In August 2013,
Prime Minister of the time Kevin Rudd stated: "Around 30 per cent of
cancer is caused by tobacco consumption and it's estimated this will kill
15,000 Australians each year." The surprisingly thing about this statement
is not the astounding number of Aussies who die each year from cigarettes, but
if that is the number of Australians who are dying, why isn't the cause being
prohibited?
Plain packaging is
great, and it works, and companies who push cigarettes are afraid of plain
packaging, like Philip Morris who wrote in their 2012 Annual Report:
"...there were also a number of setbacks or lack of progress on some key
regulatory initiatives, the most obvious of which was the implementation of plain
packaging legislation in Australia in December of last year."
The thing is,
Australian politicians are playing a not very small trick on Aussies because
while it looks like they have their cards on the table, they actually have a
full set of cards in their hand, and just as smokers are addicted to their
little cancer sticks, the Australian government is addicted to the green stuff
that those little cancer sticks make: no, not the smoke, the money. As yet they
do not have the courage to ban cigarettes as they just love those tariffs and
duties (so they can have bigger campaigns to spend more money on things like: hospitals).
In a 2010-2011
Budget Review the government noted that Australia's tobacco tax was 68%, while
Canada's was 76%, the United Kingdom's was 78%, and France's was 80%. So quite
frankly Australia is lagging behind in something
it should be a world leader in. According to the study noted below, cigarettes produce up
to a 12 times higher concentration of carbon monoxide than car exhaust, so it
may even be possible to prohibit cigarettes on purely environmental grounds,
especially if you also include the 70 carcinogens and up to 4,000 other
chemicals.
References:
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