this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
35 points (100.0% liked)
Australia
4289 readers
214 users here now
A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.
Before you post:
If you're posting anything related to:
- The Environment, post it to Aussie Environment
- Politics, post it to Australian Politics
- World News/Events, post it to World News
- A question to Australians (from outside) post it to Ask an Australian
If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News
Rules
This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:
- When posting news articles use the source headline and place your commentary in a separate comment
Banner Photo
Congratulations to @Tau@aussie.zone who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition
Recommended and Related Communities
Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:
- Australian News
- World News (from an Australian Perspective)
- Australian Politics
- Aussie Environment
- Ask an Australian
- AusFinance
- Pictures
- AusLegal
- Aussie Frugal Living
- Cars (Australia)
- Coffee
- Chat
- Aussie Zone Meta
- bapcsalesaustralia
- Food Australia
- Aussie Memes
Plus other communities for sport and major cities.
https://aussie.zone/communities
Moderation
Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.
Additionally, we have our instance admins: @lodion@aussie.zone and @Nath@aussie.zone
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I suspect the high tax no longer has much of a harm reduction/uptake suppression utility, and that the Aus government secretly knows this, but they are hopelessly addicted to the revenue so will enact overbearing new laws to protect the income stream.
The reasonble approach is to wean nicotine users off black market product by removing the price disparities. The only way to do that is by accepting a much lower tax intake than the current arbitrary, punitive one (perhaps VAT * 1.5 or 2?)
I remember the Australian government crowing about their world-first plain packaging initiative many years ago. Talk about fighting the last war lol
They should just go ahead and make it illegal at this point. Illegal sales will go down when you can't smoke in public or on your smoko's.
Well that depends...at what point is the revenue stream under threat because of the significant price disparity? My understanding is that it has dropped significantly, which one would imagine is a cause for concern if revenue is a key consideration.