Kaspar Wowser
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Crikey is Australia's leading independent source of news, investigations, analysis and opinion.
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Shorten’s not smokin’ : compared to the “Malboro Man”.
First, in last Friday’s Crikey, Bernard Keane kicks off by decrying Labor’s plan to increase tobacco excise as an example of “nanny-state” oppression of poor people, followed by vehement denunciation by Guy Rundle on the same policy (‘shitty’, ‘suicidal’, ‘delusional’, a “sinister desire” to punish and penalise working class smokers). Now (in Monday’s Crikey), Kaspar Wowser takes up the cudgels warning that “doubling the price of cigarettes may Shorten your political life”.
This argument may lazily play to a right-wing, libertarian cum vulgar labourist ideology but it makes for poor public health policy. Population health research, and internal tobacco industry documents, have repeatedly shown that tobacco tax is the single most important factor in reducing smoking rates, and that low socio-economic smokers quit at around the same rates as their better-off peers.
The big difference is in the proportions who smoke (one quarter of the most disadvantaged socio-economic quintile, double that of the most advantaged quintile)and this is because of higher uptake, not because of lower quitting. Poor smokers do not choose fags over food – they stop smoking.
So, tax increases work as the most effective public health strategy for quitting smoking across all classes, and any electoral backlash from the “beaten-down, low-income Labor loyalist” (in Guy’s colourful polemic) will be miniscule because barely one per cent of the total population who smoke daily and who don’t want to quit (90% of the 12.8% the population who are daily smokers regret that they ever started and may oppose hikes in tobacco tax) may take their vote from Labor. Or perhaps not – in the 2013 Federal election, the Smokers’ Rights party fielded Senate candidates in all six states, attracting just one in every 44,865 voters.
Phil Shannon
The Malboro became terminal before time but bumBoil Shlernt is long past his use-by date. As is the party.