Plain packaging failure

Richard winces, not at the spending of $3 million of taxpayer’s money, but at his failure to ensure the study did nothing but confirm nobody likes the olive green-coloured packs.  He’ll have to have a word to the academics he hand-selected for that study.

Later that week Amanda is buying cigarettes again, this time at a place recommended to her by a friend.  Instead of swiping her card for a $30 purchase, she hands over a $10 bill.  The cigarette pack she gets back looks like packs used to look, except the contents are smuggled and there’s no $17 of tax.  Amanda, like 15 per cent of all smokers in Australia, has now joined the black market.  She is getting her supply from the same criminal network that supplies teenagers with ice and terrorists with guns.

Richard doesn’t mind.  He doesn’t mind that plain packaging makes it a hassle for the servo attendant to serve customers.  He doesn’t mind that the ban on e-cigarettes means Amanda continues to fill her lungs with tar from cigarettes.  He doesn’t mind that the world’s highest rate of tax on tobacco means the smuggling business is booming and government is missing out on billions of dollars of revenue. 

What matters to Richard is that the tobacco companies are getting screwed too.  For him, this makes it all worth it.