Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is not there, Minister. We asked. I suggest that, if senators who were not part of the inquiry have any doubt about that, they should read through the last three or four pages of the minority report on this inquiry and see all of the witnesses—the National Drug Research Institute, the AMA, the Alcohol and Other Drugs Council, the Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Foundation, the Australian Drug Foundation et cetera—who were asked the question: ‘Have you seen any evidence of the positive effect of this legislation on use or abuse levels by young people?’ Every one of them said, ‘No, we have not seen that evidence.’ Without that evidence, it makes it very hard for the Senate to act in a responsible way in supporting legislation of this kind.

As I said before, we have been working on the basis of supposition to some extent. Without that hard evidence I just spoke of, we have been asked to assume that a measure attacking alcohol through taxation must necessarily be an effective one. But I think that it is perfectly possible to suppose a quite different scenario—that is, the young people who are presently abusing or have in the past abused alcohol are simply finding other, cheaper ways to access that alcohol. I had an email from a young man in New South Wales after the tax was first imposed. I think it is worth reading part of that email to the Senate:

I am a 21yo male living in NSW. I voted for Labour in the election, indeed I voted for Maxine McKew in place of former Prime Minister John Howard. I have always considered myself a ‘labour man,’ and it never crossed my mind to vote liberal, indeed I thought I never would. However, the action the Labour Government is taking toward the ‘Alcopops’ is one which I find completely unacceptable, and your opposition to which I can’t help but to support. While I myself do enjoy alcohol, I must stress that the tax increase will not affect me much at all—I never drink RTD’s. I drink wine, beer and if I drink spirits, I mix them myself. So you must ask why it is that I am so opposed to the new legislation, despite my habits indicating that I will be virtually untouched by the new taxation. I find myself completely at a loss as to how it is the Labour Government even concieved such an idea, nevermind thought it was a good one. The logic in itself is almost childish in its application, ‘What drinks are the young binge drinkers drinking? Well the money spent in Marketing seems to indicate that they have a preference for the RTD’s so we should make them more expensive.’ Of course the logic is just as childishly put aside as is demonstrated when I asked my younger sister (she is 17) what her friends would do—’Drink straight spirits or goon (cask wine)’ was the reply. So all the Labour Government is achieving by implementing this law is simply to push young children who wish to drink to do so with drinks that are at least twice as strong as the RTD’s they are wishing to ban?? As I said, I am completely at a loss as to how this was ever supposed to work.

This is not some apparatchik who has written an email to support the case the opposition made; this is a person who has contacted me to demonstrate very logically what young people who presently access alcohol would think about a tax on a particular kind of alcohol. Of course they would migrate to some other kind of alcohol, some other kind of beverage that still allows them access to alcohol—but with all the concomitant dangers that the use of bottles of straight spirits and other mixers present to young users when mixing those alcohol products themselves. That is a perfectly plausible explanation of what young people would do. Young people will stop using alcohol because one particular kind of alcohol is more expensive? I do not think so. I think the evidence will suggest at the end of the day that that is not the case.

Some of the advocates for the government’s legislation who came before the inquiry suggested that this was a good move because it was the first step towards a volumetric approach to alcohol taxation. That sounded good superficially but failed at a rather obvious hurdle: if you were to tax Australian alcohol volumetrically and achieve the same tax take that we now achieve from the taxation of alcohol, we would in fact reduce, not increase, the taxation levels on RTDs. On a volumetric approach, RTDs are overtaxed. You would need to reduce the taxation in order to achieve a volumetric approach, so that argument was spectacularly illogical—unless, of course, you have an argument that we should increase the level of taxation across the board. That model, incidentally, raises many billions more in taxation from alcohol than is the case at the present time. If that is the ambition of the government, I would be pleased to hear it, because I would be surprised if they were prepared to admit that to the Australian community. Perhaps it is their ambition.

The other point that was conceded by most of the witnesses is that a strategy which relies simply on one plank, which is to increase alcohol taxation levels on one particular form of alcohol, suffers from an immediate and obvious problem: it is not part of a concerted, across-the-board attack on alcohol abuse. There needs to be a broad approach not just across different forms of taxation but also with different measures dealing with availability of and access to alcohol, which is in the purview not only of the federal government but also of the state governments and sometimes even of local governments. The lack of that strategic approach was very evident in the comments made by witnesses to the inquiry. This government was not in a position to say, ‘We are working with state governments to look at hotel trading hours, promotions on billboards, advertising in local communities and so on’—or, for that matter, at issues of television advertising of alcohol. None of those things were part of this strategy. There were no measures of that kind that were alluded to except that the government was putting aside about $50 million from its $1.6 billion worth of tax take for some preventive activities—a pathetic token gesture given the enormous amount of money the government is raising, even taking into account that its tax take has approximately halved from what it originally estimated it would be when this measure was first announced at this time last year.

This adds up to a very unsatisfactory package It adds up to a half-cooked chicken, and I do not think the Senate should pass something so un-thought-through into law. I think the Senate has been disregarded and abused by having this legislation brought forward so late in the 12 months that the government had to validate its announced taxation measure from March or April last year. If it had been serious, it would have engaged the Senate on this issue much sooner. It has not done so, very clearly, because it did not have the evidence, it knew it could not produce the evidence and it thought that, the larger the amount collected under this measure, the harder it would be for the Senate to knock it back. I am sorry; I do not think that is a good enough political reason to support legislation which is essentially flawed. I say to the Senate that if evidence can be produced that this legislation in the future will actually reduce the harmful intake of alcohol by young people I would unquestionably be over there, voting with the government to support it. But evidence is not there. Until the evidence is there, I think it is quite irresponsible to expect the Senate to take this sort of measure on trust and to support it. I hope there will be the evidence based approach that we all should live by, particularly when such enormous amounts of public money are being talked about.