Amanda Stoker (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak tonight about sugar and obesity. I want to commend the Australian of the year, Dr James Muecke, for his work in ophthalmology and the prevention of blindness by attempting to reduce the incidence of type 2 diabetes. The work of Dr Muecke in paediatric ophthalmology is saving the sight of around 20,000 children a year in Africa and Asia. According to him, around 80 per cent of blindness is preventable, and he believes that sight should be regarded as a human right. His skills and knowledge are being passed on to a new generation as he trains and mentors young surgeons in the feel of ophthalmology. His work is noble and selfless and an example of just the kind of thing we love to see in our community. But I disagree with him on one point—that a sugar tax would help to reduce the incidence of type 2 diabetes and, with it, the incidence of preventable blindness. All the evidence says that it won't.

There was an image that went viral over social media recently: a grandmother took a packet of cigarettes, valued at about $50, and put it next to $50 worth of groceries. It was a stark reminder that the cost of cigarettes eats into family incomes.

Don't get me wrong; I think smoking is a terrible habit and we should do all that we can to prevent the uptake of it and help people who wish to to quit. But, for those people genuinely addicted—and, according to the Heart Foundation, the rate of smoking among unemployed people is higher than among the employed, and people in rural and remote areas are more likely to smoke than those in our cities—the cost of cigarettes has a real impact on their ability to feed their families and, indeed, themselves. The tax on cigarettes took a pack of 25 from less than $1 in the 1970s—and then it was taxed and taxed and taxed—to an average of $40 a pack.

Other measures that have been taken to reduce smoking have included banning advertising on tobacco products; the sale of small packets—sometimes called poverty packets—of 10 cigarettes to try to reduce uptake in young people; changing packet warnings from a gentle 'smoking harms your health' in small font on the back to full-blown images of rotting gums; and demanding plain packaging. Smoking has been banned in the workplace, in pubs and clubs and within 10 metres of government buildings. To buy a packet these days you need to know what you want because they are locked away in cupboards you can't see. All of these combined have reduced smoking rates from a peak of 72 per cent of males in 1945 down to just 14 per cent of the total population now. But it has taken 47 years of federal, state and local government changes to laws and regulations to get it there.

All the evidence shows that this is analogous to how a sugar tax would operate. On 10 November 2016, in Cook County, Illinois, they introduced a sugar tax, and it failed. It was repealed within two months—one of the shortest lived taxes in history. It didn't work. People just drove outside the limits of the area affected, got their soft drinks and came back. It applied to soft drinks but not to fruit juice, which often has just as much sugar. It was an epic fail, raising only half the money expected. In the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has in his sights the removal of a sugar tax that was introduced in April 2018. The levy was applied to the manufacturer and they could either pass on the cost to the consumer or absorb it themselves. So manufacturers adjusted their sugar content and, in just 2018, sugary drink consumption went up 7.7 per cent.

The evidence comes from a whole range of sources, including, quite compellingly, the McKinsey Global Institute in 2014, which found that the UK sugar tax ranked 13th in effectiveness as a strategy for reducing obesity out of 18 factors, with portion control, product reformulation and consumer education ranking much higher in effectiveness, Separate reviews by the Menzies Research Centre and the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research in 2017 both found that there is little evidence to show that taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages work to reduce obesity or improve health outcomes. And all of the evidence, from the UK to Mexico—where they have also given this a go—shows that this disproportionately harms the poorest people in our community. It should be enough of a reason for us not to do it. But the fact that it doesn't work at all is so compelling we cannot go down that path. (Time expired)