THE WHO, THE WHAT, THE 80, AND THE 50 Those who argue Australia’s tobacco policies are on the right track often say that anyone with a different opinion must somehow be in the pay of Big Tobacco. Yet: 1. Organised crime has become Big Tobacco in Australia: they’re now four-fifths of the market. 2. You’d hope that how we tax tobacco: a. helps achieve better health for Australians, b. successfully raises money while encouraging better health, and c. doesn’t hand dollars on a platter to organised crime. 3. However, some in this debate seem to ignore those three sensible aims for policy (around health, revenue and organised crime) in favour of a fourth aim: putting the boot into the legal tobacco companies. 4. Let me put this as plainly as I can: if your preferred tobacco policy is driven by who you hate rather than what policy should be trying to achieve, then you are part of the problem. 5. And nor does it help in any way to believe that those with the opposite view in an argument must be being paid off. Doing so simply deflects debate away from the issues and on to the people, focussing on the who rather than the what. 6. Or, to put that differently, no, I don’t believe that those with the opposite view to me on tobacco are in the pay of organised crime … 7. Finally, since there are those who will ask, no, I have never received a single cent, either directly or indirectly, from the legal tobacco companies. And, while on the board of a large business, I was instrumental in changing our policy to ensure that we didn’t do any work for those tobacco companies. Meantime, the latest (albeit still experimental) estimates from Australia’s Bureau of Stats show that illegal tobacco is now 80% of total tobacco sales, and that total nicotine use per person is up by exactly 50% in the last four and a half years alone. Yes, you read that right: those numbers were 80% and 50%. Organised crime now dominates the Australian tobacco market, and they’re growing it at speed. Look at the turnaround in this chart and weep. Organised crime is now Big Tobacco. And on every sensible measure of how we’re going, Australia’s policy aims are being bulldozed: · Our health? Nicotine use per person up by 50% in the last four and a half years alone, with the speed of that pick-up still accelerating. · Our tobacco tax take? About $15 billion less per year than it would have been if the black market had stayed steady at its 2019 share of sales and if the rate of smoking had continued to fall (rather than rise). · Organised crime? Raking in a river of gold that may well be north of $6 billion a year. Yes, Australia’s policy of taxing smoking to death worked for many years. But then we took taxing tobacco to an extreme, and that attempt at Prohibition-by-price hasn’t been working since at least 2019. Simply ignoring our multiplying failures because of blind hatred of the legal businesses that used to account for more of our tobacco sales seems like cutting off our nose to spite our face. And at the same time cutting off our nose to spite our health, to spite our tax take, and to spite our efforts at fighting organised crime. Will cutting taxes alone be enough to solve this problem? Of course not – Australia also needs to throw everything we can at the enforcement side of this equation. Perhaps we could have gotten away with only lifting enforcement if we’d started to do that properly three or four years ago. But we didn’t. We’ve been so busy identifying the wrong enemy and fighting the wrong war that we’ve wasted way too much time. And organised crime has used that time well: it is now superbly positioned to fight any serious attempt at taking it on. That mistake was an own goal that is already costing the equivalent of $1,000 in extra personal tax for the average Australian taxpayer every single year – a bill that’s still growing fast. Our policies have been way too focussed on who we hate – the legal tobacco companies – rather than on the goals in health, revenue and law enforcement that we should be prioritising. We’ve brought this on ourselves, and then we compounded the problem by dithering instead of being decisive. So now this nation needs both a large tax cut and a big increase in enforcement effort and funding. And even then we will be hard pushed to succeed …

AUSTRALIA MESSED THIS UP – WHAT DOES THAT SAY ABOUT OTHER ISSUES? I hate that we’ve just cemented into place Australia’s largest ever marginal seat bribe – the WA GST deal It’ll be a millstone around the neck of Australians for the foreseeable future But no politician or party had the courage to push for reform, so Albo pulled the plug Yet what really worries me is that the attempt to fight for better policy here died with such a whimper The federal pollies didn’t try, and depressingly few journalists championed change Keating notes that, by the time he became Treasurer in 1983, politicians, bureaucrats and even the public thought that a whole bunch of things simply couldn’t be changed So they didn’t even try To his credit, Keating did try – and succeeded on many fronts As noted in Paul Kelly’s latest (and very marvellous) book, the Keating equation was pretty simple: he would try to convice the ‘five most influential journalists’ of the need for a change in a given area Once he’d convinced them, they’d help make the case to the wider public, and the momentum for change would build Roll on to today, and the similarities to the Australia of the early 1980s are building As a nation, lots of our policies are dumb, and fewer people are convinced that those policies can be changed Worse still, an effort to mobilise public opinion would now require convincing more like 500 influential people – not just five Yet it seems as if we just aren’t trying Or, as the economist Elton John puts it, this is “a sad, sad situation, and it's getting more and more absurd …”