Smoking today, alcohol tomorrow, food the day after? That’s the anti-free will road we’re heading down, says a smoker who tells his local MP that the only thing consistent about the government policy on cigarettes is its hypocrisy.
29 June 2011
Ms Gai Brodtmann MHR
Member for Canberra
PO Box 6022
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600
Dear Ms Brodtmann,
Thank you for your letter of 5 April 2011, which responded to my completion of the e-mail form at the internet site sponsored by Philip Morris Ltd., opposing plain cigarette packaging.
I take this opportunity to belatedly congratulate you on your election as Member for Canberra, succeeding the former local member Ms Annette Ellis.
Improving public health is a desirable objective, but the Government’s intention to impose plain packaging raises wider issues about freedom of choice and the extent to which producers and consumers of a particular product should be subjected to paternalistic preventative health measures, taxation and regulation.
Your letter refers to the reports of the Preventative Health Taskforce as justification, citing their assertion that plain packaging will, amongst other optimistic claims, reduce the general appeal and desirability of smoking.
I hold no brief for the tobacco companies, but their product remains legal so why should they be subject to additional restrictions of unproven effectiveness, further impeding their marketing capacity and infringing corporate intellectual property rights?
The plain packaging proposal seems to proceed from assuming that the general population is so suggestible and weak minded that the sight of a cigarette package in other than olive green with photos of disease will cause them to become tobacco addicts, which is risible and an insult to our collective intelligence.
Plain packaging could fairly be described as an ill considered ideologically based smoking ‘countermeasure’, as cigarette packages are already required to be concealed at retailers, and many smokers transfer their cigarettes to cases.
Another ‘initiative’ introduced by Government to correct wayward smokers, namely removing the tar and nicotine concentration figures from packets, could in fact contribute to smoking-related health problems, by preventing consumers from knowing which brands contain lower proportions of harmful chemicals. Governments have used taxpayer funds for over 38 years to sponsor the crusade against smoking, which promotes intolerance and discrimination, interfering with and restricting ‘Big Tobacco’ while advantaging ‘Big Pharmaceuticals’.
Unless these public funds were wasted, the general population is already well aware that smoking involves the risk of harm to health.
The taxpayer funded subsidies provided to pharmaceutical companies for their mostly useless smoking ‘cures’ indicate the zealotry underlying the public health message, based as it is on selective quotation or misrepresentation of facts and ignoring any evidence indicating bias.
The current moves to ban smoking in outdoor areas is an example. Cigarette smoke in the open air is at worst an irritant and it is impossible for the concentration of smoke to approach ‘toxic’ levels (the US Environmental Protection Agency findings in 1991 that ‘sidestream’ smoke is toxic have been discredited but continue to be relied upon as justification for increasingly harsh anti smoking measures). The anti smoking zealots succeeded in banishing smokers to outdoor areas and are now trying to prohibit smoking outdoors too.
The Government collects more revenue from each cigarette than the tobacco companies, by imposing excessive and punitive rates of excise and import duty (almost 70% of the price of each cigarette is tax), while piously haranguing a significant minority of the population and infringing the rights of individuals to freely choose what they consume, whether ‘healthy’ or not.
How does the Government reconcile this blatant conflict of interest, making billions in revenue while introducing yet more coercive anti smoking measures? This stance could be perceived as hypocrisy.
Your letter refers to the Preventative Health Taskforce claim that the ‘social costs’ of smoking amount to some $31.5 Billion per annum. No definition of ‘social costs’ is offered, or of how this figure was calculated, although I assume it would include the ‘social costs’ of aggression caused by the self appointed anti smoking vigilantes who believe they have the right, encouraged by Government, to command other people not to smoke.
The Australian Consumers’ Association Ltd. (ACA), publishers of CHOICE magazine, also have a strong focus on health issues and could not be described as supporters of smoking or of tobacco companies.
The ACA states that the annual revenue from tobacco (a figure absent from your letter) is around $6 Billion, with total annual smoking related health costs of about $3 Billion (see page 7, CHOICE magazine, March 2011).
The ACA has no ideological agenda to pursue by deliberately inflating or misrepresenting health costs, so their figure is to be preferred to those provided by the health fanatics the Government seems to exclusively heed.
I understand the latest Preventative Health Taskforce report made some 122 recommendations, involving 26 new laws and the creation of 7 new Government agencies to dictate ‘approved’ behaviour. They also recommended a minimum price for standard alcoholic drinks, and advocated cash reward payments to adherents of ‘healthy living’, however that might be defined or measured.
Does the Government also intend to rely upon these ideologically motivated Taskforce report recommendations to justify yet more puritanical measures to manage and control every aspect of our lives, to save us from ourselves and further restrict informed personal choice?
How is it a legitimate function of Government to regulate the informed voluntary assumption of personal risk? Obviously to be consistent the next step must be to impose plain olive green packaging on all alcoholic beverages and fattening foods.
This latest shrill campaign is akin to the moral panic over ‘alcopops’ and the technologically illiterate and draconian Internet censorship measures proposed by the Minister for Communications, Senator S. Conroy, more suited to a totalitarian regime such as North Korea.
I deplore the tendency for Australian executive government to presume to intrude upon and regulate our informed personal choices, and believe politicians clearly exceed their authority in such instances.
Paternalistic public health measures may well be fuelled by charitable rectitude and a belief that we are our own worst enemies, but the Government should resist the gloomy apostles of wowserism and support freedom of choice, as we should and must have in a nation claiming Western liberal democratic traditions such as Australia.
Perhaps Members of Parliament would do well to remember the words of political philosopher John Stuart Mill, noting in his work ‘On Liberty’, “…it is desirable that in things which do not primarily concern others, individuality should assert itself”.
I will continue to import cigarettes. The packets list the concentration of potentially harmful chemicals, are not plastered with images of diseased organs, and the health warnings are in a language I do not speak, so they do not concern me.
I am aware of the possible risk to my health and have decided to accept it, as a matter of informed personal choice.
Customs has enough difficulty at present intercepting shipments of tobacco and calculating the exorbitant rates of import duty and GST, and in the event the Government decides to also prohibit personal tobacco imports, the prospect of seizing shipments which are in other than olive green packaging are at best slim.
I would appreciate the views of the Government on these issues, and a shift away from coercive interventionist health policies which discriminate against and trample the rights of tobacco producers and consumers while advantaging ‘Big Pharmaceuticals’.
Yours sincerely