Sin taxes are an insult to the intelligence of adults

Nick Cater
APRIL 5, 2016
THE AUSTRALIAN
Michael Costa once threatened to write a book titled I’m Fat, Ugly and Stupid — what’s the Government going to do about it?
Late last year the Department of Health in Canberra answered the former NSW treasurer’s question by issuing official guidelines on healthy eating.
“We eat for many different reasons,” healthyweight.health.gov. au informs us. “Sometimes, we eat because we are hungry. Sometimes, we eat because we think we’re expected to eat … And sometimes, we eat just to make ourselves feel better.”
This last type of ingestion is known as “comfort eating”, or, “eating because you’re feeling sad, lonely, bored or hopeless”. Or ugly and stupid, presumably.
The guidelines warn against entrapment. “If you know you’ll be tempted to buy unhealthy food at a particular shop, try to avoid going past that shop,” we are advised. “Acknowledge to yourself that you’re sad. It’s an important step in changing the habit.”
If all else fails, the government recommends that we stop eating altogether. “Replace eating with something else: talk to a friend, get out of the house for a while, go for a walk or turn to a hobby.”
It would be nice to say that the Healthy Weight Guide is the most pointless, patronising and preposterous offering in the history of the internet, but no doubt there is a team of bureaucrats somewhere who have conjured up something even more fatuous.
Governments invariably do these things badly, but that’s not the issue. The real problem is that they do this stuff at all.
Moral panic about obesity has led to some of the worst excesses of the nanny state from impractical and expensive food labelling rules to the campaign for a sugar tax.
The assumption that consumers should be free to choose for themselves and take responsibility for the consequences is entirely overlooked. The state has assumed authority to protect us from ourselves.
Gone are the days when kids got fat because they ate too much, exercised too little and then were brought into line, or not, by their parents. Today’s kids are obese “as a result of entrapment by contextual factors operating within society”, the World Health ­Organisation tells us. It is governments, not parents, who must act.
Hence the campaign for a sugar tax, or to be more precise, a tax on sugar sweetened beverages — SSBs — since a tax on all sugar-sweetened products has proved too complicated to implement.
Last month, the Conservative government in Britain introduced an SSB tax, prompting celebrity chef Jamie Oliver to offer some unsolicited advice to Australians. “Pull your finger out,” Oliver said. “It’s about time your government got on this.”
If an Australian fat tax would stop the sanctimonious Cockney ramming his latest hobby horse down our throats, it might be a price worth paying.
Yet we know that if we give into this year’s righteous fad, next year’s will be even less palatable. In any case, the evidence to support of fat tax is, shall we say, thin.
A timely report soon to be released by the New Zealand Initiative examines the case for sin taxes and concludes that supporting studies are methodologically flawed. The evidence that the measures change behaviour is ­inconclusive and morally contestable.
“It is not just the scope of government intervention that must be challenged, but the idea that people can and should impose their personal tastes, preferences, and likes and dislikes on others,” writes author Jenesa Jeram.
Fat tax campaigners cite the example of Mexico, which stuck a peso a litre tax on sugary drinks two years ago. A British Medical Journal report claims the volume of unhealthy soft drinks sold fell by 6 per cent in 2014, the year the tax was introduced.
Yet the BMJ study took no ­account of the consumption of cakes, biscuits or other ways in which Mexicans might have been getting their sugar fix. Nor did it factor in the effects of the $32 billion the Mexican government was spending on the supply of fresh water to shanty towns and villages where soda drinks had previously been one of the few safe drinking options. There was no consideration of the weather, a not unimportant factor when it comes to the demand for soft drinks.
Even if we were to suspend our scepticism and take the report on face value, the claimed per capita reduction in soft drink consumption was equivalent to just a single can of Coca-Cola a month.
Even that is a guesstimate, since studies on the effectiveness of sugar taxes merely note the amount consumers spend on soft drinks, not on the volume they consume. They may be simply switching to cheaper brands.
In any case, why do governments obsess about the weight of their citizens, rather than put the money to more profitable use or, better still, sack a few public servants?
Nobody believes the anti-sugar brigade’s ridiculous claim that obesity costs the nation more than $50bn a year. It simply isn’t credible. It is just more alarmanomics, the cherrypicking of data and abandonment of sound economic practice to produce a big scary number.
One could just as easily mount the counter argument that the public interest is best served by keeping the populace fat. A US study found that fat people are a third less likely to be arrested than thin people.
Forget taxing Coca-Cola; we should be giving it away. In fact, we should be pumping full-strength Pepsi into kiddies through intravenous drips to keep them on the straight and narrow.
It might sound tough, but if it saved one granny being robbed by some emaciated, sugar-starved mugger hiding behind a lamppost, who could say it wasn’t worth it?
Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.