David Leyonhjelm (NSW, Liberal Democratic Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to address my comments to the roughly 18 per cent of the Australian population who engage in a despised activity. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for smoking. Australian smokers contribute significantly to the pile of money which, as I noted in this place recently, other people then spend. As you well know, there are many such big spenders in this parliament, as are many of the people who malign you. They do not like your habit, but in my view they have an even filthier habit: spending your money and other people's money on things that are often even sillier than spending too much money on cigarettes and booze.

Your generosity to the nation's Treasury is truly staggering. The government collects around $8 billion in tobacco excise each year. That is a lot of cash. Last year, smokers imposed $318.4 million in net costs on the Australian health care system. Depending on rainfall, smokers also cost the taxpayers about $150 million a year in bushfire control. If you do even basic arithmetic, these figures disclose that you wonderful, generous smokers pay 17 times as much as you cost. Of course, I am aware that the justification for making you pay so much for your smoking is born of a desire to help you quit and improve your health. However, every now and then the mask slips. Tony Abbott, in one of those unguarded moments while in opposition, made the following comment in relation to the then government's tax hikes:

It would only be raising $5 billion or so if people are to continue to smoke, so let's not listen to the palaver about health. This is all about revenue. It is all about tax. It is all about a government that can't control its spending, that's why it hits you in the hip pocket.

Those who would tell us how to back this flagrant theft tell us not because they are prone to agree with Tony Abbott but because they are troubled by the worrying thought that someone somewhere may be having a good time. Those 'havers of good times', smokers of Australia, are you. This is why, having banished cigarette advertising from everything, from television to cinema to motorsport and even the internet, and ended the commercial cultivation of tobacco in Australia, the health mandarins have moved on to banning smoking in prisons and insane asylums. That is right: people in cages, who have lost most or all of their rights, are denied even this small thing. Yes, prison is meant to be punishment, but the widespread tendency to see prisons as comfortable budget hotels bespeaks a fundamental failure to grasp just what jail is for. Rehabilitation means not committing further crime; it does not mean being trained to live according to somebody else's values. The same people worry about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander smoking rates, with about half of Australia's Indigenous population being daily smokers. Aborigines on income management, like prisoners, are also denied this small consolation. Racial paternalism lives on.

Because revenues versus costs figures are so lopsided, those who would tell you how to live have tried to add social costs to the healthcare costs that I discussed earlier. Social costs take in things like smokers spending on tobacco and the lost productivity represented by the early mortality of smokers. These, allegedly, represent income forgone. By that logic, deciding to work part time to increase your leisure time is a social cost, as is going on holiday. Arguments like that suggest to me that the antismoking lobby is running out of ideas. But when powerful, well-funded lobby groups run out of ideas and arguments, unfortunately, they do not fold up their lobbying tents and head home. They keep lobbying. We have now reached the point where, thanks to their efforts, the government is about to kill the goose that lays the golden egg by handing over all of that lovely tax money, that it extorts from you, to organised crime. Australia is set to have the most expensive ciggies in the world, once Abbott's extraordinary 12.5 per cent per year tobacco tax hikes, taken over from Labor, kick in. Already, in 2012, the WHO found that a packet of cigarettes costs US$14.35 in Australia. Only Norway had higher prices, at US$14.49. Following the unprecedented 25 per cent tobacco excise increase in April 2010, Treasury's postimplementation review observed:

The availability of illicit tobacco products (products on which taxes have been avoided) undermines the effectiveness of taxation in many countries in reducing affordability to prevent uptake and promote quitting, particularly among low-income groups.

That should come as no surprise. Here is a little basic maths: if you spend $5,000 a year on tobacco, it is a bigger proportion of your income if you earn $30,000 per annum than if you earn $100,000 per annum. In the trade, that is known as a regressive tax. And if, along with South Park's Mr Mackey, we can agree that 'drugs are bad, m'kay?', it is probably also fair to say 'regressive taxes are bad, m'kay?' Calling regressive taxes sin taxes does not hide the scale of the problem. Smokers are typically poor, which makes this vast tax-take all the more perverse. It means, for example, that social planners who want to redistribute money from the rich to the poor need to increase both welfare payments and income tax rates to achieve their goals. When the 25 per cent excise increase was imposed, the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service noticed an increase in seizures of illicit tobacco. In 2013, it rose to 183 tonnes, representing forgone customs duties of $150 million. Remember: that is the annual cost of putting out bushfires caused by cigarettes. It is entirely to be expected that tobacco cannot even be commercially grown in Australia.

Smokers of Australia: despite your generosity, I need to apologise on behalf of short-sighted pickers-of-your- pockets in this place. Maybe they have not studied history, because if they did they would learn that the regime controlling cigarettes is no longer one of legalise, regulate and tax. Instead, it now resembles two other regimes, regimes that were and are catastrophic failures. I am thinking here of prohibition and the war on drugs. In a world where cannabis is in the process of legalisation, because illegality simply does not work, and where prohibition enriched Al Capone but beggared the US government, I think people like me need to do better by you, the smokers of Australia.

I am put in mind of a constituent's comment made to me last week. He pointed out that he valued the e-cigarettes now available because it means that he does not smoke during the day. It also means that he does not inflict his smoke or smell on others. However, he said that he was still going to sit on his balcony of an evening, drink a glass of wine and smoke a cigarette. He was going to continue to do this because he enjoys smoking. And that is his choice.