Australian State Broadcaster Is Even More Gullible Than The BBC

Australia really is a funny old place.

Long time readers may remember a time (March 2010) when a smoke-hating Policy Exchange wonk here in Blighty produced a pile of garbage about the cost of smoking to the taxpayer being around £13.74bn, forgetting that taxpayers aren't actually affected by private costs to businesses or imagined personal losses. Here's a taste.

The tax on cigarettes should be increased as the burden on the taxpayer is too high, even taking into account revenues from duty, a think tank said. 

Research conducted by Policy Exchange found that while tax on tobacco raised £10 billion a year for the Treasury, the annual cost of healthcare and other consequences of smoking totalled £13.74 billion. 

That total includes £2.7 billion of NHS care, £2.9 billion lost in productivity during smoking breaks, the £342 million cost of cleaning up butts and £507 million spent putting out fires. 

Lost productivity due to the deaths of smokers and passive smoking victims costs £4.8 billion and £2.9 billion is lost in increased absenteeism, their report - Cough Up - concluded.

As I discussed in detail at the time, the guy must have been pissed out of his tiny mind when writing such rot, and it was rightly rubbished by the Telegraph and Spectator - to name but two sources - as economically illiterate propaganda of the most egregious kind.

Hardly surprising since the author, Henry Featherstone, had tweeted his intention to produce such codswallop well in advance.

In case you're wondering what he looks like, here he is sat to the right of Debs Arnott at said ASH AGM, perhaps detailing how quickly he could cobble together his weapons grade bullshit.


Maybe Debs threw the oleaginous twerp a biscuit for his faithful lapdoggery, I dunno.

Anyway, it is quite clear that the £13.74bn cost is arse-biscuits of the most superlative kind, even when speaking of a country where OECD figures state that around 21% to 22% of a 70m population still smoke. So let's say that's around 10 to 12 million if we exclude the kids.

Australia's population is just 22m, and they have a smoking rate - as they consistently remind us - of less than 15%. So, again, let's be generous and say it equates to 3.5 million smokers if we include youths, teens, kids, babes in arms and foetuses.

So I was quite surprised to see this on the ABC website.

Anti-smoking groups, buoyed by a pledge by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to "get serious" about the $35 billion cost of tobacco-related diseases in Australia, are urging him to solve his revenue problem by raising taxes on cigarettes.

"Crikey!", I thought, the Australian currency must have been through one hell of a crash! If that's the cost from so very few people, there must be about ten Aussie dollars to the pound!

Not so, because according to XE.com, that AU$35bn equates to about 20 billion of our dear old Queen's golden nuggets. That's right, 50% more than Henry Featherstone's daft claims for about a quarter of the number of people ... even giving all benefit of doubt to the prohibitionist convicts.

By my reckoning, then, even the wildest and most corruptly fabricated mock-up of costs caused by smoking in the UK amounts to £1,374 per smoker per year, whereas the Aussie equivalent - as stated with a straight face in the ABC article - is £11,666 per adult, youth, child, ankle-snapper and chain-smoking embryo per year.

What the hell are they smoking down there? Unfiltered dynamite?

Or is it, as is infinitely more likely, outrageous - and simply impossible - tobacco control industry lies accepted without query by an inept state-funded broadcaster? You know, like the BBC but with extra special incompetence added.

Perhaps all that sunshine down under in the sandpit has frazzled their claptrap detector or something.

UPDATE: Chris Snowdon, writing at the IEA today on smoking breaks and productivity, also references Featherstone's foolishness.

I've written a lot about these 'cost of vice' studies and I will not go so far as to say that Policy Exchange's is the worst in a highly competitive field. It is, nevertheless, poor. Its primary aim appeared to be finding an annual 'cost of smoking' that exceeded the annual revenue from tobacco taxes, thereby justifying higher tobacco taxes.

Precisely the way the laughable AU$35bn fantasy figure has been used by the ABC above, in fact.

You can read the rest here.