Worked for me! I smoked for 30 years. Went to Australia to 3 months and gave up. They were far too expensive.
Did it go too far?
Yes, obviously.
The purported reason for the tax is to discourage people smoking. If the unintended effect is supporting criminals providing an unregulated product, then obviously the tax is not satisfying it’s objective.
There’s a point at which more tax is just more punishment for addicts.
It’s similar to increasing interest rates to curb inflation, it’s effective up to a point, but increases beyond that fail to control behavior.
Nicotine addiction is complex, like any form of substance abuse. The high taxes in Australia have done a great job of reducing the harm, but if we’ve reached the point where more tax doesn’t reduce harm then we need to consider other measures.
Yes, obviously.
Not that obviously, the article cites data from Canada. The research states:
There is strong evidence that reduction of tobacco taxes to combat smuggling had an adverse impact on smoking rates in youth.
Given how many articles I see popping up on sky about this and that most of this BS seems to come from Pauline, pretty sure we can chalk this policy discussion up to the tobacco industry.
LOL. I agree that Hanson’s position does sound like she’s got tobacco lobbyists up her ass. God she’s trashy.
That said, that doesn’t really contradict what I’ve said, both can be true.
I don’t think we should halve excise or whatever, just stop the regular increases of theyre no longer effective.
She the one that looks straight out of a 70s soap opera? (Sorry, from the UK and don’t know the names of your national scumbags 💛)
Lol. Probably the one that you’re thinking about. You might not have heard the classical tribute song that was made in her honour, “Fish And Chip Bitch From Ipswich”.
There is no future where 0 people smoke or consume some form of nicotine. I think the tax excise has simply achieved all it can, and new inventive strategies for tackling addiction are needed. Trying to achieve a smoke free society is folly though, especially while conditions continue to deteriorate across our society.
No. It’s simply an enforcement issue. Police aren’t doing their job
If you offer $1000 for every successful report of illegal tabacco and actually pursued the dodgy stores, it provides even smokers with incentive to report
Every non smoker out there is so f**king sick of the tobacco industry.
It’s not “simply” anything. Ofc if you assume police are just lazy that makes sense, but if you acknowledge that law enforcement is operating at capacity it’s clear they don’t benefit from more reports. They will need to sacrifice more hours sifting through more reports, many of which may be lower quality or even false because of the perverse incentives. Rest assured every store in the country will quickly accrue many reports against it, and police will spend more time investigating innocent stores than guilty ones.
The harder the police enforce, the more clever the market becomes. Violent and brutal crackdowns do nothing to the drug market so why would tobacco be any different?
People don’t get paid a reward to report those either
It’s a cost benefit analysis…
I mean, enforcing bans on illicit substances has always worked so well historically.
It is kinda weird how the arguments for this can sound like neocons arguing for the war on drugs.
The difference is the policy is working, with smoking continuing to trend down consistently.
As an asthmatic who gets attacks from all forms of smoke, I’d be happy if they outright banned it. Then enforcement would be easy too, anyone smoking would be breaking the law.
Thankfully (for me) smoking has collapsed in the UK in the last decade or so. A lot of that is down to vaping. Unfortunately, it’s almost entirely the conscientious smokers who changed over. The end result is I would rather try and move on a bunch of heroin addicts than a group of smokers. They also have an annoying habit of standing upwind, rather than downwind.
That’s pretty much spot on.
They were all given the chance to be respectful. You can’t even go shopping without breathing in smoke though, and I’m tired of cleaning up cigarette butts, even in parks. It might only be a few people doing it, but the rest of the smoking community aren’t holding them accountable
OK, so previously illegal cigs were 10% of the market, and now they’re 80%. But the market has shrunk dramatically. From the article:
In 2010, about one in seven Australians smoked daily.
The country’s main national household survey last year found that rate had dropped to about one in 18 people.
If you assume the market halved, absolute illegal trade still went up 4x
And if less than half as many people are smoking, that’s still a win in my book.
Sure just ignore the drive by shootings and burning buildings on your way down the street
If the market continues to trend downwards then illegal trade will fall as well until it’s below pre-excise levels.
If the market plateaus with the illegal market still above pre-excise levels then I’d agree they should remove the excise and call the policy a failure… Well, maybe, you might be able to argue some marginal increase is worth a massive decrease in smoking, not 4x, but maybe 1.1-1.3x.
