You can always rely on the government taxing the crap out of alcohol, cigarettes and gambling to keep the economy afloat.

Last year the government snuck in a 70% overnight increase in the price of alcopops. This raised the excise from $39.36 per litre of alcohol to $66.67.

Apparently they did this without passing anything through parliament, Jayeless explains;

The Government decided to start collecting this tax before it had been approved by parliament. For months people have had to pay exorbitant prices for their mixed drinks. But then, when the legislation finally came before parliament, it was rejected.

This essentially meant that the Government had stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from its people without having the right to do so. To people who bother to pay attention, this makes them look bad.


For those not sure what I’m talking about, Alcopops are those sugary premixed drinks that make Coke look like a bucket of lemons. I assume sour is the opposite of sweet… otherwise that kind of doesn’t make sense but I’m sure you get the idea.

The tax was introduced under the guise of the “National Preventative Health Strategy”. The logic behind which I can only assume is that if we make alcopops too expensive people will stop buying them and thus the binge drinking problem is solved.

Yeah because people are too lazy to buy their spirits and just mix them themselves right? I mean cmon have you been to the bars in Melbourne lately, half of them have teenagers (18+ obviously) working behind the counters.

I went to country pub ‘The Bogong Hotel’ recently out in the middle of nowhere, well Bogong actually but it might as well have been nowhere. It was a quiet Saturday night and it felt like I was being served by highschool kids! I haven’t felt that old in quite some time.

My point is that the teenagers this tax was targeting are pretty switched on. Brand loyalty doesn’t exist with generation Y so if you bump up the price of their favourite premix, they’ll just spend the 30 seconds mixing it themselves or move onto something else.

This seems to not be lost on the alcopops industry as this half page newspaper ad from Fitstyler shows.


With all this in mind I couldn’t help but feel some amusement reading about how hard done by the alcopops industry had been affected following the introduction of this tax.

Independent Distillers, which has its sole Australian manufacturing plant at Laverton in the Melbourne electorate of Lalor, has already cut 23 jobs in response to last year’s controversial excise hike and is threatening to axe the remaining 135 positions if the higher rate of tax is retained.

Mr Murphy said the company’s alcopops production would move offshore, to its New Zealand plant, if the Government’s latest legislative bid succeeded.

Independent Distillers’ nine alcopops brands, from Vodka Cruiser to Woodstock Bourbon, would still be sold in Australia, despite a 30 per cent slump in total sales over the past 12 months.


So the government places an overnight ridiculous increase on a product ‘for our own good’, lets it sit for a year and then we are supposed to be surprised when the industry starts bleeding?

What the hell did the industry think was going to happen?

In raising the tax 70% overnight and declaring it a national health interest, the government has effectively said ‘we don’t want people buying your products anymore’. Had the alcopops industry had any brains I don’t see why they wouldn’t have just rebranded instead of hoping people pay stupid money for premix.

I mean realistically one of two things were going to happen:

a. People buy other drinks and continue to binge drink or

b. People stop drinking alcohol

As laughable as b. might be, it’s important to note that whichever happens at the end of the day people are still not buying premix!

Despite this failure at logic I do still have a few shreds of sympahty for the alcopops industry. Whether your profits are mostly from teenage binge drinkers or not it’s got to suck having the government decide to increase their profit stake 70% overnight driving the price of your product through the roof. Worst of all you don’t see any more money out of it.

Fortunately despite the collapse of the alcopop industry and job losses there are those that still manage to see the positives,

The Rudd government’s tax hike was not on vodka but on pre-mixed ‘alcopops’, the sorts of things that my old mother would call ‘lolly-water’.

It’s sweet, sickly stuff useful for getting your drunk, learning the colours in the rainbow and not much more.

If there’s more people enjoying vodka rather than orange-coloured-soda-infused-with-4%-low-grade-vodka then all the better.


I tend to agree with Vodkablogger. Alcopops for the most part make alcohol too easy. It’s kind of like saying Mcdonalds is a true representational experience of what eating food must be like.

I for one hope the industry does fail here and winds up relocating to New Zealand, to think a whole generation have grown up on alcohol-in-a-can kind of irks me. If they’re going to drink (and they will) then at least make them drink proper alcohol.

The alcopops bill is set to go before parliament again sometime this month, let’s hope it succeeds.