not prepared to come to the party and help fund their activities. It is a state and federal government issue and it is something that is going to require a more coordinated effort in the months and years ahead. It is inevitable that the sporting clubs, whether they be football clubs, cricket clubs or surf-lifesaving clubs, will encourage greater alcohol sales because it is in their interests to maintain the activities of their clubs.

My other concern with alcopops, as I said earlier, is the issue of substitution. The first time I received feedback after this legislation was announced was when I was right in the middle of the Gippsland by-election campaign. I was in one of the shopping centres in one of my towns and a mother came up to me and said that she had caught her son and three of his mates at a party. They were taking mouthfuls of bourbon from a bottle and then taking a bit of Coke with it, saying that they were mixing their own drinks. It may be a funny story but, on reflection, it indicates that these young people had just substituted their previous product—they used to buy a bourbon and Coke type drink—with just mixing their own drinks in their mouths. They were young men, 17- to 18-year-old teenagers, and pretty unsophisticated in terms of their knowledge of alcohol and what they were doing. Certainly there was no measured shot of alcohol involved. It concerns me that what we have seen is simply a replacement.

Unfortunately there is a culture of binge drinking where people drink to harmful levels. At the start of a night—at the start of a party, an occasion or whatever it might be—it is the deliberate intent of these people to get wasted. This is not about which type of alcohol they prefer. They will find the cheapest type of alcohol they can get and they will simply substitute it. While the minister’s attempts to address binge drinking are certainly well intended, I do not believe that the tax increase is actually having any result at all out there in the community. There has not been a shred of evidence presented to the House in the subsequent 10 months that there has been any reduction in the level of violence or the incidence of binge drinking in our community. If we are not prepared to accept the fact that there is a culture out there of people who will just simply substitute whatever product they can get their hands on—the cheaper the better—then we are really missing the point in trying to address this issue at its root cause.

Targeting the ready-to-drink products alone has been particularly unscientific in that regard, and I do not believe it is going to achieve the stated health aims. Common sense indicates to me that people within the community will simply substitute one brand of alcohol for another. I give the example of a club on the South Coast of New South Wales, which I attended prior to the Christmas break, where a bottle of bourbon and Coke was $9. That would be about the cost of three pots or middies—I am not sure what you call them in New South Wales. People were simply not buying that particular product but transferring their choice of alcohol to something else. The concern for me—although I do not have any evidence to support my concern—is that, by pricing these products at these sorts of levels, you may end up encouraging young people to experiment with illicit drugs. I would much prefer that, when my children get to the legal age for consuming alcohol, they consume alcohol which has been produced within strict health guidelines, in comparison to sampling amphetamines which have been cooked up in some criminal’s kitchen or other establishment. It is a real issue for us that ready-to-drink products are being priced at such a level that people may find it more attractive to purchase ecstasy and other types of amphetamines.

When the shadow spokesman spoke earlier this morning, he clearly highlighted that the opposition’s position on this legislation is based on the fact that it is simply bad policy. It is irresponsible of those opposite to suggest that they somehow have a mortgage on empathy with our community or concern in our community in relation to the issue of overindulging in alcohol and the associated violence. It reflects poorly on this chamber if we are always slinging arrows backwards and forwards at each other, when I do believe that there is genuine goodwill on both sides of the House in relation to curbing the incidence of binge drinking and the associated violence that goes with it. If this were a genuine health measure—and I take up this point from the opposition health spokesman—why did it emanate from the finance ministries in the first place and not from the health department? I fear this is more about being a tax grab than anything to do with actually improving health outcomes.

At different times during this debate we have talked about research. Today in the Financial Review there was a report about research by Access Economics—and I acknowledge that the research was commissioned by the Distilled Spirits Industry Council of Australia—which showed ‘that there had been little or no change in the impact of high-risk drinking by young people since the introduction of the increased tax on ready-to-drink products’. It quotes the Access Economics director and health economist, Lynne Pezullo:

If anything, hospitalisation rates of young people due to acute intoxication and harmful use of alcohol worsened in the months following the government’s tax increase.

I do not make that point with any great relish, but it is basically saying that our incidence of alcohol abuse and associated violence—young people placing themselves in harm’s way—has actually increased over the past 10 months. There is no joy in quoting that information from Access Economics. It proves the point that slaying this dragon will be hard and will require more than simply increasing a tax. An article in the Australian also quotes Ms Pezullo as saying:

The analysis showed young people who moved away from the premixed drinks, such as vodka and lemonade or rum and Coke, to other alcohol could end up buying more standard drinks for $20 than before they switched.

That is my genuine fear—that we are simply going to be in a position where young people substitute products and go on their merry way overindulging in alcoholic products.

A question that has been raised in this whole debate is: if the bill is defeated, what will happen to the money raised? I believe hundreds of millions of dollars—in the vicinity of more than $220 million and perhaps up to $345 million—has been raised from this tax grab over the past 10 months. I believe it should be directed to some real programs to curb binge-drinking problems. I hope that, if the bill is defeated, that money can be directly hypothecated back to anti-binge-drinking initiatives—more than just advertising programs, although I do freely acknowledge that that is a good start.

In the contribution to the debate of the Minister for Health and Ageing, she referred to the National Binge Drinking Strategy. The strategy includes $53.5 million, of which $14.4 million is for the community-level initiatives which I referred to before in terms of the culture of binge drinking, $19.1 million is to intervene earlier to assist young people to assume personal responsibility for their binge drinking and $20 million is for an advertising campaign. Each of those in their own right has a great deal of merit, but it is only $53.5 million and we have already supposedly raised in excess of $200 million over the past 10 months from this tax grab.

One of the things I would like to refer to in relation to the National Binge Drinking Strategy is the $14.4 million to invest in community-level initiatives. This highlights the need for sporting codes to be involved. We have the situation in regional areas—and I assume that it pretty much occurs in suburban areas as well—where young men and women interact with adults from a very early age. We have a smaller population base—we need our teenage boys, for example, playing in senior footy teams and we have young girls playing in adult netball teams. They are exposed to the culture of sporting clubs—football, cricket, netball, tennis and even lawn bowls—and alcohol can play a very important part in the whole culture of clubs. I believe that supporting young people through early interaction with adults and giving them an understanding that you can enjoy alcohol responsibly is something that we should aspire to. I do not believe that we are doing anything even near enough in that particular area. I accept that the National Binge Drinking Strategy is doing some work with sporting clubs but I believe we have a long way to go in that regard, particularly in regional areas, where it is such a focus of community activity. We have a real opportunity to show our young people how they can enjoy themselves in that environment without overindulging.

I believe there is a misunderstanding about what is actually happening out there in the community in terms of the impact of this type of tax. The government is basically failing to understand the mentality of some of these binge drinkers. We all acknowledge that there is potential for self-harm and incidents of violence associated with overindulging in alcohol, but simply increasing the tax on one product is not ever going to address the bigger issues that I have already referred to. It is not going to be easy, and I do not envy the minister her task in this regard—neither do I pretend to have solutions at my fingertips, but I think that simply increasing the tax and declaring a war on binge drinking is not going to be the answer.

I am very keen to work with the government in good faith to help reduce the incidence of binge drinking in our community and the violence which is associated with it. It is going to take a lot more than a tax grab, and it is going to take a lot more than simply, to gain a media headline, nice words about declaring war. This is a war that needs to be won very much at a grassroots level: house by house, street by street, town by town and city by city. People are concerned across the spectrum of political life, and our communities are concerned about the incidence of binge drinking and the level of associated violence. We all accept that action is needed, but there are genuine doubts and concerns on my side of the House that the alcopops tax is not the silver bullet which has been presented to us. It is going to take a lot more than simply a tax hike on one alcohol product. Action is going to be needed in advertising and education, which I understand is underway. We need to lead by example in our homes as responsible adults. We need to demand better standards from our television shows and our sporting stars and celebrities. And we need to fund programs to rehabilitate and help those with a drinking problem.

We also need to be supporting those community and sporting clubs I referred to earlier. I will give you a classic example. In the small country town where I live, Lakes Entrance, we organise an annual New Year’s Eve fireworks display. New Year’s Eve in coastal towns of Victoria has been synonymous with a fight night in the past. It has been a night where people have wandered the streets, getting drunk, causing trouble and then waiting for the fireworks at midnight. That has been the typical experience of some of the coastal towns in Victoria. About eight years ago I was involved with my local business and tourism association and we made the decision that we would try to reclaim New Year’s Eve as a family night, so we decided to run an alcohol-free event. We would have a family fireworks display at 9.30 pm and another at midnight. I think this was actually one of the first times that this was done in Australia—to have a 9.30 pm fireworks display to encourage family groups back to the foreshore to enjoy what should have been a night of family entertainment. By making that evening alcohol free we hoped to encourage more family groups to get involved.

The point I would like to make is that we were very successful in organising that event. The police supported us, our local business community supported us and our local council supported us. We have been running that event for the last seven years. The rate of arrests in our community has plummeted. For the last two years we had no arrests whatsoever and we had two the year before that, so it has been very successful in that regard. We have not been able to secure any funding from the state and federal governments to support us in that endeavour on an ongoing basis, so our community raises about $50,000 or $60,000 a year. We do not get any support from the state and federal governments to run an alcohol-free event, a family event, on New Year’s Eve. I make this point more just to emphasise that if we are going to be preaching to our young people about the possibilities of enjoying themselves in an alcohol-free environment, without the temptation to binge drink, we need to put the money up to support the community groups and sporting clubs I mentioned before in their endeavours in that regard. I hasten to add that we have received occasional funding from the Victorian state government after a major flood event. It was more of an economic stimulus that was provided for our town as a one-off payment, but we have not been able to secure any ongoing funding for that type of activity.

This is a complex issue. There are severe social and economic impacts which we are all aware of, but there is a huge human toll involved. I urge the government to continue to pursue this very serious issue, but I just caution that it is going to take a lot more than a tax grab. I assure the government that the National Binge Drinking Strategy is a positive step, but I think that much more needs to be done in relation to excessive drinking.

Jim Turnour (Leichhardt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to support the Excise Tariff Amendment (2009 Measures No. 1) Bill 2009 and the Customs Tariff Amendment (2009 Measures No. 1) Bill 2009. I must admit that I was a bit confused while listening to the contributions from members opposite. The member for Gippsland made some useful contributions to the debate today, but he was having a bit of a bob each way, being a good backbencher.

Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Does that mean that you are a bad backbencher?

Jim Turnour (Leichhardt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

One minute he was saying that the government is just about alcopops tax and that this is just about raiding taxes and the next he was talking about the National Binge Drinking Strategy. That is something that has been introduced by the Rudd government. We have got an overall strategy to tackle binge drinking and this legislation is just a little part of that strategy, but it is a very important part of that strategy.

The member for North Sydney, the shadow Treasurer was interjecting before. The position the opposition are taking is synonymous with positions they are taking on a whole range of different issues. The position the opposition are taking demonstrates how out of touch they are. They are out of touch with the mums and dads, grandparents and young people out there who are really concerned about binge drinking. They want a government to take action. They want a government that has a national strategy to combat binge drinking, a government that will take measures that may be unpopular to special interests in the community but which are the right things to do, and that is what this legislation is about. It is the right thing to do. But the opposition are so out of touch with mums and dads, community leaders, local police and health professionals that they are opposing this legislation in the same way that they opposed the stimulus package and in the same way they will, in the end, oppose our climate change policy. They are out of touch with the general community. They are a rabble over there. This legislation is just another example of their response to us. We are taking proper measures to tackle this very serious issue.

These amendments are very important amendments that will change the way that alcopops are taxed. They will effectively enable alcopops to be taxed at the same rate as spirits. Why should alcopops get a tax break? Why should a drink that is targeted at young people get a tax break? That is what this debate is about. The member for North Sydney, the member for Gippsland and the shadow health spokesman want to give a tax break to alcopops that are targeted at young people. That is why they are out of touch and that is why they are not supported by the mums and dads of this country.

This legislation is only part of an overall measure, as I have said. We have committed—and the Prime Minister did that in March last year—to a National Binge Drinking Strategy that will invest in community level initiatives to confront the culture of binge drinking, particularly in sporting organisations. The member for Gippsland rightly nominated sporting organisations. We need to do more work there. That is what the Prime Minister did and that is what the Minister for Sport did last year in terms of the national strategy—they engaged with sporting codes and leaders in those codes.

This legislation also has measures to assist young people, to ensure that they assume personal responsibility and face up to binge drinking and the impacts that it has in their local communities. Importantly, if we are going to change the culture in this country, we need to get out there and run advertising campaigns. That is what we are doing as part of this National Binge Drinking Strategy. When I was a young bloke—and that is a few years ago now—a lot of people used to drink and drive. Drinking and driving was culturally acceptable, but it is not today. There were fantastic advertising campaigns and fantastic educational campaigns that changed the culture of drinking and driving. We are committed to changing the culture of binge drinking in this country. These measures are just part of an overall strategy, but they are a very important part.

There really is a serious problem. In any given week, approximately one in ten 12- to 17-year-olds is binge drinking or drinking at a risky level. Almost 20,000 girls aged 12 to 15 drink daily or weekly. That is a very, very sad statistic. The number of young women aged 18 to 24 being admitted to hospital because of alcohol has doubled in the last eight years. It is eight years since the Liberal Party changed this excise exemption and gave alcopops a tax break.

Every year, more than three-quarters of a million Australians are physically abused by a person under the influence of alcohol. This is a real problem all across the nation, but it is particularly a problem in my own electorate of Leichhardt, in my own town of Cairns. There are regular newspaper articles about people having their jaws broken or being abused in the street. That reflects the disappointing culture that we have in this nation of binge drinking. That culture starts with young people—and that starts with the influence young people get from older people. But it starts with young people taking that culture on and responding inappropriately when they drink alcohol.

What this tax exemption and the lack of an overall strategy to combat this culture have done is to allow that culture to continue, and we are not prepared to allow that. This legislation makes the drinks that young people—young men, and young women in particular—drink, and which they drink because they are designed to be attractive to them, more expensive.

We know that there are social and economic costs to this drinking culture. The annual social cost in Australia is estimated to be $15 billion. But there are greater economic costs to it as well. People do not go to work. People are injured. The impact on the tourism industry in my local community of inappropriate behaviour is something that is being readily discussed now, because there is real concern about the misuse of alcohol and associated violence in the community tarnishing the name of Cairns as a tourism destination internationally. That is an issue that we are talking about in our local community; it is a real issue, and alcohol plays a part in it. To tackle that, we need to make sure that we are tackling it with our young people and changing the culture nationally.

As I have said, alcopops are targeted at young people and particularly young women. We are not prepared to put up with that. The evidence shows that industry sales have grown by 250 per cent since 2000. Between 2000 and 2004, the percentage of female drinkers aged 15 to 17 who had consumed alcopops on their last drinking occasion increased from 14 to 62 per cent. I repeat: since the changes, the number of young women drinking alcopops on their last occasion of drinking increased from 14 to 62 per cent—and those opposite say that there is not a problem here! For females drinking at risky and high-risk levels in 2004, 78 per cent drank alcopops on their last drinking occasion. That figure had increased threefold since 2000. Those opposite should hang their heads in shame for opposing these measures.

Independent expert advice—commissioned by the former government, the Howard government, which did nothing about this—by Collins and Lapsley has also backed the government’s approach to this. Their report says:

… alcohol excise taxes are capable of being designed explicitly to target the types of alcohol known to be the subject of abuse (for example, high strength beer and alcopops) …

…            …            …

For example, studies show that young people are more influenced by the price of alcohol so that increasing the tax rate on alcoholic drinks which are specifically targeted at the youth market … is likely to be effective.

They go on to say that, as a result:

There would appear to be strong justification for the April 2008 increase in the Australian tax on pre-mixed drinks—

alcopops—

by 70 per cent.

ATO figures similarly support our arguments. ATO figures drawn from the first nine months of the measure’s introduction show that sales have dropped by 35 per cent compared to the previous year. This goes beyond the government’s predictions when the measure was introduced that growth would merely slow. In fact, alcopop sales have slumped, bringing overall spirit sales with them. Despite a small increase in full-strength spirit sales, overall spirit sales have fallen by almost eight per cent. So you have to take this evidence—that of the Australian Taxation Office showing that overall alcohol sales have dropped by eight per cent and that of a study by independent experts commissioned by the former Howard government—and weigh it up against what we keep hearing from the opposition, which is about an Access Economics report commissioned by the alcohol industry. That is their evidence: a report commissioned by the alcohol industry. Our evidence is from independent experts and from the Australian Taxation Office.

They should also listen to a range of other experts. We have been backed by the Australian Drug Foundation CEO, John Rogerson. We have been backed by the Alcohol and Other Drugs Council of Australia CEO, David Templeman. We have been backed by the Public Health Association of Australia President, Mike Daube. You would think that the opposition would listen to these experts. But we have also been backed by some of them. For instance, the Australian National Council on Drugs Chairman, Dr John Herron—someone well known to many on the other side of the chamber, I am sure; a former minister and AMA president—wrote to the Prime Minister in support of these measures and said that they were worth while.

The fact is that the government are very much in touch on this issue. We are in touch with the mums and dads, with the police and with community leaders all across this country, because they want action on binge drinking. They want a government with a national strategy, but they also want a government that is prepared to make alcopops more expensive to dissuade young people, particularly young women, from taking them up. And that is why we will support this legislation and that is why we are driving it through.

Finally, my other real concern—and we have heard the weasel words from the opposition on this issue—is that if we do not get this legislation through, there will be hundreds of millions of dollars going back to the alcohol industry. That money will not be able to be diverted to the national binge-drinking campaign, as the member for Gippsland might have suggested. Those opposite will be giving this money back to the alcohol industry, and that is a shame. So I support this legislation. The community supports it. It is supported by the police and supported by health workers. I beg you, please, to support this legislation.

Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to participate in this debate on the Excise Tariff Amendment (2009 Measures No. 1) Bill 2009 and the Customs Tariff Amendment (2009 Measures No. 1) Bill 2009, especially as the member for the city of Bundaberg.

Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Defence Science and Personnel) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Rum, rum, rum!

Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

And I note the honourable member for Bonner in the House today, who is also a Bundy girl from way back.

Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Defence Science and Personnel) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is she! How do you know her drinking habits?

Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You’d be surprised, Minister. The coalition is opposed to these bills, which seek to validate a substantial tax increase on one category of alcohol products: ready-to-drink beverages. The government claims it increased these taxes as a health measure—a measure aimed at cutting the rate of binge drinking, particularly amongst young women. The coalition certainly does not deny that there is binge drinking in some sectors of our society. We are as concerned about that problem as anyone else is. But this policy is quite transparently a tax grab designed to boost the bottom line of the budget, allegedly to protect young women. In other words, the smoke and mirrors trick is the young women. On both health and tax counts it is a failure.

I do not promote binge drinking—in fact, quite the opposite. I have always promoted responsible drinking and, despite some of the muck that has been thrown at me at the past in this chamber, there is already ample evidence that RTDs deliver a measured quantity of alcohol. When you get a Bundy and cola, a scotch and dry or whatever it may be, you know exactly what you are drinking. You know you can have a can or two drinks of a particular one and that is your limit. From a road safety perspective, that is a very sensible way to drink. For example, a can of XXXX Gold has an alcohol-by-volume reading of 3.5 per cent, but the grey label Bundy, or the mid Bundy as some call it, also has 3.5 per cent. Why should one be taxed at $0.36 and the other at $0.90? What is fair about that? Let us take one standard drink—not a can—and this time compare not the half strength but the full strength. A full-strength beer has an excise rating of $0.39. One standard drink of Bundy and Coke is $0.88. Where is the equity in that? Why is one form of alcohol any more dangerous to the person, be it a young person or an old person, a motorist or nonmotorist or any other? And where are the hundreds of millions of dollars that Minister Roxon said would flow to preventative health measures?

My colleagues on the other side have been talking about this today. Let me enlighten them. Instead of the government spending a paltry $53 million on a National Binge Drinking Strategy—that is $40 million for community initiatives, $19 million to assist young drinkers and $20 million for anti-binge advertising—what we find is that these measures are funded through the existing resources of the government, and there is no further indication of how much of the alcopops’ revenue has been or will be provided to this preventative measure. So if they are fair dinkum, of the $22 million-odd how much has flowed into this system? I do not want to be too cynical, but perhaps all this money was meant to pour into the health coffers that were never intended to materialise. This is just an example of how spin has become more important to the government than real substance.

I have often spoken in this House about the contribution of Bundaberg Rum to my community and to this country. It is important to me—as I said, I come from the city of Bundaberg—but it is also important to the wider Australian community, to say nothing of its significant corporate contribution to national sporting events. Bundaberg Rum has been in Bundaberg for 120 years. It is an important adjunct to the sugar industry. It is a great employer—a particularly good employer—a great tourist operator, a great ambassador for Australia and a great sponsor for the local community in supporting events as well. Bundaberg Rum’s parent company, Diageo, has invested $24 million in the Bundaberg distillery, which includes the construction of a modern multimedia tourism centre which draws around 80,000 tourists a year. That is an enormous part of the Bundaberg tourism profile and its economy—not just the economy of Bundaberg but of the entire Wide Bay region and Queensland.

The Bundy bear was made a Queensland heritage icon in 2004. So should the heritage trust of Queensland be lambasted for allegedly supporting binge drinking, as I was in this place? You all know that I was said to have a full-size bear in my office and that the minister was shocked. It was a poster for the tourist centre; it had been in my window for several years. (A) how could it be shocking? and (b) it certainly was not a life-size bear—and what is more I have never supported binge drinking. I quote my good friend and colleague in state politics in Queensland Anna Bligh, who said:

I think Queenslanders and Australians love their Bundy and they love their Bundy Bear.

Frankly, I do not think the Bundy bear is about to lose favour with Queenslanders and Australians. Leave the bear alone! On just one thing in the state election I agree with the Premier—just the one.

Again I ask: is this new tax regime more a health measure or a tax grab? And, from a local perspective, why should Bundy drinkers—because they are the major ones—be singled out for this additional tax? The Australian newspaper reported on 17 May 2008 that the excise increase first emerged in a finance department budget submission couched in terms of closing a tax loophole, which it never was. As Christian Kerr said:

Was the alcopops tax motivated by concerns about the health of teenage girls or the health of the budget surplus?

That question remains today because the government simply cannot supply any hard evidence that the tax has had an impact on levels of harmful drinking.

The bills before the House are about the tax impact. The 69 per cent increase in excise on RTDs—that is, from $39.36 a litre to $66.67 a litre—will raise $1.6 billion across the forward estimates. But this increase of 69 per cent is a massive tax grab, especially coming from a government that claimed we would have no new taxes. The budget estimated revenues originally at $3.1 billion, but, as I said, it is now down to $1.6 billion. Clearly, it has failed both as a health measure and as a tax matter. The minister said sheepishly that the revenue was—and I will quote for members of the opposition—‘somewhat less’. Minister, try halved.

One questions not only the government’s intentions but also the quality of its advice. For example, on a Treasury minute on 14 May 2008, the very day after the budget, Treasury said of relative rates of alcohol consumption:

RTDs have different patterns of cross-price elasticy being complements to some products (eg a reduction in RTD consumption may also be reflected in a reduction in beer consumption) …

Wow! How they ever got to that conclusion I will never know. The quote goes on:

… and a substitute for other products. On balance the cross-price elasticity estimates are assured to be zero.

However, this advice was proven unreliable and in its Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook Treasury was forced to admit that there has been substitution into spirits and beer—in other words, the government’s basic rationale was faulty. But still they deny it, even in the face of advice from their own agency. Let me quote MYEFO’s admission that the RTD sales have fallen with the excise rate increase. It says this:

… was partly offset by a substitution towards domestically produced and imported spirits and other excisable alcoholic beverages.

In other words, people were drinking more full-strength spirits and, in addition to that, other excisable alcoholic averages—wine and beer, no doubt. I draw the members’ attention to that last phrase ‘other excisable beverages’. In that statement, they let the cat out of the bag, at least in part. Despite the fact that we cannot get the beer and wine figures since 27 April, it is clear there has been a move towards beer consumption. That has been kept very quiet in this debate. There has not been a word, I think, from either side of the chamber—there might have been a few words from our side but nothing from the other side. But, again, you get caught out. In its quarterly trading update to 31 December 2008, released on 19 February, only a week and a half ago, Lion Nathan reported:

Australian beer market remains robust with a growth rate of 2.3 per cent for the quarter.

So beer went up in that quarter. Better still: Foster’s Group reported that, for the first six months of the current financial year, their beer sales had increased three per cent. More interestingly, for January, the beer figure has shown an increase of eight per cent. In other words, the problem has shifted from one mode of alcohol to another. There has been a shift in drinking modes, but so far the government has presented no evidence that there has been a net decrease.

When you have inconsistent taxing, more particularly, excise applications, you will always get distortion and drinkers moving from one mode to another. The kids will tip a bit out of a bottle of Coke and fill it up with full-strength spirit or they will drink beer because they find the RTDs too dear.

Back in 2000, at the time of the introduction of the A New Tax System—and I say this proudly—I was one of those who fought for alcoholic beverages to be taxed on alcohol content, not the type of alcohol. There is no logic in that whatsoever. I am not against the wine industry having special concessions to protect its development; let me make that quite clear. But, in broad terms, one form of alcohol should not be taxed at a different rate from another.

The tax system at that time was grossly unfair and worked against some types of premixed drinks because it was based on the source of the alcohol rather than the amount of alcohol being consumed. The motivation was not as the member for Corio said in his address this morning but rather to remove a loophole which allowed the development of designer drinks, which are the real alcopops—and I am not talking about Bundy and whisky and others—which had a non-spirit base and, broadly, to bring RTDs in line with canned and stubbies of beer with which they competed. Why should you have one rate for beer and another one for an RTD? At that time I fought for fairer treatment of premixed drinks for three reasons: firstly, because the original law was archaic and unfair; secondly, it worked against the interests of our own distillery in Bundaberg and its potential in the Australian market; and, finally, because premixed drinks are a known, measured quantity of alcohol and are a more responsible way to drink.

Many speakers have said today that the government’s increased taxation on RTDs has driven people away from alcohol in a measured form to either cheaper products on the one hand or splashing random quantities of full-strength spirit into mixers on the other. I have a piece of interesting history I will share which I am sure the minister at the table, the Minister for Defence Science and Personnel, and my two colleagues opposite will be very interested in. Back in 2004 Labor floated this very idea and, let me tell you, the people and workers of Bundaberg delivered a message loud and clear, ‘No way, no how.’ In fact, the outcry at that time forced the Labor Party to deny it had even considered a tax hike on premixed drinks. We actually had the documents, but they denied it emphatically. The now Minister for Resources and Energy and Minister for Tourism, Martin Ferguson, said that the concern was ‘unnecessary’ and was reported in the Australian as saying that a tax hike of premixed spirits would be ‘unfair’.

I recall convening a meeting at that time which involved local community leaders, tourism stakeholders as well as members of the Distilled Spirits Industry Council of Australia and representatives of Diageo, the parent company of Bundaberg Rum, to thrash out what Labor’s policy would mean for our town and its industry. That meeting and the public outcry forced the hand of then Labor leader, Mark Latham, who clearly thought Bundaberg would accept this passively. He was dead wrong. When Bundaberg fights back, it fights back hard and that is something Labor need to learn—and I suspect they are going to need to learn it again in the forthcoming state election.

Now we face a Labor government intent on resuscitating the tax in a cynical grab for money. Minister Roxon makes much of the fact that RTD sales have dropped 35 per cent since the excise went up, but she has not admitted to any great extent that the sales of full-strength spirits have increased nor, as I said earlier, about the beer consumption. Anecdotally, bottle shop attendants will tell you that RTD sales have plummeted, with young Australians preferring straight spirits and a couple of litres of Coke to go with it. One survey by Roy Morgan reported that in the period June to September last year cider sales went up 249 per cent. That is a big increase. This government was warned that that is exactly what would happen—there would be a mode shift in drinking habits.

The minister has also complained about companies trying to avoid tax by making RTDs based on beer or wine. She has been caught again—as I said before—by the inanity of her own argument. If you are going to have a cheaper excise on other forms of alcohol, people are going to move to make alcopops from that source of product. Again, the government was warned that this would happen and, faced with these cold, hard facts, the minister tried to claim that the industry’s reaction is a sign that the tax is working. That is a very long bow—and I am not talking about Strongbow either.

Even some of the groups who support the government’s action acknowledge that they certainly do not know whether young drinkers have simply switched to higher strength alcohol products or not. When it gets down to the short strokes, the minister has hidden behind the smokescreen of allegedly protecting young female drinkers. But if we take, for example, the 14- to 19-year-old group—and I am sure colleagues would acknowledge that on the face of it this is about the middle of the most vulnerable group of the lot—we find that they represent only 0.5 per cent of the Australian population and one per cent of the total female population of this country. I just make the point here that, if it is as small as that and if it is as easily recognised as members in the government have said in their speeches today—I think the member for Leichhardt cited 20,000 people; they may not have been the same denominators but were roughly in that same group—why do we not target them? Why do we not target them with education and responsible drinking regimes instead of using them as some sort of stalking horse for the government to pick up more revenue through tax?

I would like to conclude with three very interesting facts—referring again to that 14- to 19-year-old age group. Members opposite who have been peddling this stuff all day might like to know this figure: there was a 27 per cent reduction in risky and high-risk drinking in this group in the period 2001-07. The second fact is that—contrary to the impression the minister gives all over Australia—the biggest consumers of RTDs are males over 24. Finally, three-quarters of all RTDs are dark spirit based products, like Bundy and cola, whisky and cola, and bourbon and cola. These are quality distilled products, preferred by males—hardly synonymous with ‘alcopops’. But then, as I said before, the government’s actions are a tax grab. They are about spin, not about substance.

Amanda Rishworth (Kingston, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to rise to support the Excise Tariff Amendment (2009 Measures No. 1) Bill 2009 because, unlike the opposition, we in this government take the issue of binge drinking incredibly seriously. This government has made it a priority to address this serious issue in our community. Even if the opposition does not seem to think it is a serious issue, there are many people in our community who think it is. I think some of the statistics speak for themselves. The following points illustrate just what a serious issue this is. Four Australians under the age of 25 die due to alcohol related injures in an average week. On average, one in four hospitalisations of people aged 15 to 25 happens because of alcohol. Seventy Australians under the age of 25 will be hospitalised due to alcohol caused assaults in an average week.

In addition to these statistics about the physical impact of binge drinking, there are also unintended psychological consequences of binge drinking. One in two Australians aged 15 to 17 who get drunk will do something they regret. Doing something you might regret when you have had a bit too much to drink could be something silly with no long-lasting consequence but it also could be something that can lead to long-lasting anxiety, long-lasting depression and long-lasting negative self-esteem. In my previous work as a psychologist, I met a number of young people who engaged in binge drinking on a regular basis and who were also suffering from depression and anxiety. It is a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue. Does binge drinking come first or do depression and anxiety come first? In some ways, it did not really matter to the people that I was seeing. Whether or not the depression and anxiety came first or whether it was the binge drinking, the continual binge drinking was exacerbating their mental health problems. More importantly, this binge drinking was impeding their recovery back to full mental health.

It was not just me who noticed the negative impact that binge drinking is having on our young people. There are many people working in our community, on the front line, who recognise this as an issue—whether it is police, ambulance officers, emergency workers, hospital staff or GPs. And it is not just people on the front line. Within my own community, there have been many groups, including the Aldinga men’s breakfast group, who have indicated to me that this is a concern of theirs. Many people who have raised this issue with me have indicated that they are not against drinking alcohol. These have been people within my own constituency, and we have a large wine-growing area there, McLaren Vale. There are many people in this area who are not against drinking alcohol but who have indicated that binge drinking is causing significant violence in our community. There are some specific occasions when the community comes together to look at how it might tackle the issue of binge drinking. A lot of people are saying that they do not have a problem with drinking in moderation; it is the culture of binge drinking and violence that they are very concerned about.

It is not just those who work on the front line who are concerned. Parents and our general community are recognising the dangers and social concerns of teenage binge drinking. However, one of the few groups that are not concerned are the opposition. For example, the member for Warringah said on 3AW on 17 June that concern for binge drinking was just a beat-up, and the member for North Sydney indicated that he thought that concerns about binge drinking were over the top. This really is an example of just how out of touch the Liberal Party is when we have parents and community members and workers on the front line, such as doctors and emergency workers, all saying: ‘Binge drinking is a concern. This is affecting our community.’ Yet the opposition are so out of touch that they do not think it is a very serious issue.

In response to this serious social and health issue, it has been this government, unlike the previous government, that has taken up this issue. The Rudd government has begun to implement the federal government’s National Binge Drinking Strategy. This strategy comprises a range of different measures, including $20 million to fund an advertising campaign that confronts young people with the costs and consequences of binge drinking. Members may have seen these ads on TV with the theme ‘Don’t turn a night out into a nightmare’. I have certainly had comments about them from people in my community, and I have also seen them myself, and I do believe that these ads achieve what they aim to—that is, they raise awareness about some of the very negative consequences that can happen after a night of binge drinking.

In addition to this measure, the government has provided $19.1 million to intervene earlier to assist young people to ensure that they assume personal responsibility for their binge drinking and $14.4 million to invest in community level initiatives to tackle this problem. The government has moved swiftly on this. The first round of these community grants was announced on the 17 November, with 19 local communities receiving federal government support to really look at grassroots programs to help tackle binge drinking by young people. It is important to empower local communities to deliver local solutions to these problems. There are often specific circumstances within each community and it is often people on the ground who know best how they might deliver these solutions.

The measure that we are debating today is one of the other measures that we have developed to reduce the incidence of binge drinking—that is, closing the tax loophole for alcopops that was created by the Liberal Party in 2000. Alcopops are targeted at young people and underage drinkers, using bright colours and sweet flavours that disguise the taste of alcohol so that young people can drink more alcohol faster. If anyone is left under any illusion about this, I want to highlight to the House one type of alcopop that I find very concerning. Recently I saw an alcopop that was in a tube that looked like a tube of toothpaste, and it was filled with some sort of red vodka drink. The packaging for the alcohol is basically such that you open the tube and squeeze it, consuming about 1.4 standard drinks of vodka in three seconds. If anyone is under any illusion that the packaging of these alcopops is not designed to attract young drinkers then certainly I would point to this alcopop as something that has left me in no doubt that these products can only promote excessive levels of drinking.

It is clear that the tax break given to alcopops by the Liberal Party gave these types of drinks encouragement in the marketplace. Since 2000 the sale of alcopops has increased by 250 per cent. Why would the Liberal Party give a tax break to these beverages? Why should a postmixed vodka and lemonade be subject to a different tax to a premixed vodka and lemonade? I am unable to comprehend that. Why shouldn’t all vodka drinks be treated the same? Instead, the Liberal Party decided not to compare apples with apples and rather to have a vodka drink—or Bundaberg drink or whatever the case might be—treated differently, depending on the way it was packaged.

In closing this loophole we are ensuring that all spirits, bottled or premixed, will be taxed at the same rate. In this debate many on the other side and also distillers have suggested that increasing the tax for alcopops will not reduce consumption and that people will just choose a different type of spirit. However, the ATO’s figures suggest something quite different, and this has not been mentioned by opposition members in this debate. Figures show that, for the first nine months, alcopop sales have dropped by 35 per cent compared to the previous year, contrary to what the members on the other side have said. They would have us believe that drinkers have just started drinking full-strength spirits. However, overall spirit sales have fallen by eight per cent, clearly showing that this measure is working.

While the opposition when in government sat there and did nothing about binge drinking, we are tackling the alcopops issue and we are tackling a National Binge Drinking Strategy. That is at the forefront of our approaches to ensure that we protect our young people. We are concerned about their health and we will do our best to ensure that our young people live happy and healthy lives. I commend the bill to the House.

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I was interested, when listening to the end of the member for Kingston’s address, to hear her starting to cite some figures dealing with the quantum of tax that is being collected on spirits alone without mentioning cheap wine, for instance, or a whole variety of other things which can be substitute drinks. I think that is very relevant to this debate on the imposition of a new tax by the Labor Party which in the budget papers was going to raise them $3.1 billion. I think it is most interesting to go back to the budget papers of May, bearing in mind that this initiative was announced on 27 April 2008. They state:

The Government has increased the excise and excise-equivalent customs duty on ‘other excisable beverages not exceeding 10 per cent alcohol by volume’ to the same rate as for full strength spirits, on and from 27 April 2008. This measure has an ongoing gain to revenue which is estimated to be $3.1 billion from 27 April 2008 …

I think it is very interesting that the revised figure is $1.6 billion that the initiative will collect. That immediately suggests to me that fewer alcopops were bought and that the people who were previously drinking those drinks simply did not give up taking substances which would give them the sufficient high which they were striving to get. It suggests to me that they have selected one or another of a range of things that are available. Firstly, there is the very easily cited example that they would move to buying full bottles of spirits and Coke, or whatever goes with the alcohol. Instead of having a measured dose of alcohol, as occurs in the alcopops, it would be more likely that there would be a much larger dose of alcohol than would have been the case if they had been drinking alcopops.

The previous speaker, and many speakers on the government side, have neglected to mention what I think is the elephant in the room—that illicit drugs represent another alternative. When we look at the coverage of the phenomenon of so-called binge drinking, we see an increase in violence. One of the things that have become very obvious is that violence becomes very much more pronounced among those who start taking drugs such as ice. Violence becomes a very serious and significant addition to the behaviour of people when they are under the influence of such drugs.

We see a lot of reports in the papers which say that a person has been seen to be intoxicated, and there is a presumption that it must be alcohol. This has been the case with drink driving over the years, but we did take action with regard to that and we did introduce limits on the amount of alcohol that could be consumed before driving, but there has been a reluctance by governments to introduce proper testing for illicit drugs of people who are driving, yet in Victoria they have started a program and are starting to measure outcomes. I think the results are worth putting into this debate. Information from Arrive Alive, which is a joint initiative of VicRoads and the Victorian Department of Justice, says:

Drink driving is a major community issue, but so is drug driving.

In 2003, 28 per cent of drivers killed had a blood alcohol content of 0.05 or more. In the same year, 31 per cent of drivers killed tested positive to drugs other than alcohol.

In 2008, they say:

Drink driving contributes to around 20 per cent to 30 per cent of driver deaths on Victoria’s roads each year. Drug driving, where one or more illicit drugs are present, is found in approximately 40 per cent of driver deaths.

In other words, the incidence of people dying with alcohol in the bloodstream has gone down but the number of people who have died because they had illicit drugs in their bloodstream has gone up. Going back to the report that I did whilst I was Chair of the then House of Representatives Standing Committee on Family and Human Services called The winnable war on drugs: the impact of illicit drug use on families, it became quite clear that the use of illicit drugs is undercounted within our society and there is this accent that says that we must concentrate on alcohol.

All along we in the opposition have said that this new tax on alcopops was just a drive to get $3.1 billion more in tax. We said it was part of the $19 billion of new taxes that were in the budget. I think that has been borne out very much by the minority report of senators in the inquiry which was carried out by the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs. Evidence from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare noted that there had been virtually no change in the pattern of risky drinking over the period from 2001 to 2007, including among young Australians. Yet those figures that I just gave on deaths in Victoria show that there is an increase in the use of illicit drugs.

You do not have to be very smart to work out that young people may find that alcopops, which have now risen so dramatically in cost, could be replaced by a less expensive pill which will last all night. Then there are the incidents where young people take illicit drugs—usually amphetamines of some description—and wash them down with alcohol. The problem is this: the government has chosen to defend what is simply a tax grab by dressing it up as an earnest health issue which needs addressing. Nobody would say that we do not want to lessen the amount of binge drinking that happens. But we also have to be far wiser and acknowledge that the problems with young people and what is known as binge drinking can so often be far more than that and can involve drug use as well. Yet, with the harm minimisation policies which are pursued, we see that Australia has now become the highest user of illicit drugs per capita in the OECD.

The harm minimisers have been in charge for 20 years, and they have failed. But they have always placed the stress on the need to deal with alcohol and never the need to deal with drugs. I think this debate gives us the opportunity to seriously go back through the research and look at the figures that are staring people in the face. If you are concerned about addiction in young people, to whatever substance, and about the increasing violence in society then you must address the drug problem.

The minister is going to provide a total of about $86 million worth of advertising and programs designed to combat binge drinking, yet nowhere do I see in the health portfolio a continuance of the programs that were initiated when we were in government to warn young people about what drug use does to you. You need only to look at the cover of the report that we did on this to see what a few short years of drug taking can do to the appearance and life expectancy of a young person. This is something that should be made known.

In supporting the opposition’s position on this legislation to increase tax and to have a tax grab, I think that we should look further than what the minister has had to say by way of trying to defend the hole in the budget. The estimated revenue from alcopops has already been revised downwards to $1.6 billion. That shows there has been a move away from this product but on to something else. We really do need to address the problem of illicit drugs and what they do not only to individuals but to families and the people who are around them.

The Federal Police have developed a harm index whereby they can show that, for every gram of illicit drugs they take off the streets, there are enormous savings to the Australian people in a whole variety of ways. There is a saving on policing, there is a saving on health issues and there is a saving that results from behaviours that are prevented from happening because the drugs did not get into the bodies of the people who would otherwise have used them.

Returning to the question of the tax, I think the evidence given to the Senate inquiry by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare showed that there had not been, up until the introduction of the tax, an increase in young people’s binge drinking. In fact, the figures show that there has been a lessening of it. But figures now coming out of Victoria show that there is an increase in the use of drugs in the Australian community—and that needs to be addressed.

But this legislation is a new tax on alcopops; it is precisely that. It is a new tax which is not attached to a health initiative at all; it is merely a $3.1 billion tax grab. Of course, with the government’s decision to spend $42 billion of taxpayers’ money on the so-called stimulus, the minister is no doubt desperate to try to salvage what is left of the $3.1 billion—that is, the $1.6 billion—to somehow make a lesser hole in the budget figures. But that is not a good reason to support a tax. It is a bad tax. The opposition is opposed to the introduction of new taxes, particularly at this time.

Nicola Roxon (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

in reply—I would like to take the opportunity to thank the many members who have taken part in the debate on the Excise Tariff Amendment (2009 Measures No. 1) Bill 2009 and the Customs Tariff Amendment (2009 Measures No. 1) Bill 2009. Whilst there is a fair amount of difference between the different sides of the House on this, there is certainly a strong theme running through all of the speeches. Despite some of the earlier comments from the previous shadow minister for health, denying that binge drinking is a problem, I think the new shadow minister and some of his colleagues who have spoken on this have indicated their concern that binge drinking and the abuse of alcohol is an issue that we must grapple with. Obviously, we have in the bill before us a measure which we in the government believe can be part of the solution. We hope that the opposition will reconsider their position and see this as part of an important solution to an important problem.

I explained in my second reading speech the excise and customs tariff proposals, published on 26 April 2008, to increase the rate of excise and excise equivalent customs duty applying to such beverages from $39.36 to $66.67 per litre of alcohol content. I tabled these proposals in the House of Representatives on 13 May. The tax office and the Australian Customs Office have been collecting excise and excise equivalent customs duty at that higher rate since 27 April 2008. Of course, the data from the collection is one of the key issues that need to be considered by the opposition, and by the Senate when this matter comes before them in a number of weeks. The measure is designed to close a loophole which was created by the previous, Liberal government in 2000, when they reduced the rate of excise applying to alcopops. The government has increased the rate of excise because of concern about the increase in alcopop consumption. The data from 2000 was quite astounding, and we believe the lower rate of excise played a role in encouraging binge drinking.

I should flag for the benefit of the House that, at the conclusion of the debate, I am also going to introduce amendments to this legislation to ensure that the so-called ‘malternative’ products, which undermine these rate changes, do not enter the market. To do this, these amendments alter the taxation definition of ‘beer’ in the Excise Tariff Act and ‘beer and wine’ in the Customs Tariff Act. Changes in the definition of ‘wine’ in the A New Tax System (Wine Equalisation) Tax Regulations 2000 will also follow as part of these changes.

Today, as I acknowledged, the member for Dickson, the shadow minister for health, said that the Liberals do share the community’s and the government’s concerns about alcohol issues and that he would support sensible policies to tackle binge drinking. As I said at the beginning, I welcome this change of tack from the opposition. It is a change of position, as the former health minister and the former shadow minister for health have both been on the record a number of times denying this is a problem. Mr Hockey, now the shadow Treasurer, said on 30 March:

… I don’t think you should overplay it—

referring to the binge-drinking crisis—

… let’s not go over the top.

Tony Abbott, the former health minister, said in June last year, ‘Trying to say that binge drinking is happening nearly all the time in ways which are a deadly threat to the youth and even the adults of this country is a beat-up.’ So I welcome the opposition’s recognition at last that there is a binge-drinking problem in our community; but I do say to the current shadow minister that if the coalition genuinely believe this then there is one very simple thing they can do today to show it—that is, vote to support the passage of the bill that is currently before the House.

I see that the shadow minister has also been calling today for revenue collected through this measure to be directed towards health and education. I think it is no coincidence that this is what the distillers now claim they want, but their strategy is pretty much as obvious as it is insidious: they want to cut their losses with past profits and revert to the alcopops cash cow in the future. I think the shadow minister jumping on this bandwagon does show just how confused the Liberal Party’s position is, and maybe that is because with the new shadow minister there is a change in position and it has not had time to run its course.

Our very clear advice—and I know that the shadow minister would be distressed if he thought that he had got the position wrong—is that if this measure is voted down then the money must be refunded to the distillers. The member for Dickson has been out and about today saying, ‘We don’t want to see this money go back to the distillers; we want it to go into health and education.’ The only way you can ensure that happens, Member for Dickson, is to ensure that the Liberal Party votes for this bill today and in the Senate. That way we can ensure that money is invested in health and education measures. If the Liberal Party vote against it, we will have no choice but to refund that money to the distillers.

I am happy to provide more detailed advice to the member for Dickson if he doubts that, but I am sure he would be well aware that that is the position and that the only way his now-expressed desire for money to be put into health and education can be achieved is for him to ensure the Liberal Party vote for this measure. The opposition can, as I say, either vote against this and give the money back to their newest best buddies the distillers or they can vote with the government and boost health spending on important initiatives. We have already said that, if the law is passed, we will spend a huge proportion of this money on preventive health.

The member for Dickson made a number of claims, both in his speech and in comments more recently, that include many distortions and half-truths that have been bandied about during the course of this debate. Let me go through these one by one. Firstly, the opposition has said that not enough is being spent to tackle binge drinking. I can of course remind the House that our $53 billion binge-drinking strategy includes a number of very important measures. There is $14.4 million for community-level initiatives to confront the culture of binge drinking, in partnership with sporting and community organisations; $19.1 million to intervene earlier to assist young people and ensure that they assume personal responsibility—the very sorts of education measures that it sounded like the member for Dickson was encouraging us to invest in today; and $20 million on an advertising campaign, ‘Don’t turn a night out into a nightmare’, confronting youth with the consequences of binge drinking.

The shadow minister has described this expenditure as ‘meagre’, but interestingly this ‘meagre’ $53 million is $53 million more than the coalition spent on this issue. I think it would be a perfectly responsible position for the opposition to take if they offered to support this measure and wanted to encourage more investment in those sorts of projects. But instead they are voting against this measure and criticising investments that we are making that are significantly more than what the previous government did. Of course, that is not all the government is doing; far from it. In addition to the $53 million binge-drinking strategy, the government announced last year $872 million in new funding for preventive health as part of the COAG agreement. This is the biggest ever investment in preventive health; it is a very large amount of money. It includes new initiatives which will tackle binge drinking. Alcohol, tobacco and obesity are the key targets of that spending, and obviously a significant chunk of that will have an impact on the ways that we might tackle binge drinking.

When the alcopops measure was announced last year, the government made it clear that a significant portion of the revenue would go towards preventive health measures. I said at the time that this change would see the single biggest investment ever by a Commonwealth government in preventive health measures, and at COAG last November that is exactly what the Rudd government delivered on this commitment. The revenue from the alcopops measure is expected to be under $1½ billion. This investment is over half of the total revenue that is collected. This may be an important thing for the shadow minister to acknowledge given that he has called for more investment in these areas.

Secondly, the shadow minister says there is no firm evidence for this measure. That is blatantly untrue. Let me first of all quote from research commissioned under the Howard government. The report by David Collins and Helen Lapsley titled The avoidable costs of alcohol abuse in Australia and the potential benefits of effective policies to reduce the social costs of alcohol deals with a whole range of issues, from the impact on families to the impact on employment and the impact on our hospitals. The report states—and of course I am just quoting a section of it:

There would appear to be strong justification for the April 2008 increase in the Australian tax on pre-mixed drinks … by 70 per cent.

…            …            …

… alcohol excise taxes are capable of being designed explicitly to target the types of alcohol known to be the subject of abuse (for example, high strength beer and alcopops)

…            …            …

For example, studies show that young people are more influenced by the price of alcohol so that increasing the tax rate on alcoholic drinks which are specifically targeted at the youth market … is likely to be effective.

Let me also cite for the House the data which shows this measure is working. Since this bill was introduced we have had some even more up-to-date data. This has been provided previously to the House, but let me just go over that again because the member for Dickson seems not to be fully aware of that. The Australian Taxation Office clearance figures show that for the period May to June 2009 total spirit clearances decreased by 7.9 per cent compared to the same period in 2007-08 and compared to solid growth in the previous three years. This figure comes from a 34.6 per cent decrease in alcopops clearances.

So, when the member opposite asks whether there is any evidence that this measure is working, it should be noted that the clearest evidence is in the sales data, which shows a 34.6 per cent decrease in alcopops clearances. It is true that there has been some substitution, and there is a 17 per cent increase in full-strength spirit clearances over that period. When you combine those figures, given that the base is obviously different for the amount of alcopops sold and the amount of spirits sold, the combined decrease in spirits is 7.9 per cent. That is a huge decrease in the amount of alcohol that is being purchased and the clearest measure of why this measure is being effective—and, of course, the clearest reason that the industry is fighting so hard against it. This is a much better result than the government had forecast. At the time of the budget, it was forecast that the measure would merely slow the growth in alcopop sales. We thought that was a conservative and responsible approach to take. Happily, the measure has been even more effective. I have said publicly—probably to the misgivings of the Treasurer—that as the health minister I would be delighted if this measure were so effective that we collected no tax from it. But I do not think that that is likely to be the case. To see this dramatic reduction is the clearest evidence—and uncontested evidence—that this measure is working.

No-one has ever said—and the government does not contend—that any single measure will, of itself, solve the problem. We know that this is a problem that has been growing in our society for more than a decade. But, as part of a comprehensive package, this measure certainly can. We do not pretend that we have all the answers, and we have made it quite clear that we are prepared to work with members of the opposition or senators who are interested in ensuring that our comprehensive package deals with the range of issues that they believe it should. The very reason that we set up our National Preventative Health Taskforce is so they can look at what comprehensive, multipronged approach is required to ensure that our strategies will work. That is what we are doing with our $53 million National Binge Drinking Strategy—and the $872 million of COAG money—and we will of course consider the recommendations of the task force when they are provided to us in the middle of this year.

In this summing-up speech I am keen to make sure that some of the relatively outrageous claims of others made in this debate are all properly answered. The shadow minister referred to the Access Economics report which was out today—a report which was, of course, paid for by the people who make alcopops. It is clear from even a cursory read of this that the report is seriously flawed and it really is a deliberate attempt by the industry to manipulate debate. Unfortunately, this is not the first time that they have used reports and statistics to do this. One only needs to open the report—as I am sure the shadow minister has—to see that the authors themselves conclude that ‘firm conclusions were not able to be drawn at this stage’, a point that the member for Groom made earlier today in the House.

The report admits that the period of study is too short to be meaningful, that there are gaps in the data, that the figures may change and that the opposite evidence, from more reputable sources, is far more frightening and shows that alcohol related hospital admissions rose rapidly after the Liberals’ decision to give alcopop producers a tax break. I think that in this House both the shadow minister and I would probably be able to agree that this trend is very worrying. The truth is that it is not possible to detect from the data—any of the data that is relied on by Access Economics or others—or for any hospital to give any information about, what type of alcohol a person is presenting with. We have not been able to—and I do not think one can—assume that a single measure will be able to turn around a very wide social problem, but we do think that this measure has had an impact. What we can look at, for example, is the Australia New Zealand Journal of Public Health, which found that between 1999-2000—the period when the original change from the previous government was introduced—and 2005-06 the number of young women admitted to hospitals because of alcohol abuse more than doubled. So we are talking about a large increase—from a small number, but it is, I know, a worrying trend for any parliamentarian or any parent to see.

The report paid for by the distillers uses data over an incredibly short period of time, which it admits makes it unsuitable to base firm conclusions on. It uses hospital data of dubious quality. As the report itself points out:

… there is no agreed national approach to collection of diagnosis codes and demographic information for ED patients.

I might say, for the benefit of the shadow minister and other members in the House who are interested, that more rigorous national reporting is one of the issues that we got the states to sign on to in our COAG agreement last year. These are very serious problems, and it would help all of us in health debates if we had better data. But we do not currently and we should not pretend and misuse it in circumstances where it is just not able to be used to draw conclusions. The report uses just one diagnosis code for most of its data, excluding others and distorting the statistics. It does not show any causation between the government’s actions and the effects it alleges to show. The report also ignores the tax office figures on alcohol consumption—figures which are uncontested.

This is the sort of material that the opposition are relying on to support their arguments. I think it gives them a credibility problem. I think we have seen from the comments by the member for Dickson today that the opposition are a little bit uncertain on where they now stand on this. The question for the opposition—the answer to which we will no doubt see in how they choose to vote, given that this debate is now concluding—is whether or not they support action to tackle binge drinking. If they do support action to tackle binge drinking, they should be voting with the government—they should be on this side of the House backing the bill and encouraging us to spend more money on health and education to tackle this social problem.

This measure is working. It is backed by research, it is backed by health experts and it is backed by the evidence. It will enable us to make significant investments in preventing and tackling alcohol abuse. It should be supported. If it is not supported, it will be the Liberal Party that is forcing us to return hundreds of millions of dollars to distillers—the very people who are out there trying to hook young people on their products.

Question put:

That this bill be now read a second time.