Game over for Australia

Incredible scenes in Australia where illicit sales officially now make up 80% of the tobacco market. I wrote about this for The Critic...

 

The growth of the black market could have been prevented if the government had listened to economists, historians and criminologists. Instead, they fell under the spell of dogmatic fanatics masquerading as “public health” experts. As predictable as this fiasco was, the statistics in the ABS report are still breathtaking. The black market share of the tobacco trade went from 12 per cent in 2017 to 26 per cent in 2020 and then exploded after the pandemic from 40 per cent in 2022 to 80.6 per cent in 2025. In the same period, the quantity of nicotine consumed in the country rose by almost 40 per cent. The price of legal cigarettes nearly tripled between 2016 and 2025 while tobacco duty revenue more than halved. 

 

And on my Substack...

 

The blame lies squarely on the charlatans masquerading as public health experts who opposed the legalisation of vapes and pushed for ever higher tobacco taxes while scoffing at the idea that any of the obvious unintended consequences would come to pass.

In a sensible country, these people would have gone into hiding to live the rest of their lives in disgrace.

 

 

 

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Extended Producer Responsibility, more government failure

Extended Producer Responsibility is a boring name for a boring regulation, but it is worth understanding if you want to see how the government squeezes the life out of British industry and contributes to the cost of living “crisis”. 

The story begins, as such stories often do, with Theresa May and Michael Gove. After watching too many David Attenborough documentaries, Gove became obsessed with recycling. His first idea was to introduce a bottle deposit return scheme, which would have had huge operational costs and been largely pointless since everybody has a recycling bin at home. His second idea was Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), which he said would “cement our place as a world leader in resource efficiency” by taxing businesses for every tonne of packaging they produce, on the basis that “the polluter pays”. Seven years and four Prime Ministers later, EPR came into force last April.

The logic of EPR is not entirely without merit. A company that produces packaging is not actually a “polluter” — although the end user might be — but there is an argument for making companies internalise the costs of recycling the packaging they produce. In effect, the policy takes billions of pounds from manufacturing firms and gives it to local authorities to spend on recycling and landfill.

The problem is one that is often overlooked by politicians. Since businesses get their money from consumers, an increase in costs to business is bound to lead to an increase in prices. Since it is consumers who pay the higher prices, the real question is whether it is better for recycling of widely used packaging to be paid for by individuals as taxpayers or by individuals as shoppers. 

Read the rest at The Critic. 

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The anti-gambling slush fund

I said that the gambling levy would provide a slush fund for spongers and activists, and it has.

 

Dozens of pieces of research have already been commissioned. Since many social scientists specialise in woke postmodern guff, that kind of thing is well represented. Projects include “Intersectionality in gambling related harm” (£48,670), “Menstrual change and gambling: a hybrid review” (£51,092) and “A rapid evidence review of gambling harms in ethnic and faith minority communities” (£50,420). A review into “gambling and its spatial footprint” (£51,088) is being led by an economist who only seems to have taken an interest in gambling in 2024 when he received funding to conduct a study which came to the earth-shattering conclusion that “people living in close proximity to gambling establishments are more likely to visit in person”. 

A study of the “aetiology and treatment of disordered gambling” (£164,481) is being led by a psychologist who has been publishing gambling research for years, which sounds promising until you see that the first line of his proposal says: “Gambling is acknowledged as a mental health disorder.” It is not, but such claims will serve him well in “public health” where the distinction between gambling and problem gambling is being deliberately erased. A study about gambling and suicide is being led by an academic who is an expert on suicide but has never published anything about gambling. Her proposal begins with the nonsensical claim that “almost half of adults have gambled within the past four weeks and around 40% within the last year” before claiming that the gambling industry in Britain is expanding (it is shrinking) and that rates of problem gambling have “escalated” (they have not).

 

Read the rest at The Critic. 

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Introducing Action on Gambling

Action on Smoking and Health's former CEO Deborah Arnott famously insisted that...

 

"the 'domino theory' i.e. that once a measure has been applied to tobacco it will be applied to other products is patently false." 

 

As a staunch denier of the slippery slope, it must have pained her when Consensus Action on Salt and Health was set up as a tribute act to her organisation, later followed by Action on Sugar. 

 

Another new campaign group has recently been moulded in ASH's image. Action on Gambling is now a thing. Amongst their members are the Labour MP Beccy Cooper, whom I wrote about two weeks ago. Her bio reads:

 

As a public health doctor Beccy has been a leading proponent of stricter regulations on the tobacco industry – a skill set she is putting to work to curb the harm caused by gambling. 

 

Even ASH have stopped pretending that the slippery slope isn't real. The webpage that gave us Arnott's immortal quote about the domino theory has been taken offline and their new CEO, Hazel Cheeseman, has some warm words for Action on Gambling...

 

 

We've gone beyond denying the slippery slope now, haven't we? We are now at the "Of course there's a slippery slope, what are you going to do about it?" stage.

ASH always denied being prohibitionists too, but we now know for a fact that they were lying. 

 

So there's a slippery slope and it ends up with prohibition if we let them. This is no longer up for debate. The anti-gambling people will claim that they don't want to ban gambling and the anti-alcohol people will claim that they don't want to ban alcohol. They will say whatever they have to say to get public support, but they are explicitly following the anti-tobacco blueprint that ends with prohibition. 

 

Don't get fooled again.

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Australia's tobacco tax disaster

I knew things were bad in Australia but this graph really show how dramatically the black market has grown since the tobacco turf war took off in 2023.

 

The green and yellow lines show the government's projections from the last few years. Each time, the government forecasts that revenues will flatten out somewhat but they just keep plummeting. It won't be long before the Australian state is spending more on enforcement than it gets in tobacco duty!

What a fiasco. It's great that Simon Chapman has lived long enough for him to see it happen.

 h/t Ed Jegaothy

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Omnipotent government

I wrote this last week for The Critic...

 

Not since the early 1980s has the government had such a stranglehold over economic life in Britain. It is well known that taxes are at a record high and that the state is spending a larger share of GDP than at any time since the Second World War, but these statistics do not do justice to the full extent of the government’s interference in the economy. The price of gas, electricity, water, bus tickets, train tickets and, in Scotland and Wales, alcohol is controlled by the state. So too is the price of labour — since 2010, the minimum wage has risen from half of the average wage to two-thirds. Listed companies are ordered to “comply or explain” why 40 per cent of their board members are not women. Captains of industry are summoned to Downing Street to receive bollockings over non-existent “price gouging”. Businesses are given targets to sell more of one product and less of another. 

We lack the words to describe our current economic model. The left call it neoliberal but neoliberals have had no meaningful influence on British governments for thirty years. The right call it socialist but neither the Tories nor Labour have shown much interest in seizing the means of production. Keir Starmer’s government is more left-wing than he wants you to believe, but even if he renationalises the rail and water companies, it will be a nostalgic gesture rather than a heartfelt effort to control the heights of industry. Only on the fringes of the left is there any desire to return to the days when British Airways, Jaguar and Thomas Cook were under “democratic control”.

On the face of it, the post-Thatcher settlement has held, but there is nothing Thatcherite about this government, nor the ones that preceded it. “State capitalism with British characteristics” would be one way of describing it, but that doesn’t really fit. Under state capitalism, as practised in China, the government owns the major industries but allows them to use the price mechanism and other levers of the free market to compete. What we have in Britain is almost the opposite of that. Businesses are allowed to stay in private hands but with so many instructions, targets and, increasingly, price controls that it could perhaps best be described as a capitalist command economy. 

 

I go on to discuss the government fining companies for selling too much of a product which is, I think, completely new for this country. Everything else I mention has probably been tried before because every terrible economic policy has appealed to governments at one time or other. But it is the mix of these policies that is unique for the UK. It is no longer a question of being more socialist or more capitalist.

 

Upon publication, some people said what I was describing was corporatism or crony capitalism but I don't think that is right. Someone pointed me to Mises' Omnipotent Government, which I had not read, and said that a capitalist command economy is similar to what Mises called "the German pattern of socialism", i.e. the economic policies of the Third Reich. Certainly, there are similarities: private companies were kept private but threatened and bossed about to achieve the regime's goals. But Mises distinguished the German pattern of socialism with what he calls "interventionism". It is "interventionism" that is closest to what I am describing.

 

He wrote:

 

Nor should interventionism be confused with the German pattern of socialism. It is the essential feature of interventionism that it does not aim at a total abolition of the market; it does not want to reduce private ownership to a sham and the entrepreneurs to the status of shop managers. The interventionist government does not want to do away with private enterprise; it wants only to regulate its working through isolated measures of interference. Such measures are not designed as cogs in an all-round system of orders and prohibitions destined to control the whole apparatus of production and distribution; they do not aim at replacing private ownership and a market economy by socialist planning.

In order to grasp the meaning and the effects of interventionism it is sufficient to study the working of the two most important types of intervention: interference by restriction and interference by price control.

And there's a video...

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Deluded wowsers

It's time to laugh at the Aussies again. 

 

The article is here. The delusion and hubris is strong in this one. Australia hasn't beaten tobacco. Tobacco is beating Australia. It has unleashed a crime wave, and it seems that the underworld is now expanding into bootleg alcohol. It will be bootleg hamburgers if the wowser who wrote this article gets his way. 

It contains all the usual NPC talking points from someone who has considered the issue for about five seconds. "Let's have a sugar tax!' (They've never worked anywhere.) "Let's ban advertising! (Ditto.) "Let's subsidise healthy food!" (How?) And then there is the usual diversion about TeH iNdUsTrY.

 

There will be predictable objections. Industry will argue that taxes are unfair, advertising restrictions are excessive, and governments should stay out of people’s kitchens. Similar arguments were made about tobacco. But Australia did not become a world leader in tobacco control by accepting industry talking points. It acted because the health and economic costs were too large to ignore. 

 

If Australia is the world leader in tobacco control, send me to whichever country got the wooden spoon. It will probably be safer there. And yes, the government should stay out of people’s kitchens.

 

As for those "industry talking points", they turned out to be correct. Every one of them. The taxes were regressive, the black market did explode and, as this article proves once more, there was a slippery slope. 

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