Freeze tobacco excise & free the vape

The price of smokes is sky high, the black market on vapes and tobacco is booming and the revenue to the federal budget is falling. It’s time to re-think the Federal Government’s war on tobacco. 

The Federal Government makes more money from the tobacco excise than they spend on student support payments and veterans and their families combined. This year it was $7.4 billion – a huge slice of the funding pie. At the same time, the price of smokes has just gone up to $84 for a 40 pack. No wonder people are turning to the black market. In a cost of living crisis, these price rises aren’t convincing people to kick the habit. It’s just forcing them to look elsewhere for a cheaper product. 

For a long time, vapes were the solution for a lot of people.They were cheaper than smokes and for a lot of people, better for their health. Tammy has loved ones who she saw firsthand stop using nicotine products altogether because vapes helped them kick the habit. It worked. Until the Labor and the Greens decided to make vapes impossible to access. 

Labor says you’re free to buy one from the pharmacy, but you’ve got to find one that stocks them and is willing to hand it over first. And if you’re in Tasmania, then you’ll need a prescription to get one. Good luck finding a doctor who’ll give you one of those.

Tammy’s a reformed smoker. She grew up with most of her family smoking at events. It’s a generational cycle, a habit that was always going to be in her future. Her partner Tim has always been a smoker, for as long as he can remember. He was actually reducing his daily nicotine with vapes. Until the new laws came in.

Since then, Tim’s gone back to smoking. You can instantly see the effect of it. The hacking cough that’d been quiet for months is suddenly back with a vengeance. Our office has heard similar stories from people across the country.

Tammy’s not here to say that smoking is good for you. Shouldn’t adults have the choice to make decisions for themselves, without government oversight on everything? We choose every day whether to drink coffee or alcohol – both things which can badly affect your health. But we don’t see the government rushing to ban those.

So here we are, with a government scratching their head at the loss of income from the tobacco excise, while pouring millions of dollars into resources to fight the black market trade of their own making. What we’re doing isn’t working anymore. 

Tammy’s idea is to freeze the tobacco excise. Just for a year, while cost of living pressures are still high. And then regulate vapes. Make them legal to access, the same way people buy smokes, and then put a tax on them. They shouldn’t be taxed at the same extreme rate as smokes, but there should be something. That way people who want or need to access vapes can and we’re putting money back into the budget for health measures. I haven’t done the math on it, but I reckon the excise made on vapes will help to make up for the revenue lost on freezing the tobacco excise.

The way we’ve been treating tobacco and nicotine products isn’t working. Tammy’s solution isn’t a radical idea; it’s just a common sense approach which helps the budget and allows adults to make their own choices. Apparently for a politician, that kind of thinking is pretty radical though.