Mitch Fifield (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities, Carers and the Voluntary Sector) Share this | Hansard source

It is always a great pleasure to follow the ever-thoughtful Senator Humphries, one of the great legislators of this chamber. The tax we are debating is yet another example of Labor’s nanny-state approach to governing. The government contends that this legislation, the Customs Tariff Amendment (2009 Measures No. 1) Bill 2009 and the Excise Tariff Amendment (2009 Measures No. 1) Bill 2009, is intended to reduce binge drinking. I do not accept that contention for one second.

The RTD tax is nothing but a naked tax grab. Even if we give the government the benefit of the doubt, even if we accept their claims at face value, the truth is you cannot solve social ills through a tax. You cannot cure the ills of society through a tax. You cannot change behaviour and you cannot eliminate binge drinking through a blunt tax. If it were possible to do this with binge drinking then it would also be true for obesity, smoking and tooth decay. Through applying the right tax at the effective and appropriate level to the offending cigarettes, foods and beverages, surely we could stop smoking, tooth decay and obesity, as well as binge drinking. But, as every senator in this chamber knows, that is absolute nonsense. The government, or at least its senior members, know this as well as we on this side of the chamber do. Some on the other side of this chamber with a social-engineering heart may have a genuine but wrongly held belief that you can cure social ills through a tax. But the architects of this tax in the other place—Mr Rudd, Mr Swan and Ms Macklin—know better. They are smarter than that. They know that this tax is nothing but a tax grab.

But, as is so often the case, it is much more important for Labor to be seen to be doing something than to actually do something practical. I must say that Labor’s approach to taxation of RTDs reminds me very much of the Victorian government’s approach to binge drinking and alcohol related crime in the city of Melbourne. The state Labor government’s solution to that issue was not to put more police on the beat, was not to have an education campaign and was not to put more public transport on; no, the Victorian state Labor government’s solution was to institute a 2 am lock-in. If you were at a venue—a bar or a nightclub—once 2 am hit you had to stay in. If you left, you could not come back in and you could not go into another venue. You had to stay in. That was the brilliant solution: the 2 am lock-in. That was the nanny state’s solution. Their objective was not to address the problem, which was a law and order issue; their approach was to punish small business and young people, the majority of whom do the right thing. That 2 am lock-in trial went for a few months, but—surprise, surprise—at the end of it the government decided that it had not worked. Such is the case with this particular legislation as well. That sort of approach never works.

When the Rudd government introduced this particular tax grab on premixed alcohol in its first budget, it claimed, as I have said, that it was a measure to address concerns about drinking amongst young people. It claimed that binge drinking had reached epidemic proportions amongst Australians aged 14 to 19 and that only a tax increase on these popular drinks could tackle the looming health problem. I have Mr Swan and Ms Roxon’s media release of 13 May 2008 here—it was quite some time ago, 13 May 2008—which cries:

Binge-drinking is a community-wide problem demanding a community-wide response, and this decision by the Rudd Government is an important part of that response.

Well, was it? Let us see. I must say that the dissenting report of Senator Cormann, Senator Humphries and Senator Birmingham sheds a lot of useful light and provides a lot of good information on this subject and whether that great media release of 13 May last year did fulfil its promise.

The opposition and many in the industry were wary that this tax was not a health measure but, as I said, simply a policy designed to raise revenue. The claim was that a 70 per cent increase in excise on RTDs—a narrow category of alcohol beverage—would help reduce rates of binge drinking amongst Australian youth. That decision, taken nearly a year ago, should be very easy for the government to defend if it has worked. They should be able to point to tangible benefits from the introduction of the tax, such as declining rates of binge drinking and reduced hospital admissions amongst the target group of young drinkers, especially females. But the government have failed to do so. They have been unable to provide any solid evidence to prove that this tax is achieving its objectives. We do not have to go any further than the opposition senators’ minority report to discover that:

The government by its own admission did not even try to get the evidence to demonstrate whether or not the measure had reduced at risk levels of alcohol consumption or alcohol abuse related harm.

In answers extracted from Treasury as a result of an Order of the Senate the Government admitted that beyond the 2007 National Drug Strategy Household Survey (before the measure was introduced) it had:

“not collected any additional national consumption data on the reduction of risky or high risk and/or at risk behaviour since the introduction of the RTD excise increase in April 2008”

They have not collected any additional data. I thought that government senators might actually try to hide this fact in their majority report, but I was actually surprised by their honesty. At 1.195, they write ‘notwithstanding its partial and inconclusive nature’, referring to the partial and inconclusive nature of the evidence.