Look What We've Deprived You Of

Chris Snowdon today highlighted some quite astonishing proposals by Health Nazis and others in Australia, it's definitely worth a read. He finishes with a chilling well-being warning.

Australian control freaks are only ever half a step ahead of the British nutters so brace yourself. 

This is true. Globalisation doesn't just apply to big business, you know. The fanatics who derive financial enrichment from destroying people's lives share their insane ideas at global conferences, on social media and via e-mail. If it is happening anywhere in the world, it is likely to happen here - and everywhere else too - before very long.

Australia also mirrors the UK in having a state-funded broadcaster willing to bend over backwards to defend the indefensible if the government is committed to it. In Australia, this means regular eye-watering 12.5% increases in tobacco taxes.

As enthusiastically publicised on Twitter by Simple Simon, here is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation doing its best to deny that there is any problem with them.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott told Liberal Party members in Tasmania that Bill Shorten's Labor Opposition plans to bring in "five new taxes" if elected. 

Mr Abbott identified these potential taxes as a housing tax, a wealth tax, a seniors tax, a carbon tax, as well as characterising Labor's proposed tobacco excise increases as a "workers tax". 

"There'll be a workers tax 'cos he's going to slug smokers," Mr Abbott said on March 4, 2016. 

"And as my grandfather used to say, 'it's the only pleasure I've got left, son'. I don't much like smoking, but nevertheless why single out one particular section of the community for yet another slug?" 

He repeated the claim on March 23, telling Sky News host Paul Murray that Labor's policies include "increased tax on workers having a smoko", which he later called "a tax on every worker having a smoko". 

Is Labor's planned tobacco excise increase really a "workers tax"?

It should be clear to anyone that the point being made is that it is a regressive tax which predominantly harms the less affluent. The oft-referenced 'workers' to whom Labor (and Labour here) always claim to represent.

The ABC goes through lot of theatrical nit-picking to say that tobacco hikes being a "workers tax" is technically incorrect, but can't evade the incontrovertible salient fact which they leave till the end of an intensely statistic-laden article where most people won't see it.

Tobacco taxes represent a greater proportion of a "worker's" income than that of a higher income earner. 

Michelle Scollo of Quit Victoria has acknowledged that "increases in tobacco taxes are most felt among poorer sub-groups" but says that this makes tax increases "an effective preventive tool".

In other words, impoverishing the poor is a deliberate strategy of tobacco controllers, for their own good. A hideous contravention of principles laid down by J S Mill in On Liberty and de facto prohibition.

“Every increase of cost is a prohibition, to those whose means to not come up to the augmented price"

It's important to stress this point, particularly since the overwhelming majority of career 'public health' tax-troughers would describe themselves as left of centre. Yet they are quite happy to inflict policies on the public which actively attack the poor and which don't really affect the rich at all.

As if that isn't bad enough though, once they have impoverished the poor - which causes harm in its own right - those lovely left-leaning, caring, sharing 'public health' bansturbators then revel in boasting about how their policies have made those people poor.

1.1 million people in England are in poverty because of tax policies demanded by @ASH_LDN https://t.co/4Yvx03yUE1 pic.twitter.com/kG1fL91NxS

— Dick Puddlecote (@Dick_Puddlecote) November 3, 2015

And even love to tease those they have impoverished by waving the goods they now can't afford in front of their faces.

Chutzpah, definition: Taxing people into poverty and then "caring" about what they cannot afford.@CDCTobaccoFree https://t.co/DjptwHcbyk

— Carl V Phillips (@carlvphillips) April 5, 2016

There really isn't anything more vile than an industry which claims to be looking after the less well off, while actively attacking them and then rubbing it in by explaining exactly what has been deliberately put beyond their financial reach. And all just to perpetuate the industry's own existence and to fill its own bank accounts with the proceeds of the taxes they lobbied for.

Remember, we're on the side of the angels here, they on the other hand are just repulsive.