The cutting of pleasures, the trimming of delights and telling people how they can enjoy life, is the sort of thing that will be tolerated, up to a point. Otherwise liberal countries do suffer moral convulsions, be it about sex, drug taking, smoking and boozing. Regulations and laws are inevitably passed, much of it tolerated. But instead of addressing the vice in question, invigilating rule makers and bureaucratic needlers often end up creating something worse. That’s when questions start being asked.

The demon tobacco is particularly relevant here. While tobacco companies deserve their satanic reputations for ruining health, knowingly denying medical science and encouraging addiction, governments and state authorities have also capitalised. The smoker, in effect, has become a unique exploited species, derided by the moralists for taking to the puff and polluting sacred air, seduced into addiction, and having the wallet raided by the severe excises levied upon the product.

The relentless battle against tobacco consumption has had a curious turn of late in a country which counts itself one of the most successful in restricting it. Over five decades ago, the Marlboro Man vanished from Australian billboards and was nowhere to be seen on television. An aggressive health campaign, accompanied by images of graphic savagery and brutal steep rises in the tobacco excise, accounted for a decline in consumption. (From 2013, the Commonwealth legislated 12.5% annual increases, followed by further rises in the excise.)

In recent years, however, a few problems have emerged. In 2025, the revenue model that the Commonwealth had relied upon was no longer providing expected returns. Legal cigarette and tobacco sales had fallen by 29% in the year through to September. The Australian Tax Office, in calculations made for 2023-24,estimateda net loss of A$3 billion.

Economist John Quigginexplainsthis decline with admirable clarity:

“The short answer is that, over the past decade or so, the tobacco excise has been steadily increased to the point where there are big profits to be made from dodging the tax.”

The Australian Financial Review, with a dash of cynicism, alsonotedthat the unquestionable harm caused by smoking had “given successive governments social license to ratchet up taxes on tobacco products for decades while enjoying the accompanying budget bonanza.”

Apaperby the conservative Centre for Independent Studies published in November last year argues that a misalignment of priorities has emerged in the policy of taxing tobacco consumption. The Commonwealth, in the main, had been “rewarded for over-taxing while states and local communities bear the health, policing, and insurance costs of the disorder that results.”

Punishing excises have, effectively, encouraged smokers to shop elsewhere. The number of tobacconists and innocuous convenience stores have proliferated, profiting from under-the-counter sales of untaxed tobacco with plain packaging and illegal vapes. The variation of price between a legal pack of 20 cigarettes (about A$50) and one available at such stores (say A$16), should make policy makers blush. The onus has fallen to the States to try to punish infringements, something they have been doing with acertain degree of leniency. To this can be added a throbbing surge in violent crime, thriving criminal syndicates and, if any concession to abject failure was needed, anincreasein smoking rates.

In the face of such a collapse in policy, government wiseacres and health advocates remain stubborn to any change on taxing tobacco. Terry Selvin, chief executive of the Public Health Association,sees no reasonwhy the tobacco lobby should be placated, placing the stress, as all fundamentalists on controlling behaviour do, on stiffer regulations.

Source: Global Research