Sorry to kill the buzz, Senator David Leyonhjelm, but when you speak to smokers whose lives have been ruined by cigarettes, it's hard to refer to them as "havers of a good time", writes Simon Chapman.

Big Tobacco has a new, unabashed, lavishly paid-up errand boy in Parliament, the anti-taxing, gun-loving, donkey-vote-beneficiary Liberal Democrat Senator David Leyonhjelm.

Yesterday in the Senate he thanked Australia's three million smoking coughers for their contributions to the Treasury coffers. It was a speech worthy of the 1994 satirical book (later a movie) by Christopher Buckley, Thank You For Smoking.

Except Leyonhjelm was being serious.

His speech focussed on the heinous taxes being paid by mainly low-income smokers. In May 2010, Labor introduced an overnight 25 per cent tax hike which Treasury had predicted would reduce consumption by 6 per cent. It worked nearly twice as well, reducing it by 11 per cent.

There have since been two further 12.5 per cent tax rises in addition to the regular twice-yearly CPI adjustments, and all this, along with plain packaging and other measures, has reduced Australians who smoke daily to 12.8 per cent, the lowest ever.

While this has been happening, companies like Philip Morris have been blubbing uncontrollably in public about tax rises. But the same companies have been raising their own slice of the price pie. Between 2008-2014, tobacco tax rose by 64 per cent, but retail prices by 101 per cent, something Leyonhjelm neglected to mention, perhaps out of deference to his new benefactors.

Leyonhjelm thanked smokers for making (albeit reduced) lifetime contributions to tax collections. So are the 87 per cent of us who don't smoke just scrooges who deserve exposure for our unpatriotic parsimony? Should the government make a massive U-turn and encourage more people to smoke?

The reason why this is more than nonsense is that non-smokers don't go home each day and squirrel away in a jam jar under the bed what they would have otherwise spent on tobacco, had they been smokers, vowing to never let this money into the economy. Amazingly, we spend our money on other things, all of which - with the exception of fresh food - is GST taxed. This expenditure benefits all who are involved in the manufacture, provision and retailing of the goods and services we consume.

Yes, there is the special tobacco tax which - depending on which brand you buy and from which shop you buy from - ranges between 57 and 70 per cent of retail price (the rest goes to the manufacturers and retailers).

But this is only a transfer payment to government within the economy, not wealth generation. Nearly all of the tobacco sold in Australia is manufactured by three transnational tobacco companies, none of which are listed on the Australian stock exchange and only one of which still manufactures in Australia. Most profits are expatriated to international shareholders.

The fraternal twin of this narrative is a continuation of one exposed in 2001, when it was revealed that Philip Morris had been advising the Czech government that the tobacco control malarkey would cost them dearly. By having the decency to die early, smokers were doing us all a massive national service. They would unselfishly trim the old age pension list, and exempt themselves from perhaps 20 years of greedily storming the public health system with the fervour of a Boxing Day sales crowd. Philip Morris publicly apologised for what they had been whispering to the Czechs.

Actually, they were partly right. Every time a poor smoker dies before pensionable age, somewhere in the Treasury, a bean-counter moves a bead on the national abacus into "savings" territory.

But this is right in exactly the same way that those in charge of Nazi "arbeit macht frei" work camps were correct that the sick and infirm were no longer needed because they could no longer contribute to the work schedule. In Big Tobacco's world, smokers who die early are not to be pitied or a reason to think about how to prevent this.

The reductio ad absurdum of this reasoning is that all prevention that stops people living into old age should be scythed as unpatriotic. How long will it be before the NHMRC is lobbied to audit and then blackball all health and medical research which might keep this flood of longer living spongers from sucking on the government public heath and welfare tit?

Preventing death in younger people who can swing the economic pick until 65 would stay. So come on down childhood cancer, vaccination and injury prevention researchers. Your work might contribute to a healthy workforce. But over and out to anyone working on disease areas that help people enjoy the last decades of their lives.

Leyonhjelm emphasised that smokers were "havers of a good time". A 52-year-old woman called me a few years ago. Give the 'smoking kills' line a rest, she urged:

I've smoked for 30 years. I have emphysema. I am virtually housebound. I get exhausted walking more than a few metres. I have urinary incontinence, and because I can't move quickly to the toilet, I wet myself and smell. I can't bear the embarrassment, so I stay isolated at home. Smoking has ruined my life. You should start telling people about the living hell smoking causes while you're still alive, not just that it kills you.

Was Leyonhjelm referring to her?

Simon Chapman AO is professor of public health at Sydney University. View his full profile here.