Opinion & Commentary
Forget alcohol - the binge here is on taxing drinkers
The Federal Government has used skewed figures to justify its alcopop tax hike.
From midnight on Saturday, the Rudd Government raised the excise tax on so-called alcopops by 70 per cent.
To justify the hike, Federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon maintained it was price that encouraged binge drinking.
But price has played little role in the growing popularity of pre-mixed drinks, with pre-mixes having always been a more expensive option.
Roxon argued that the percentage of young girls consuming pre-mixed drinks had increased from 14 to 60 per cent since 2000. Rather than explaining what this really meant - that the popularity of pre-mixes simply had increased - she created the impression that this was proof binge drinking had exploded among teenage girls.
The figures the Minister quoted certainly sounded impressive. Except that the 2007 National Household Drug Survey found that, since 1991, alcohol consumption patterns for Australians aged 14 years or older actually remained largely unchanged.
Look at the 2001, 2004, and 2007 surveys compiled by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, and you also find that between 2001 and 2007 there was no overall increase in high-risk binge drinking by people aged 14 to 19. In fact, the percentage reported as bingeing weekly was 10.7 in 2001 and 2004, before falling to 9.1 in 2007.
The figures for young women are even more damning. In 2001, the percentage of 14 to 19-year-olds bingeing weekly - five or more drinks on any one occasion - was 11.8 per cent. In 2004, the figure was 10.5. In 2007, this had fallen again to 9.5.
This isn't to say we should not be concerned about those young women who do binge drink. But the "crisis'' isn't as great as the Health Minister portrayed and it does mean we should suspect the Government's real agenda.
The tax hike on pre-mixed drinks will yield $500 million in the next four years - that's a lot of money for a new government with election promises to keep.
Dr Jeremy Sammut is a research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
