Quiet, children. The grown ups are talking.

Accelerationists believe that things have to get worse before they get better and that the faster things get worse, the sooner people will wake up and demand radical change.

I've always been sceptical about this because, as Adam Smith said, there is a lot of ruin in a nation. Some people will never change their minds or admit that they were wrong.

Australian tobacco policy is a prime example. Even the government now accepts that most of the cigarettes and nearly all the vapes in Australia are sold on the black market. The number of firebombings linked to the illicit trade is nearing 300. But, as this article shows, politicians and 'public health' academics cannot tear themselves away from the script that says that the real problem is BiG ToBaCcO.

 

Australia’s illegal cigarette trade has exploded into a full-scale criminal economy, prompting fears within the legal tobacco industry that its industry is being pushed towards extinction.

The debacle is hitting the big tobacco giants hard. So much so that a representative of Philip Morris International privately warned a Senate inquiry this week that its days were numbered in Australia.

... At the centre of the crisis is Australia’s booming underground cigarette market, now estimated to account for as much as 60 per cent of all tobacco sales nationwide.

Authorities say the scale of the problem is staggering. Nicotine is widely accepted to be one of the toughest addictions to crack, and broader cost-of-living pressures have encouraged smokers to look elsewhere as service station packs skyrocket.

The issue has merged into the disposable vape market, which has exploded in Australia over the past decade.

... But despite the massive enforcement effort, the black market continues growing.

Australia’s soaring tobacco excise — which is among the highest in the world — has pushed cigarette prices beyond $70 a pack in some cases, creating an enormous financial incentive for organised crime groups flooding the country with cheap illegal products.

In recent years, the illicit trade has become increasingly tied to gang violence, extortion rackets and a wave of tobacco shop firebombings across Melbourne and Sydney as syndicates battle for control of the market.

 

Oh dear, what a mess. But everyone knows that "world-leading" tobacco taxes caused the problem and, therefore, that cutting taxes is the way to tackle it. The government, the tobacco companies and the public all have an interest in dealing with this issue, but when a representative of Philip Morris said the bleeding obvious, left-wing politicians jumped down his throat.

 

The Philip Morris representative argued during the Senate inquiry that lowering tobacco excise could help undercut criminal operators by making legal cigarettes more competitive again.

That sparked fierce backlash from health advocates and Labor MPs, who criticised Coalition senators for allowing the hearing to take place behind closed doors despite Australia’s obligations under the World Health Organisation tobacco control framework.

The secret hearing turned combative after Coalition senator Jonathon Duniam asked the representative what Australia could face “in this dystopian world in 2030, when all tobacco or nicotine is illegal”.

The company warned organised crime could effectively take over the country’s nicotine supply chain if current trends continued, saying the legal market was becoming “unsafe and definitely unsustainable”.

But Labor senator Dorinda Cox aggressively challenged the company over whether any of its products were ending up in the illicit market.

“Are you able to guarantee to the Australian Senate that none of your tobacco that you produce ends up in Australia’s illicit market?” she asked.

When the representative pointed to anti-diversion controls and counterfeit products, Senator Cox fired back: “How do you know that if you don’t have any production controls in place? That doesn’t make sense at all.”

 

Tobacco companies can't control what people do with their products once they've been sold, but since the big sellers on Australia's black market are Chinese brands and brands like Manchester which are not made by 'Big Tobacco', it seems safe to say that Senator Cox is barking up the wrong tree.

 

But she is a beacon of common sense compared to the man from the Green Party...

 

Greens senator Jordon Steele-John went further still, comparing the company’s appearance before the inquiry to “inviting mosquitoes to give evidence at an inquiry related to the prevention of the spread of malaria”.

 

Sounds like someone's been given his lines by a "public health" activist, doesn't it? It's an analogy that doesn't work well at the best of times and is completely fatuous when the subject at hand is not the spread of smoking but the spread of illegal tobacco products. 

 

He later mocked Philip Morris’s argument that lowering tobacco excise could help weaken criminal operators.

“So, in your infinite wisdom, the best idea you can chuck at us … is lower the amount of tax that you pay,” he said.

 

I imagine he had a smug little smile on this face after delivering that zinger. Except that excise tax is paid by the customer, not the company.

 

“It’s a sophisticated submission that ends in the shocking conclusion that you should pay less tax. It’s not a serious proposal.”

 

They don't pay the tax, dumbass. 

 

Prof Garry Jennings of the Heart Foundation likened the scene to inviting “the enemy into the war room”.

“Big tobacco will simply argue for a reduction in excise so it can sell more cigarettes legally,” he said via the publication.

 

Yes, that's the idea, Garry. We want demand to move from the illicit, untaxed and violent market to the legal, taxed and peaceful market. The Australian government has paid a big enough price for listening to ideological halfwits like you. Now that the thing you said would never happen has happened spectacularly, it's time to listen to the grown ups.

 

University of Sydney public health professor Becky Freeman said the illicit trade was no longer a hidden “black market” operating in the shadows.

“It’s clearly an in-your-face market,” she said.

“It’s part of the business model now that retailers just sell untaxed illicit goods.”

 

Yes, we know, Becks. And it is, quite specifically, your fault. 

 

Australian tobacco control has been an absolute disaster but even now, with the fires burning around them, the political class cannot change the record. 'Big Tobacco' only controls a minority of tobacco sales now. The real Big Tobacco in Australia settles its disputes with guns. The legitimate tobacco companies should exit the country and leave them to it.

 

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Public health scholars

Some self-described "public health scholars" have called on doctors to stop talking in public about drugs that could save their lives. I look at their backgrounds and possible motivations for wanting to focus instead on BIG FOOD on my Substack...

 

The second author, Grant Ennis, is an Australian with a Masters in Public Administration. He has written a book titled Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Harms Our Health and the Environment which has been praised by no less a luminary than our old friend Greg Fell. 

He also “lectures at Monash University (Australia) on activism, organizing, corporate disinformation, and the role of subsidies in creating global problems (the content of Dark PR).”

This seems to be only his fourth journal article. The others are titled ‘From Corporate Activism to “Dark PR:” Corporate Discourses and Their Influence on Public Opinion in the Digital Society’, ‘We Do Have Enemies and We Should Know Who They Are: The Commercial Determinants of Physical Activity’ and ‘Calling for a more coherent policy response to driving harm’ (the latter article was co-authored with Mr Fell and tries to apply the Total Consumption Model to motoring).

The third author, the splendidly named Yogi Hale Hendlin, is based in San Francisco and has a PhD in Environmental Philosophy. He is currently writing a book titled Interspecies Solidarity: Valuing difference in the biotic community. He has a keen interest in ‘Critical Plant Studies’ and has written “the first ecohumanities book dedicated to algae”. He’s written a lot of papers but none of them seem to be about obesity. He does, however, have a book in the pipeline titled Industrial Pandemics: The Spread of the Corporate Virus and How to Stop It and he is affiliated with The Center to End Corporate Harm. He is not only interested in ‘interspecies politics’ but also in ‘understanding industries themselves as disease vectors’.

What does this tell us? Firstly, it tells us that anybody can call themselves a “public health scholar” these days. Secondly, it tells us that some people in the “public health” conversation about obesity might possibly have more of a political interest in fighting corporations than a medical interest in making people healthier.

 

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Not everything is a public health issue

Is gambling advertising a "public health issue"? And if it is, then what isn't? 

I've written for Spiked about this... 

If your definition of public health is so broad that it encompasses everything that could potentially have a direct or indirect effect on the health of somebody somewhere, then everything can be described as a public-health issue, but what is the point? If everything is a public-health issue, there can be no such thing as a public-health expert. Expertise requires specialised knowledge of a narrow field. A problem doesn’t become easier to solve just by putting it under the umbrella of ‘public health’. What do they teach people in schools of public health that makes them better equipped to solve every social and economic problem than anyone else?

Similarly, what do civil servants at the Department of Health know about gambling that the people at DCMS don’t? What expertise do they have on the three key licensing objectives of preventing gambling from being a source of crime, ensuring fair and open play, and protecting children and vulnerable people? At a push, they might have some ideas about how to protect the ‘vulnerable’, but they would be no more than the usual sledgehammer tactics of taxing and banning. ‘Public health’ academics have shown themselves to be hilariously out of their depth when they attempt to transfer their supposed wisdom to the world of gambling. If they can’t borrow a trick from the anti-smoking lobby, they don’t know what to do.

 

Read it all.

 

NB. Spiked has a partial paywall these days. I recommend subscribing, but if you don't you can still register and read three articles for free each month.

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The idiocy of MMT

Emmanuel Maggiori has a book about Modern Monetary Theory out today. It's very good and I was delighted to sit down with him on Tuesday to talk about it. 

There's a danger of giving credibility to this ridiculous theory just by talking about it. It's so idiotic that it feels like punching down, but since it seems to be growing in popularity, it needs to be addressed.

Enjoy!  

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