A tax that would be welcome here

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

News that the Government is taking another look at introducing a sugar tax and salt limitations would be welcomed in this district.

The information is contained in documents obtained under the Official Information Act for Radio NZ’s series OFF the SHELF.

Advice given to the Government from the Ministry of Health says that governments around the world are increasingly using the tax system to combat increasing obesity.

The documents showed that a sugar tax is back on the agenda.

The tax, which was rejected in 2017, is now being reviewed.

The documents show that over the past five years more than 45 countries have implemented or continued to use sugar taxes.

However, Minister of Health Dr Ayesha Verrall has said that such taxes are not on her agenda or part of Labour’s tax plan.

National’s health spokesperson, Dr Shane Reti, has said a sugary drinks tax is not on the party policy, but he remained open to exploring it.

Professor Boyd Swinburn, the co-chair of the Health Coalition and an international expert on obesity, says New Zealand is lagging behind.

Half of the world’s population now has a sugary drinks tax on it, he says. The evidence had been piling up on its level of impact and it was obvious the sugary drinks tax would almost immediately reduce consumption and the amount of sugar that manufacturers put in their products.

The World Health Organisation reported last year that 85 of its 194 member states taxed sugar-sweetened beverages.

The gold medal of such taxes is the UK’s 2018 soft drinks levy, which is set at 38 cents a litre on drinks with between 5g and 8g of sugar and 50 cents a litre on ones with 8g of sugar or more.

The tax has seen more than 45,000 tonnes of sugar removed from soft drinks and Cambridge University research shows it may have prevented 5000 obesity cases among 10- to 11-year-old girls.

Labour says that, if re-elected next year, it will exempt GST from fruit and vegetables at a cost of about $500 million a year. The opposition is saying there is no guarantee that prices will actually fall if the supermarkets do not automatically pass savings on. Removing GST from fruit and vegetables is said to be complicated to administer and even senior government ministers previously had doubts about it.

You don’t need statistics to see that obesity is common in this district and impacts heavily on people of all ages and ethnicities. Just stand outside any supermarket or dairy and see what is going out the door.