Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Health Administration) Share this | Hansard source

I am happy for Senator McLucas to have more time to find answers to the questions I have previously asked. If it is in the budget papers, it must be hidden in the fine print. I have certainly had a quick squiz to try and find any reference to the expected revenue from the increased excise on RTDs. I admit it was late at night and perhaps my eyes were a bit too droopy to hone in on it, but if it is in there you have been hiding it very well. I do want to know whether you have further revised your revenue estimate downward and, if you have not, whether you still expect—as you did in December—sales of RTDs to go up, to the tune of 7.8 per cent every year, from 1 July 2009 onwards.

Here is the absolute flaw in the argument. The only so-called evidence that the government has been able to come up with that this measure has been successful is that sales in the 2008-09 financial year have gone down. The argument according to the government is that sales have gone down, which equals consumption going down, which equals binge drinking going down. But they have not got any data or evidence. Who is buying less alcohol? Who is drinking less? Who is substituting? Are the responsible drinkers drinking less because they are faced with a 70 per cent increase in tax or is it problem drinkers? The government have no idea and they have not even tried to find out. They have not done any research. They have not done any assessments whatsoever. That was the conclusive evidence put forward before the inquiry of the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs. That was the evidence provided in answers to questions by Treasury themselves. There has not been any further assessment done since the 2007 National Drug Strategy Household Survey, which was of course done before this measure came into effect.

Senator McLucas keeps persisting with this line: ‘The evidence is overwhelming.’ You know what? Let us have a look at the majority report of the Senate community affairs committee. We in this place all know that government senators will do everything they can to protect their government. So, if there is something critical of the government or something that goes counter to the government’s official line in a majority report, chances are that it must be true because it is a very hard thing for government senators to do. Let us have a look at the final page of the report, signed by Senator Claire Moore, the chair of the community affairs committee. It said:

… it was not possible to definitively conclude that this reduction in consumption had resulted in a reduction in levels of risky and high-risk consumption of RTDs by young women …

That is as damning as it will get from a government senator. That is the government’s own senators saying, ‘We can’t conclude that there has been a reduction in risky levels of drinking.’

The reality is that this was always just a tax grab. Somehow the new government thought it was politically smart to dress it up as a health measure. The spin doctors, the hollowmen, the people in the Prime Minister’s office and the people in the Minister for Health and Ageing’s office thought: ‘If we dress it up as a health measure, it will make it easier to get through. It will make it easier for us to get public support.’ That is why they did it. The problem is they did not do their homework. They did not make sure they had all their ducks in a row and, when the Senate started to ask some questions, the whole thing fell apart. When some scrutiny was applied, the whole thing fell apart.

When we discussed this in March, the Senate put forward a second reading amendment. The Senate called on the government to invest all of the revenue collected so far into genuine measures to fight alcohol abuse and alcohol abuse related harm in the community. But of course the government did not support that and there was a deal done by crossbench senators and the government to help the government in its attempt to get the legislation up. We now know that the Senate rejected the increased tax on alcopops as implemented by the government in April 2008.

This brings us to where we are today. The government is playing games on this. We—that is, all senators in this chamber other than government senators—in good faith have said all along, ‘We will validate the revenue collected so far because we do not want it to go back to the liquor industry.’ In March the government was too proud, too stubborn and too bloody minded to go along with that very constructive suggestion. No doubt the health minister was called into the Prime Minister’s office and the Treasurer’s office and told very clearly what she had to do. She had to eat humble pie. So here we are dealing with a proposal that all of us on the non-government side put on the table more than two months ago.

But what are the government doing? The government are playing games. They are being tricky and dishonest. Now that we are here saying we are quite happy to support this legislation to validate the revenue collected so far, they have used a tariff proposal to keep the tax hike going immediately after the parliament defeated it. If that is not dishonest, I do not know what it is. This is tricky. This is against the principles of accountable government. They are a government that is accountable to parliament, and the parliament has sent them a very clear message: ‘We do not agree with this tax. We do not agree that this tax is an effective way of addressing binge drinking. You have to do better. Having a tax on one single product category is not an effective way of reducing binge drinking.’

All of the public health groups that appeared before the inquiry saying, ‘We would like this to go through,’—because they would always support any increase in the taxation of alcohol—in the same breath also said, ‘But what we really want is volumetric taxation on alcohol.’ That is entirely inconsistent because volumetric taxation on alcohol, as I am sure the minister would be well aware, actually works on the basis that lower content alcohol is taxed less than higher content alcohol to provide an incentive for people to choose lower content alcohol products ahead of higher content products. This is doing exactly the opposite. This is putting other excisable alcohol products under 10 per cent alcohol content into the same category as spirits. Instead of having a predictable, lower alcohol content, this is forcing young women across Australia to expose themselves to the risk of somebody else mixing their drink. That drink could well be of significantly higher alcohol content as a result. It could well be spiked. Everybody knows that an RTD bottle is a much more predictable level of alcohol content and a much safer way to consume alcohol. They government are now targeting one particular alcohol product category in isolation. They are not putting forward a comprehensive strategy. They are not putting forward a comprehensive strategy from an alcohol taxation point of view. Do you know why? It is probably because it is too hard. They went for the easy target. They said, ‘Let’s target the distillers.’ The minister keeps talking about ‘the distillers’ as if they are a bunch of criminals. The government said, ‘Let’s target the distillers because we can make them look bad and surely the public is going to agree that we should target the distillers.’

But what really concerns me about the debate today is this. We as a Senate are acting in good faith—we are not playing games—and with a lot of goodwill we have said to the government, ‘We will help you out of the spot of bother that you have created for yourself by validating the revenue you have collected so far because we do not want to see it go back to the liquor industry.’ You are taking advantage of that. You are abusing the Senate. You are abusing the tools that you have got available to yourselves through the tariff proposal process by circumventing the express will of the parliament, which has rejected your proposed increase in the tax on RTDs. You are using a tricky process to circumvent the will of the parliament.

As Senator Xenophon and Senator Siewert mentioned earlier, this is a bit like Groundhog Day, and it could well become even more like Groundhog Day. Are you suggesting that every 12 months now you will bring this legislation to parliament and, if the parliament keeps rejecting it, you will just keep reintroducing another tariff proposal? So for the next three years, or as long as this government is in place, you are essentially going to thumb your noses at the parliament and say whatever you want, like, ‘We know you will have to validate the revenue again in 12 months time because we know that the situation we are in today is the situation we are going to be in in 12 months.’ Because we are sensible people, we do want to do the right thing. We do not want to see $400 million go back to the liquor industry. You are probably quite reasonable in your assumption that, if we were in the same circumstance 12 months from now, we would again say, ‘No, we don’t want those funds to go back,’ but that is an abuse of our goodwill. It is an abuse of the good faith that has been demonstrated by non-government senators in this chamber. The government ought to reflect very carefully on this. If this legislation is defeated again, it would be entirely inappropriate for the government to continue to use the tariff proposal process as a backdoor way to circumvent the express will of the parliament. In that, I very much agree with the comments made by Senator Siewert and Senator Xenophon.

I hope that before this debate is concluded this morning—and I have spoken long enough now, I hope, to allow this to happen—officials in the advisers box will be able to find some very, very simple answers. Have you further revised downwards your revenue estimate as a result of the increased tax on RTDs? I want it to be presented in a form that is comparable to from $3.1 billion down to $1.6 billion. What is the revised estimate now? And what is your estimate of the sales of RTDs from 1 July 2009 moving forward?