Roxon denies Big Tobacco the prospect of any smokescreen

They argue that cigarettes are a legal product, smoking is a matter of choice, and that when it comes to telling us how we can live our lives, the nanny state can go stick it in its pipe and smoke it.

This is all fine, up to a point. And that point is when smokers get sick and automatically assume that it is the job of the health system - that is, the taxpayers - to step in and cover the cost of their collapsed lungs, clogged arteries and triple bypasses.

It is a logically inconsistent position and, frankly, quite a pathetic one. If smokers and the tobacco industry are going to be hairy-chested about the manner in which they live their life, they should also be held to account for the manner of their death.
I write that not as some clean-living puritan, but one of those poor sad dills who has become addicted to this stupid drug, but who is now happily (and hopefully) in the final stages of a victorious battle against nicotine, setting aside last week's beer-fuelled regression at the office Christmas party.

You hear smokers say all the time that the amount of tax levied on their habit is more than enough to cover the cost to the health system of smoking-related death and disease, and lost productivity through the premature departure of the nicotine-addicted from this mortal coil.

The reality is somewhat different. The cost of smoking to the health system alone is a very hefty $31.5 billion a year. Annually, some 15,000 of us go to meet our maker many years before we otherwise would. Think back to early 2010 when then prime minister Kevin Rudd jacked up the price of a packet of fags by 25 per cent a packet. Even that whopping increase only raised $5 billion, which is just one-sixth the annual illness bill from our vulgar little habit.

The tobacco industry has been having a pretty ordinary time of it of late, as all those personal choice arguments vanish in a puff of acrid smoke as even smokers like this one start to admit there is no logical defence available for smoking or the public costs associated with smoking.

As a final last-gasp action, the tobacco industry has been mounting a spurious civil libertarian argument against plain packaging, featuring a matronly nanny-state lady displayed at tobacconists and corner store cigarette counters. The campaign has failed to ignite the outrage the tobacco industry would have envisaged because even smokers know deep down that what they are doing is quite dumb.