Tax: Australia Fat Tax

Fat Tax Update…

PUP Senator Glenn Lazarus calls for fat tax in maiden speech to Parliament
SEPTEMBER 02, 2014
BY JENNIFER RAJCA
THE former ‘Brick with Eyes’ turned Palmer United Party Senate leader Glenn Lazarus believes Australia needs to look at “tax incentives” to combat obesity.
“While respected for our love of sport, Australia is today ranked as one of the fattest nations in the developed world,” the former rugby league legend said in his Maiden Speech to Parliament.
“Integrated awareness, education and assistance campaigns are needed to support the community to change,” Senator Lazarus said.
He called for tax incentives, concessions and other types of incentives to be looked at to target the behaviour of consumption.
Despite playing rugby league at the elite level, Palmer United Party Senate Leader Glenn Lazarusadmitted he is worried about at the prospect of serving his six year term.
“I am not afraid to tell you that I’m scared,” he said, in his Maiden Speech to Parliament this afternoon.
But the Queensland Senator said he would put his fear — about personal attacks and the mistakes he might make — aside to say the thing which need to be said.
“I am up to the task,” he said.
GLENN LAZARUS: Denies tension with fellow PUP Senator
MINING TAX: Glenn Lazurus announces PUP’s support for repeal
Watched on by his mother Judy as well as former coaches and mentors Tim Sheens and Wayne Bennett, the former NRL legend talked up the need to live by the values of the Anzacs.
“It is the Australian way to take care of the sick and needy.
“We must fight hard everyday to practice and live the principles of the Anzacs.”
Mr Bennett had told him he could either sit back and complain or do something about it.
“I want to continue to represent my country and I want the best for Queensland.”
Australia needs politicians who understand the real struggle and hardships of ordinary people, the Senator said.
He recalled the “surreal and life changing” phone call he received from Clive Palmer last May asking him to join his team.
“Clive was convincing and the rest as they say is history,” the Senator said.
Senator Lazarus thanked Mr Palmer for his “unwavering support” and his family, who were in the public gallery, for their “unconditional love and unrelenting support”.
The boy who grew up in Queanbeyan just down the road from Parliament and later played for the Raiders was “deeply honoured” to be home in Canberra.
He committed to embrace the challenge ahead with “every ounce of energy” and to not worry about being “politically correct”.
The Senator said it was important to encourage the participation in sport.
He also spoke of the importance of helping Queensland farmers given the drought and supermarket duopoly.
Originally published as ‘Brick with Eyes’ wants fat tax

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Australia Anti Prediction
Lift health fees for fat people: Woollard

27th August 2008
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Smokers and fat people should pay higher health insurance premiums to encourage them to live a healthier life and make them less of a burden on the health system, according to one of Perth’s leading cardiologists.
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Keith Woollard said yesterday that under the current system, people with self-inflicted health problems were being subsidised by healthy fund members.
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“All they’re doing if they put an excess on smokers and fat people is stopping the rest of the community, the thin non-smokers, from crosssubsidising the fat smokers, so in a sense it’s fairer,” he said.
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“If that’s the health care cost these people inflict upon themselves then they should pay that little bit extra to cover those costs, where it’s selfinflicted.”
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His comments came as the US State of Alabama revealed it would add a $25 a month “fat tax” to a system which already charged smokers an extra $24 a month in health premiums.
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Dr Woollard said the approach should not be taken too far and should not just be used to boost health funds’ finances.
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The extra premiums could be used to encourage better health.
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“The balancing thing I would like to see, if they are going to take a financial stick to these people, that they also invest some of that money back in programs to help these people lose weight and stop smoking,” Dr Woollard said.
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“That would be a terrific force for good if those extra premiums were put back into gastric lap banding and nicotine replacement therapy.”
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Public Health Advocacy Institute of WA director Mike Daube said Australian obesity levels were not yet as bad as those in the US so other avenues should be explored first.
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He said it was important not to stigmatise obese people.
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“We have to be very careful about penalising individuals but I would absolutely like to see a tax on junk food,” he said.
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“My view is that junk food should be taxed and the proceeds from that should go to promoting fresh fruit and vegetables, healthy food.”
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Graeme Webb, the Premier’s Physical Activity Taskforce acting project manager, said punitive measures would do little to address the range of underlying factors that could cause people to be overweight or obese, such as sedentary lifestyles and increased reliance on cars and laboursaving devices.
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Joe Budrovich, operations manager at insurance provider HIF, said the health fund’s community rating system meant all people with health insurance paid the same premium, irrespective of genetic predisposition, weight, age or gender.
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“At HIF we don’t believe that people who are taking pro-active steps to maintain good health are being discriminated against by community rating.
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“These people may also need the assistance of the health fund at some stage in life for treatment for a range of life or age-related issues which can occur irrespective of their state of health,” Mr Budrovich said.
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“For example, whether you are healthy or unhealthy you might want to have a baby or you might need heart surgery or get cancer . . . and there are many people on our membership that may not be actively looking after their health who don’t get ill.”
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He said active people often required medical or ancillary treatment for sport injuries.
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Insurance provider HBF declined to comment.
STEPHANIE PAINTER

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7 December 2007

It is customary in Australia at the opening of conferences to invite representatives of the original Aboriginal owners of the land to welcome delegates. A common way of doing this is to perform a “smoking ceremony” where eucalyptus leaves are burned. This causes clouds of smoke to billow throughout the auditorium. These ceremonies are also performed outdoors, the site of a new frontier in efforts to outlaw public smoking.

The smell of burning eucalyptus always transports me to my childhood, growing up in a small country town where I would often sleep around campfires with friends, returning home with my clothes and hair thick with the smell of smoke. I have since learned that these adventures exposed my lungs to large volumes of smoke particles, the great majority of which are indistinguishable to those contained in secondhand cigarette smoke.

Because I do not subscribe to a worldview that automatically places risks to health, however small, above every other consideration, I do not believe that sitting around campfires, nor lighting them in suitable locations, should be banned as a health hazard.

Many will have visited cosy country restaurants and resorts where open log fires create an ambiance which transports us back to childhood memories of winter comforts and a somehow more authentic world. Well-flued fires see most smoke go up the chimney, but as anyone entering a room where a log fire has burned the night before knows, considerable smoke also escapes into the room, impregnating carpets and furniture.

I commence with these images because they provide salutary perspective on the debate about secondhand tobacco smoke — hereafter, SHS and my concern on whether policy and advocacy for the regulation of SHS might sometimes go “too far”. Many people are comforted by the smell of camp and log fires, even seeking out such exposures.

But the same people will sometimes become outraged by the occasional, fleeting exposure to tobacco smoke. While nearly identical in terms of their noxious content both forms of smoke have entirely different meanings.

Among the many key determinants of meaning and outrage are whether a noxious agent is seen as voluntary or coerced; natural or artificial; and whether the risk has been amplified by lots of media attention. We don’t read much about the dangers of inhaling campfire smoke, smoke from incense or candles or cooking, but we read a lot about the dangers of secondhand cigarette smoke.

“Going too far” connotes several undesirable features in policy. It can imply a questionable departure from the evidence base, a loss of proportionality, and the abandonment of important ethical principles in the development of public health policy. A careless attitude to matters of such importance can have repercussions that will be regretted and which do not stand up to close ethical audit.

To me, “going too far” in SHS policy means efforts premised on reducing harm to others, which ban smoking in outdoor settings such as ships’ decks, parks, golf courses, beaches, outdoor parking lots, hospital gardens and streets. It is also the introduction of misguided policies allowing employers to refuse to hire smokers, including those who obey proscriptions on smoking indoors while at work.

I emphasise that I am very supportive of preventing smoking in crowded, confined outdoor settings such as sports stadia, in most outdoor dining sections of (particularly small) restaurants and in unblocking the entrances to buildings by having smokers move further away. In outdoor stadia, the concentration of smokers and their sardine can proximity to others can result in significant prolonged SHS exposure over many hours.

The evidence used to justify restricting smoking in public settings has always rested on a bedrock of studies concerning the relationship of chronic diseases like lung cancer, respiratory and cardiovascular disease to prolonged and repeated exposures in domestic and indoor occupational settings, generally over many years.

Added to this, are studies which show that even brief exposures to SHS can produce measurable changes in coronary flow velocity and distensibility of the aorta to name just two.

However, these studies of acute exposure, most recently reviewed by the US Surgeon General, typically define “brief” exposure to SHS as lasting between 15 to 30 minutes – considerably more than the typical encounter with SHS in a park, beach or street — and were all conducted in indoor environments designed to replicate typical indoor exposure conditions. These effects are also considered to be partially reversible.

In an increasing number of nations, public policy has moved to outlaw all indoor occupational exposures, where the implication is that the exposure is both prolonged and involuntary. So the question we face today is whether it is reasonable to outlaw involuntary, fleeting outdoor exposure.

As I stated earlier, while tobacco smoke has its own range of recognisable smells, there are few differences between the physics and chemistry of tobacco smoke and smoke generated by the incomplete combustion of any biomass, whether it be eucalyptus leaves, campfire logs, gasoline, or meat on a barbeque.

Secondhand smoke is not so uniquely noxious that it justifies extraordinary controls of such stringency that zero tolerance outdoors is the only acceptable policy.

Many cities around the world ban coal and wood fuel fires and backyard incinerators in urban areas. These are deemed to be so anti-social in their contribution to urban air pollution that they are often totally outlawed. Similarly, restaurants are required to meet expensive standards for the indoor ventilation of smoke caused by cooking.

However, outdoor commercial cooking such as beer garden barbeques and fundraising hot dog and steak sizzles of the sort run in every second shopping centre on Saturday mornings have so far not attracted any attention. Neither have park facilities for barbequing, for what I would suggest is the very obvious reason that the amounts of smoke involved are trivial.

Outdoor smoking bans imply zero tolerance for exposure to SHS. In 2005, the WHO announced that it would no longer employ smokers in any capacity. Presumably, it would not matter to the WHO if the world’s most potent health workers in, for example, malaria, HIV/AIDS or the prevention of injury smoked: they would no longer be welcome inside the world’s peak health agency.

The WHO policy came under heated debate on an international tobacco control listserver. Several participants — also advocates for outdoor smoking bans — supported the WHO policy. They advanced a bizarre argument relevant to the debate on zero tolerance for SHS exposure.

They argued correctly that smokers, after smoking outdoors, returned indoors and “off-gassed” SHS smoke particles including volatile organics like benzene and styrene in their exhaled breath and from their clothing. This, they argued, was a further consideration for why workplaces might justifiably refuse to employ smokers.

Those who were animated about the need to stop smokers “polluting” workplaces like this, were in effect so intolerant of smokers, that they argued if we can smell smoke on their breath or clothes, that they should be denied employment in indoor occupations.

The reductio ad absurdum of such a position would involve truly frightening policy obligations. We should not also allow smokers to attend cinemas or theatres, travel on public transport, stand in queues, attend sporting matches, or perhaps even walk past us in the street because some non-smokers might find the experience of being near them intolerable.

Supporters of the WHO policy also argue correctly that smokefree workplaces can act as incentives to cessation. This paternalism in wanting to stop smokers from harming themselves is presumably benevolently motivated: it is for smokers’ own good. Let us therefore assume that such benevolence extends to all avoidable causes of death, not just those caused by smoking.

Should we encourage the WHO to also refuse to hire tanned Caucasians (for sending the wrong message about skin cancer risk); people who rode motorcycles (hugely risky as attested by insurance premiums); anyone who chose to participate in extreme sports (eg: mountaineering, lone ocean sailing, base jumping where again the risks are immense); anyone who was overweight or obese; anyone who made a virtue out of not exercising; anyone who drank excessively after hours? The list could go on.

Advocates for smokefree outdoor areas include those who passionately attest to being severely affected by even the smallest exposure to SHS. A compassionate attitude to such claims would be to uncritically accept them at face value and to not subject them to any scientific scrutiny. But if public health policy is to be evidence based, such claims need to be subjected to scientific assessment.

There are many dimensions of antipathy to public smoking. Some are affronted by the mere sight of smoking (although JS Mill was emphatic that “mere offence” did not count as harm). Others have an evangelical mission to use “tough love” to help others to reduce and quit.

Public health research is debased when it lends bogus credibility to what are essentially matters of community preference. If local governments wish to stop people smoking on beaches because of the intractable butt littering that occurs, they should frame their actions in terms of litter reduction, not public health.

The 2006 US Surgeon General’s report on involuntary exposure to tobacco smoke made no recommendations and reviewed no evidence in its 709 pages on the dangers of outdoor exposure or the public health importance of controlling it.

There should be a lesson in this for all of us.

• This is an edited extract of a paper that Professor Chapman recently presented at the William Mitchell School of Law, St Paul, Minnesota. Follow this link to read the full paper.

The anti-tobacco brigade has gone too far with proposals to ban outdoor smoking

RESTRICTING smoking has gone into overdrive in recent weeks with four developments that pose important questions for the ethics of public health policy.

South Australia has announced a ban on smoking in cars when children are on board. Fremantle Council in Western Australia intends to ban smoking in outdoor restaurant settings. The NSW Consumer, Trader and Tenancy Tribunal ordered a smoking couple in an apartment to stop smoking inside their home because of significant smoke drift into other apartments. And this week, Mosman Council in Sydney has announced plans to ban smoking in parks, bus shelters and perhaps footpaths.

Banning smoking in confined public spaces has moved at glacial pace over the 30 years since smoking was stopped on trains in the 1970s. The history of this delay is a case book in half-pregnant politics.

Bar staff, the most exposed of all workers, will be the last to get legislative protection from second-hand smoke in July this year, when the final states introduce indoor bans at least 10 years after office workers were accorded the same protection. Lobbying from the tobacco and hotel industry effectively shredded the occupational health rights of bar staff over this time.

Children exposed to smoking in private cars first tested the public-private policy boundaries on smoking. A National Health and Medical Research Council report, gutted by tobacco industry-initiated court action over procedures in 1997, included an aborted recommendation that smoking be banned in cars when children are present.

Some police murmured that it would be unenforceable, yet they have no trouble enforcing regulation of seat belt or mobile phone use (28,000 fines in NSW last year).

There are many precedents for the state legislating to protect children from harmful freedoms exercised by their parents and others. Apartment regulations often forbid pets because of health considerations, and various personal freedoms are compromised because of the communal aspects of living closely to others. So the freedom to smoke out your neighbours in apartments has looked fragile for some time.

But there are worrying signs in what has now become almost predictable, repeated policy success. There are signs that some are starting to abandon the sacrosanct ethical and evidence-based principles that underpin all good public health policy. Smokefree workplaces were built on a bedrock of research about second-hand smoke being harmful.

Doorstopper sized review volumes have synthesised this evidence, which has with rare exceptions been gathered from studying those who have been chronically, not acutely exposed in indoor domestic and workplace settings. Some experimental work has shown that even brief, acute exposure to second-hand smoke can cause measurable physiological changes in those exposed. This evidence has been important in demonstrating the basis on which cumulative exposure is pathogenic. But the evidence of acute exposure being harmful to all but the most exquisitely sensitive is poor.

As smoking becomes exiled outdoors, reasonable debates have emerged about banning smoking in outdoor, roofless areas where people gather in sardine tin-like densities. Sports stadiums are now increasingly smokefree, with little protest occurring because what is being regulated is so reasonable.

Smokers can see the distress they cause and few are keen to defend the indefensible when moving well away to smoke has now become routine etiquette.

Equally reasonable debates are also occurring about the unintended effect of indoor smoking bans in concentrating smoking in the alfresco sections of restaurants and bars where similar cheek-by-jowl seating causes patrons to be again half pickled in smoke.

In each of the above scenarios, arguments about amenity and the unreasonableness of many smokers have been at the heart of moving policy along. Typical regulations specify that smoking areas should be a minimum of 5m from building entrances.

But for some like Mosman Council, this is not enough. They want to prevent the possibility of any involuntary exposure, no matter how fleeting, from ever occurring. Smoking, they argue, should be banned from pavements, parks, beaches, the open decks of ocean cruise liners, and from dedicated smoking rooms at airports (because of leakage when smokers come and go from these rooms). It has become almost profane to ask where smokers might be allowed to light up.

I have even heard some argue for policies that ban smokers from employment because smoke on the breath and clothes off-gassed particles when they returned to a building after smoking.

By the logic of the same argument, smokers would presumably be forbidden from using public transport, attending cinemas or indeed ever mixing with non-smokers. Their children could be taken from them for their own good, the reductio ad absurdum would run.

Undeterred by the scorn poured on such suggestions, some unashamedly argue that the threat of unemployment is a fine example of enlightened paternalism: smokers should be virtually forced to quit for their own good.

The evidence base for public health policy must be vigilantly respected and the arguments for tobacco control never allowed to haemorrhage into the moralism that characterised tobacco control of previous centuries. For enthusiasts of untethered paternalism that abandons respect for smokers’ choice to harm themselves, their hubris awaits its inevitable fate.

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Anti-smoking lobbyists demand action

27/04/06

Anti-smoking lobbyists are calling on the world’s largest tobacco group to take steps to slow the “tobacco epidemic” as it prepares to split from its parent company.

Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) Australia is among more than 100 organisations from 40 countries which have put their name to a statement calling on Philip Morris to be more “socially responsible”.

The demand is being made in advance of a breakup of Philip Morris and Altria, one of the world’s largest entities.

The move would split Philip Morris International, Philip Morris USA and Kraft into three separate companies.

“We are urging Philip Morris and its subsidiaries to major changes to the way they do business …” ASH chief executive officer Anne Jones said in a statement.

The coalition are demanding that the manufacturer supports the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control to curb smoking worldwide and end “all forms of misleading and deceptive conduct” among other measures.

Smoking men put sons at risk later

December 12, 2005
Amanda Hodge and Jonathon Leake

MEN who start smoking early in life are not only harming themselves but exposing their unborn sons to a much greater risk of obesity.

A new study by the Institute of Child Health at University College in London adds weight to a body of evidence showing paternal smoking can create a genetic predisposition in children to other health problems.

There is already a substantial amount of British research demonstrating that a father’s smoking can lead to increased risk of childhood cancers by causing mutations in sperm that are passed on to progeny.

The evidence challenges Darwin’s theory of evolution by showing that people’s lifestyles and environments can alter genes in ways that can be inherited by subsequent generations. The Darwinian theory assumes that evolutionary mutations occur by chance over generations.

The latest study drew on data collected on 10,000 British children born between 1991 and 1992 and their fathers. Of those children, about 5000 had fathers who smoked.

Lead researcher and professor of pediatric genetics Marcus Pembrey identified 166 fathers who said they had started smoking before the age of 11. He then studied the growth of these men’s offspring.

“The sons of the early smokers were significantly bigger than other children,” he said.

However, the daughters were unaffected.

Professor Pembrey believes the men’s exposure to smoke so early in life did not damage their DNA directly. Instead it affected the mechanisms controlling which genes were active and which were inert.

It has long been known that lifestyle and environment can alter the way genes are switched on and off.

Sydney University professor of public health Simon Chapman said the new research came as little surprise given that there was “nothing comparable in human behaviour to the repeated exposure to carcinogens and toxins” to which smokers subjected themselves.

“We have known for some time that if you have a man who smokes and a woman who doesn’t, and they have a child, there’s a higher probability of a child being born with childhood cancers,” Professor Chapman said. “This is just another tile in a mosaic of horrors that smoking causes.”

The Action on Smoking and Health lobby seized on the report to call for greater restrictions on the public display and sale of tobacco products.

“Given the Government’s concern about the looming obesity crisis, I think as a result of studies like this they should commit more funds to reducing smoking rates,” ASH spokeswoman Anne Jones said.

Smoking ends here in 30yrs: study

Below is an article that seems like propaganda. One of the arguments used to promote the prohibition of alcohol was “no one is drinking any more”. We see the same kind of attitude from the modern day prohibitionist even though 20 to 25% of the adult populations smokes in the United States today.

Just for fun, some other classic predictions:

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
…..Charles H. Duell, Director of US Patent Office 1899

“Based on present levels of population growth, the United States will be unable to feed its own population in 50 years”
—–unknown author 1930

Smoking ends here in 30yrs: study

By Holly Nott
July 29, 2005

SMOKING could be a thing of the past in Australia within 25 years if present trends continue, research shows.

A groundbreaking study of Australian smoking conducted by researchers from Western Australia’s Curtin University projects the “epidemic” of smoking will end by 2030.

Professor Mike Daube, of Curtin University’s health policy division, said the figures were simply an extrapolation of a decline that had been occurring for decades. And far from being a bold prediction, Prof Daube said the study had erred on the side of caution.”What we can safely say on the basis of trends since 1983, is if those trends continue then smoking in Australia will be down to zero in 25 years – 2030,” he said today. Prof Daube said the study was the most exciting and encouraging research he had been involved with in 30 years of examining tobacco issues. “I think people will be surprised by it and then they will sit back and think ‘yep, that could well happen’,” he said.

“Smoking has been declining quite sharply in recent years and of course, the other side of that – the huge upside – is that it will save literally hundreds of thousands of lives.” Prof Daube said smoking killed about 19,000 Australians each year but he was confident of a huge turnaround in coming decades. In Australia in 1983, 40 per cent of men and 32 per cent of women were smokers, compared with 2004, when 18.6 per cent of men and 16.3 per cent of women smoked daily. “Of course, there will always be a few smokers just as zero unemployment doesn’t really mean zero unemployment,” Prof Daube said “And, the consequences of smoking will still keep rolling into our hospitals for another 20 or 30 years.

“But Prof Daube warned the tobacco industry would also be looking at the trends and doing “absolutely everything” in its power to reverse them. The projection included the caveats that anti-smoking programs continue, and that the tobacco industry be prevented from advertising and helping to develop policy. “The industry will try to counter the trends here and what is absolutely certain is they they will increase their efforts in developing countries … so we’re going to see a colossal death toll around the world in developing countries,” Prof Daube said.

The decline of smoking in Australia could be attributed largely to the success of public health messages, he said. “We were one of the only countries to get to a high level of smoking but we are also one of the first countries to be giving it up,” Prof Daube said. The Curtin study comes after figures showed Australia had the lowest smoking rate of any OECD nation, and possibly the lowest in the world. The West Australian Government today welcomed the study and said tough new state government measures would help bring about an end to smoking. Sue Ellery, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Health, said a legislative crackdown on the sale of cigarettes to children and a total ban on smoking in pubs and clubs by July next year were incentives for people to quit.

AAP
http://www.socialsmokers.org/smoking_ends_in_30yrs.html