Australia does a thing with cigarettes. No one cares.

Another scrape of the barrel is greeted by apathy

From 1 April, all cigarettes sold legally in Australia will have little warnings on the filters saying things like ‘toxic addiction’. How cute. I wouldn’t know this if I hadn’t seen an article from Daily Mail Australia. Australia isn’t the first country to do it. Canada got there first (if there’s one country you would back to pip the Aussies for silly anti-smoking legislation it’s Canada). I barely noticed that at the time, although it was reported by the BBC.

There was a time when this kind of thing would be avidly reported everywhere. Academics would be pumping out endless studies claiming that the policy will save ‘up to’ 2,843 lives by 2040. Radio presenters would be asking listeners to phone in to say whether they agree with the idea or if they think the nanny state has gone too far. Public heath groups would be calling on the government to be ‘brave and bold’ and follow Australia’s ‘lead’. Questions would be asked in Parliament about why the government was capitulating to the tobacco industry by failing to introduce a policy that was supported by ‘overwhelming evidence’.

But no one cares. Even anti-smoking campaigners know that it’s not going to make any difference. It’s not as if many smokers are buying legal cigarettes in Australia these days; most of the Daily Mail article is about the ‘violent turf wars and arson attacks’ that have been taking place while Australia’s pygmy politicians wasted their time on this trivia.

No self-respecting ‘public health’ campaigner is going to hold Australia up as a model to be followed. It’s more like a mad, old aunt locked away in the attic. Oh, the shame!Putting health warnings on individual cigarettes is just another desperate scrape of the barrel and everyone can see it. The only purpose it will serve is to make it even easier to see how much of Australia’s tobacco market is illicit. They used to go through the bins to look at the packs. Now they can just empty the ashtray.

There is, I sense, a degree of exhaustion with orthodox tobacco control. An article published in The Guardian this week represented a turning point of sorts. It admitted that tobacco taxes were no longer working and had created some horrendous unintended consequences.

The black market for tobacco has flourished in the shadow of Australia’s aggressive tax policy, creating a lucrative opportunity for organised crime. As legal tobacco prices have soared, criminal networks have profited by undercutting legal products, offering smokers a cheaper alternative that circumvents regulation and taxation. This underground economy has expanded dramatically in recent years, fuelling criminal turf wars and undercutting tax revenues.

The authors say that ‘the relationship between cigarette pricing and consumption appears far more complex than the simplistic elasticity models upon which policy has been based’ and acknowledge that the policy of ever-increasing cigarette taxes ‘effectively functions as a regressive tax, deepening inequality and penalising the poor.’

It concludes:

The time has come to look beyond ideological commitments and engage with the uncomfortable reality we find ourselves in.

A few years ago, the Guardian would have rejected the article, dismissing it as tobacco industry propaganda, but it is all the more powerful for being co-authored by a senior lecturer at the Sydney school of public health, the old stomping ground of the imbecile sociologist Simon Chapman who made a living by denying these realities.

It is difficult to see how the situation can be salvaged in Australia (or Britain) with their current crop of politicians, but the carnage unleashed by the wowsers Down Under should be enough to make governments in other countries pull themselves back from the brink.