The long, soul-destroying national debate has begun. Should the Commonwealth find yet another way of pick-pocketing the citizenry by taxing sugar?
Predictably the Greens are behind the push, having gone to the last election with a sugar tax as part of their grab bag of feel good policies. The Greens have said they will introduce a “sugar-sweetened beverages tax” as a private members’ bill in the ongoing freak show that is the Australian Senate at some time over the next 12 months.
Barnaby Joyce was incandescent – well, more incandescent with rage at the proposal.
“People are sitting on their backsides too much, and eating too much food and not just soft drinks, eating too many chips and other food,” Barnaby said.
Perhaps inadvertently, the Deputy Prime Minister had outed himself as a hand wringer for the public good of a different kind. He’s pro-sugar but anti-fat.
Full column here.
They could just make softdrinks/sugary drinks five times more expensive but I doubt any government would send a multi-national like Coca-Cola to the wall because they ‘care’ about consumers all that much.
We see kids out there as young as five & up into their twenties with a plastic cup & straw firmly planted in their mouths like a comforting pacifier so excessive sugar intake is something their parents, perhaps unknowingly, dosed them up on from the start. Some folks have less than no idea about a healthy diet and would never dream of reading a food label which, by the way, has sugar appearing as glucose, fructose, lactose or maltose just to make it harder. I won’t start on palm oil labelling, suffice to say Doritos & Maccas are directly responsible for a massive percentage of orangutan habitat destruction.
It all goes back to the basic equation that is take in more kjs than you burn on any given day you will gain weight regardless of where those fats come from.
Having said that I do know from experience that the instant sugar/caffeine hit from those poisonous energy drinks (V/Mother/RedBull) overloads the liver & the pancreas to dangerous level territory very quickly, depending on just how many cans you drink to acquire the ‘energy’ you think you need to get through the day. They should be taken off supermarket shelves immediately.
Bella, what concerns me is the amount of University students addicted to Red Bull. At the last two Universities I worked Red Bull outsold Coca Cola by something like 3-1. Before and during the exams students drank up to 5 Red Bull’s a day. After the exams they combined it with vodka (in Kuwait homemade vodka). Needless to say there were some very sick young people, some were hospitalized with acute liver problems.
Palm Oil plantations continue to be a scourge of the countryside here in SE Asia, not only ridding the orangutan of their natural habitat, but the elephants as well. Interestingly the people of Sarawak are starting to protest loudly against the timber industry. Maybe the people are waking up and starting to realize that it is their land and the interloping developers are no longer welcome.
I’m currently working with a kid who downs about 6 Red Bull clones a day. They cost him $3.50 each and he’s on about $22 an hour. Then he goes to his second job at night delivering takeaway. Not sure when he sleeps. He’s wired! Nice kid, smart, but I wonder what he’s getting himself in for down the track. I think there’s a lot of sugar in those drinks too.
Don’t start me on the palm oil.
I own a palm oil plantation TV
Palm oil is a necessary feedstock of perhaps a lot more products than you could care to admit. 50% of the contents of you local supermarket were produced using palm oil
Uses include
Consumer retail food and snack manufacturers
Personal care and cosmetics (mainly palm kernel oil)
Biofuel and energy
Animal feed (palm kernel expeller)
Pharmaceutical
Industrial
Foodservice/service industry
Can’t admit what you don’t know about Robin. That’s a nice list but does it necessitate the obliteration of humungous tracts of South-East Asia, with the concomitant, permanent destruction of equally humungous tracts of rainforest? I’ve seen and worked in those places, plus flown over them at low altitudes. I’ve watched the destruction first-hand in Sumatra, Borneo (Kalimantan and Sarawak), the Malaysian peninsula and Papua. There is way too much of the stuff already. And my personal observation is that the yield per acre must be pretty poor – if there wasn’t a bazillion acres of land to expand into it would not be nearly so lucrative I’d guess. And I’ll guarantee that there are alternatives.
Robin, Palm oil as a biofuel is a scam, Sounds like you are reading from a dodgy prospectus there…
There you go again Darren
Thailand produced and consumed 1.3 billion litres of biodiesel last year all from oil palm. They also produced 3.3 billion litres of ethanol
TV
oil palm produces if looked after properly 4 tonnes per Ha.
In Thailand it produces for hundreds of thousands of small farmers an income averaging the equivalent of about $500 a week. About 5 times the average salary
http://www.simedarby.com/upload/Palm_Oil_Facts_and_Figures.pdf
Also TV
most of Sabah and Sarawak back in the 1980s had been stripped of all native jungles in a lust for money and replaced by a grass cover that was inedible to even the hardiest of animals. The profits of oil palm saw widespread planting of those palms in these sterile grasslands and have prevented soil erosion on a grand scale.
Indonesia is a different matter where forests are destroyed by burning to plant palm trees
Robin, if I may make a comment about you owning a palm oil plantation, it would have to be a bloody big one if you were making any kind of living from it. Flying or driving from Penang (which thankfully does not have a palm oil plantation) to anywhere in Malaysia you see nothing but palms on land that used to support rubber trees, natural rain forest and land used for normal agricultural purposes such as rice, etc. The smaller plantation owners are struggling and there are now regulations surrounding environmental checks and balances, which although probably too late, the larger companies are complying. A close friend of ours who has been involved for years as an environmental scientist with one of the largest palm oil companies in the world is now a little embarrassed to admit he worked (s) for them. There are other alternatives to palm oil, but it’s all a little late now for the displaced wildlife that have been affected. How many orangutans do you think are left in this part of the world. I mentioned the elephants in Malaysia, but have a look too at the fate of the now rare Sumatran tiger. Nothing to be proud of owning a palm oil plantation….
Robin, palm oil as a fuel is a ridiculous proposition. Don’t worry, there was a time when I did most of the “plantation” prospetuses/PDSs in Australia. I know that scam inside out. Palm oil as a fuel? Uh uh – oookayyyy.
I see that I can’t reply to your later posts. But suffice to say the bit about ‘most’ of Sarawak and Sabah being grassland is risible and implying that palm plantations are saving them reeks of Lieutenant Calley.
There you go darren 1.3 billion litres is a scam?
All diesel sold in Thailand contains 7% biodiesel. As most vehicles are diesel that means a lot of biodiesel is consumed
What a huge scam. By the way biodiesel costs 90 cents a litre
https://www.iea.org/media/technologyplatform/workshops/southeastasiabioenergy2014/Thailand.pdf
Penny says:
November 28, 2016 at 6:32 pm
The only reason oil palm has displaced rice rubber and other crops is they give a larger return to the grower.
A rubber plantation at the moment gives a negative return to the planter. As for rice forget about it a farmer will get about 300 dollars a year. on the same block of land will get the same return a month
The land that is now my palm plantation was a former tin mine that was basically a desert. The planting of palm has reinvigorated the soil and turned it productive again. In the near future this land will be then replanted with fruit trees such as durians and hopefully the returns will be higher.
Gosh Trivalve that guy is heading for a fall. Sounds like his body can’t rest at all but unfortunately it will one way or the other. I’d be getting in his ear but that’s just me.
Hey Penny I replied to you last night but mustn’t have pressed Submit before I fell asleep!
Anyways I was quite shocked that your students could even sit still during their exams let alone give coherent answers, loaded up on that crap.
I’ve often wondered if it’s actually going to take somebody having a cardiac arrest from the stuff to get their attention. Nobody’s immune but they’re all about ‘the now’ & the feel good factor.
I do know that when you love that person in the grip of caffeine drink addiction it’s heartbreaking to witness it first hand. It took months for him to wake up & that came after a friend showed him a video of himself after six cans of V. It’s poison.
Products that use Palm Oil aren’t properly labelled most of the time but I have a list I keep on me when I’m grocery shopping so I can know I’ll never be a party to the habitat destruction of animals that is so endemic in Asia. Some examples are Palmolein, Stearic Acid, Sodium Laureth Sulphate & Glyceryl. Who’d want to put that rubbish into their body anyway.
I’m always appalled at what lengths humans will go to in their insatiable search for more money.
My best, Bella
Good comment Bella!
Thank-you Yvonne it’s appreciated.
Looks like I won’t be in Hobart this side of Xmas as we had the big send off for our two ships last weekend at our Williamstown Operations Base. At this stage all movements are on the down low but on their return from the Southern Ocean you should try to tour our newest purpose built anti whaling vessel MV Ocean Warrior, she’s a beauty and she’s faster than the entire whaling fleet.
Regards, Bella
Saw a pic of her the other day, Bella. Impressive!
I don’t know how anyone can drink that garbage. Just a whiff of it makes me think of toxic chemicals – they literally smell poisonous to me.
Your point about consuming more energy than you burn is the most important one. The way some people carry on it’s like you need a PhD to figure out what constitutes healthy eating and how to lose weight. You don’t – it’s actually pretty easy to understand. Like I said over the wall, if you burn more than you consume you WILL lose weight. You have to. It’s physics. It eliminates all the nonsense about slow or fast metabolisms, glandular problems and every other excuse people use.
I made a point somewhere a few years back that our society has become addicted to experts. People are afraid to scratch themselves without looking for someone to tell them how to do it, how often and how hard. Maybe if there was more of the Barnaby Joyce put-down-the-fork-and-get-off-your-arse brand of advice and less of the people in white coats or celebrity chefs spouting garbage we’d have less of an issue.
Mate, the way Barnaby’s going, the men in white coats will be coming for him soon.
You’re going to be disappointed when he’s PM, TV.
Spot on comment Bella! I must say though that I have worked in places, mainly Indig Communities, where Coke was about 5 times dearer and it still didn’t seem to make much difference regarding consumption. I am with you Penny and Yvonne on the energy drinks as well. Bloke at work son came home from a big night on the Redbull and vodkas and had to get taken to hospital with heart palpitations!
not often the guardian is amusing, it usually runs the earnesto meter off the dial, but the piece on PM Trudea and Castro, and the twitter response to it is very good.
a sample,
“While controversial, Darth Vader achieved great heights in space construction and played a formative role in his son’s life,” tweeted @markusoff,
Mr. Stalin will be fondly remembered for increasing tourism to the otherwise unwelcoming Siberia. #TrudeauEulogies
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/26/world/americas/justin-trudeau-fidel-castro.html
There’s an even better one about reducing obesity rates and improving Ukrainian agriculture as well.
Do my eyes deceive me, are the Greens actually proposing a death tax. Good one. If the Greens actually got to run the place no one would have anything left to bequeath except a bong and a couple of chia seeds. Do they actually know how many people have investment properties? Do they not understand that a lot of people prefer to invest in property as part of their retirement plan than trust the superannuation scheme that Keating (trigger warning!) has made compulsory. don’t they say there is nothing certain but death and taxes? Obviously the Greens take this to the extreme. With the price of real estate in this country a lot of our young are somewhat reliant on the untimely death of their forebears. Let us strive to be the disincentive nation.
No votes in a graveyard.
Negative gearing is the biggest reason young people cannot get into the housing market. The budget can be put onto a very healthy path by removing NG for all but New build homes, reducing the Capital Gains Tax concessions. By reducing access to the upper class welfare like Negative gearing, CGT, some more tightening of Superannuation concessions (the bulk of which still goes to the highest income earners along with NG and CGT) , tighten means testing access to Private Health Insurance rebate down to $100k and the budget is in good shape in very quick time. There is so much data available to show these couple of measures would go along way to not only helping the budget but raise equity for society. Research out last week shows Higher home prices leads to less societal equity.
Once of the problems with the Superannuation industry in this country is that the coalition have and ideological issue with it and continue to attack the best performing funds which are industry fund purely for ideological/political reason. K. O’Dwyer was almost laughed out of the industry get together last week .
What utter rubbish Dismayed . Negative gearing teamed with the CGT concessions for owner occupiers does support demand for housing and prices but there are many other issues and affordability and price are different. The biggest issues on affordability are insufficient supply; stamp duty, reduced bank LVRs for mortgages and the end of low doc loans. Just what do you think will happen to equity requirements from banks for a mortgage if they expect house prices to fall – prices fall 10% deposit increases 50%.
Many of our negative gearing purchasers are first home buyers – they buy to rent and negative gear to get the deposit via the build up of equity.
A price crash is coming in Melbourne and Brisbane. Sydney planning rules changes and the ABCC are all that can help.
Nonsense SimonT. I live in an apartment in the middle of a large area of redevelopment. They are building about 1 apartment block here per year – at best. The ones that have been built are half empty. Why is all that happening? Because the building companies are restricting the supply to drive up the prices and thats driving down the demand – which in turn means the developers cant get the start financing. Its a vicious circle and LAND supply has pretty much bugger all to do with this. But we’ve had this go around before.
Whats needed is a circuit breaker to bring prices down and kick start demand. And if you – who, if I recall correctly, dabble in apartment developments – cant turn a buck at that then you need to go and do something else or reduce your expectations of being the next Harry Trigoboff. The real estate development industry doesnt need a spotlight shone on workers by the ABCC. It needs a spotlight shone on the rent seeking development companies. And it needs negative gearing and capital gains gone and a land tax slapped on undeveloped blocks. That might impoverish a few greedy developers but it would be good for a lot more people than it would be bad for.
Darren and I deliver 200+ apartments a year and personally guarantee the outcomes. I suspect I have a greater interest in and more access to the evidence around cost/price than most. It isn’t self indulgent theorising for me based on ownership of one apartment. For staters you are in Cockburn Central right? The land release there was by a State government authority and at a sub-market price (as planning outcomes were a large part of the weighting in the EOI process). Developers were under time constraints to develop contained in their sale contracts. Problem is land cost is only about 15% of the total cost of affordable housing (which what Cockburn Central is) – the big cost is construction ad the margins are very low.
By the way my business is going fine thank you. – touch wood. It is a bit more than dabbling. The issue isn’t so much land supply in most cities – this is a big country – but planning approvals. In Sydney it is a huge issue and you can thank Bob Carr for that.
The CGT exemption is a major economic anomaly – if it goes who knows what would happen other than the government will lose an election. Remember the CGT exemption only applies to owner/occupier housing and our own homes account for the vast majority of private wealth and underpins our financial system. Politicians will fiddle with it at their peril – I can’t see that one happening to any great extent.
Darren – any one who thinks developers keep completed apartments empty in order to keep prices high is frankly delusional. It is like making a loss to save paying profits tax. Holding costs on completed apartments are huge. Oh and there is land tax on vacant developable land (the exemptions are for rural land and owner occupied – not investment properties).
As for the ABCC – it needs to shine a spotlight on the large builders too. They have a very cozy relationship with and engage in the same behaviours as the union.
CFMEU does NOT work in domestic housing. The ABCC does NOTHING for domestic housing. Insufficient supply? Apart from the thousands of apartments in Melbourne and Sydney that developers are struggling to offload? You are obviously part of the rentseeking industry.
Dismayed if by “domestic housing” you mean residential construction then the CFMEU most definitely does represent workers there. On Melbourne and Brisbane the oversupply is my point – a price correction is coming big time. Sydney is different – Meriton pretty much underwrites the market and the planning constraints on delivering new large estates are very significant. I think high prices are here to stay. The single biggest factor of course is low interest rates (which also means negative gearing is less of a benefit but makes housing more affordable for borrowers – who are younger so they can amortise a mortgage over a long anticipated career).
19% of investment properties vacant deliberately, 80,000 empty properties in Victoria alone. Oh I say again CFMEU do NOT work in domestic housing ABCC does nothing for domestic housing.
http://www.propertyobserver.com.au/forward-planning/investment-strategy/property-news-and-insights/49130-more-than-80-000-empty-properties-in-melbourne-prosper-australia-report.html
Here is the Reserve Bank data from 2014 stating investors are locking out first home buyers due to negative gearing and CGT concessions. There are 10 different concession or tax advantages for investors. None for first home buyers.
http://www.smh.com.au/money/borrowing/investors-taking-advantage-of-negative-gearing-tax-breaks-drive-property-prices-higher-20140925-10lr7r.html
You might want to have a look at Richard Dennis Chief Economist at the Australia institute’s article in the AFR today. He destroys your rentseeking argument. “It also shows that construction worker productivity has grown faster than construction worker pay which means the unit labour cost of building a house has been declining in real terms, not rising.” What is it again, Never get in the way of self interest?
Dismayed are you asked by the Reserve Bank to provide insight into how the residential market is functioning. yeah thought not. They do get data from a lot of sources and I am sure it is aggregated but I can tell you their level of knowledge of how the many micro-markets work is not great as the big data sources don’t capture it well. As for the CFMEU being involved in construction of residential projects I don’t care what your sources say you are wrong. I know first hand real time and we are not even builders but when the builder we use creates an issue for them they are not backward in coming forward to tell us. Credit where credit is due they aggressively look after the interests of their members which is a lot more than many of the big builders can say about their subcontractors or clients.
Ex ousted PM Tony Abbott putting in the “hard yards” Mr Insider is what looks like a positioning for a comeback as PM, should he get the call. He’ll even take a Cabinet position he tells us. 2017 sitting up there on the Backbench looks a lonely proposition and we wonder how long he will do that should a “suitable” opening not occur? Go hard Tony, punt hard and punt high!
http://tinyurl.com/z76on8h
Thus far a good effort in the cricket. To state the bleeding obvious we need to bowl the rest out cheaply and hopefull before lunch. It’s not really our bowling that bothers me, more a lack of spine in the batting.
Chelsea on top. Liverpool struggle to top Sunderland!
Spurs lost their undefeated in EPL record…ah well I knew it couldn’t last
The beauty of Mao and Castro was they believed in equality, so they ensured everyone was equally poor and skinny. (actually not everyone, but most).
Not much sugar around Milton?
Geez former PM um err ahbut on PVO show today. He is delusional. Claimed the 2014 budget should have been passed in full. Total debt $461 billion Deficit $38 billion up from $19 billion in 2013. Cormann claims the budget is in better shape even though Spending as a % of GDP is Higher, Tax as a % of GDP is also higher. All other indicators highlight problems for the Nation. New data showing the government is not providing the full details on Medicare bulk billing with only 30% of non pensioner, non children receiving bulk billing services. This government is not working in the National interest.
Neither is that useless opposition that opposes anything that looks like getting the budget back into balance working in the national interest.
The deficit we have is a result of Howard in his latter years trying to buy votes with money that he had but committed future Governments to the expenditure, the absolute incompetence of Rudd and Gilliard, and the the current Libs who have been hamstrung by the opposition and their lack of spine.
Why don’t you get off your partisan rocking horse and give the FULL facts.
I tire of your entries because they really do nothing to add to the debate.
Try this one on for size. Go and eat some bread it may spur some dopamine and serotonin production.
http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/fossil-fuel-giants-using-questionable-deductions-to-shrink-tax-bills-auditorgeneral-20161128-gszcam.html
Don’t eat chicken in India
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/stealthy-chicken-germs-show-risk-from-india-s-poultry-industry
Don’t eat in India at all if you can help it
Not been, but the lads tell me vegetarian is the go there, nowhere else of course
How true TV. Friends of mine just came back – and were quite ill over there. Saw their pics on Facebook eating street food – so was not at all surprised!
Dont breathe the air as well TV
Last time I worked there by the time I reached the hotel the dreaded gripes had started
Never finished until I left one month later
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/16/us/politics/the-two-americas-of-2016.html
so, if you have to drive so far and so long to find yourself in Hillary territory, how did the media miss the result so much that i came as a complete shock ?
i suspect because they rarely leave LA, SF, Chicago, NYC, DC, and couldn’t care less about the rest anyway
As a former resident of “flyover country” I can say the Times (and WaPo and the big 3 networks) have no clue about the middle if the country.
Certainly Castro was a larger than life feature of the 21 st century. No doubt he had good intentions but sadly a lot of his dreams did not come true.
Well, he did kill a lot of Communists.
One of my ‘favourites’ (so to speak) that the Castros and Ernesto Guevara actually left alive – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Posadas. Mostly the more orthodox Trotskyites and the more democratically minded and liberal members of the July 26th Movement not affiliated with the Communist Party and Raúl Castro and Guevara and the like who copped it big-time most. The rather more popular and debonair Camilo Cienfuegos, though, likely wasn’t a Cuban Lin Biao (probably died in an accidental plane crash, and wasn’t shot down).
I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if Raúl Castro tries to replicate something like Deng Xiaoping’s Socialism with Chinese Characteristics in the PRC or Vietnam’s Đổi Mới, while trying to keep as much of a monopoly on power as possible. I don’t expect the Trump Administration to be particularly pushy on human rights so he’s probably a little safer.
What I will say is that (probably heretofore) half-decent public services should not come with a full-blown police state down to the block level and next to no civil and human rights and State control of everything as the trade-off.
Costa Rica and Uruguay when the military dictators weren’t in control would appear to be far better models of development than the various forms of Latin American socialism (or similarly brutal right-wing dictators – that didn’t ruin the economy – like Pinochet (albeit his was a lower death toll)).