Both Labor and the Liberals are set to slug some of the poorest people in society with tens of billions in tobacco taxes. This is on top of the roughly $9 billion a year currently raised.

The bulk of the rich and the middle class abandoned smoking years ago. Today smoking is a hallmark of poverty, oppression and alienation.

People living in areas with the lowest socioeconomic status are three times more likely to smoke daily than people in the richest areas, 19.9 percent compared with 6.7 percent. Indigenous people aged 14 years or older were two-and-a-half times as likely as non-Indigenous people to smoke daily in 2013: 32 percent compared with 12.4 percent.

When you are poor and alienated, smoking is one of the few means you have to try to cope.

The unemployed are 1.7 times more likely to smoke daily and those unable to work are 2.4 times more likely to smoke daily. And while the smoking rate has continued to fall among employed workers, there were no significant changes in the smoking behaviour of those without jobs between 2010 and 2013.

The increase in tobacco tax is being justified as a health measure. But there are better ways to improve health outcomes than hitting the worst off.

Improving peoples’ lives and providing better health services would be far more effective. The well-heeled did not give up smoking because it cost a few extra dollars. If you can afford $154,000 for a new Mercedes then a hike in cigarette prices means nothing.

Providing jobs for the unemployed, raising pensions and ending the squalor that so many Indigenous people are forced to endure would make a decisive difference not just to deaths from smoking but to innumerable other health problems. When you are poor and alienated, smoking is one of the few means you have to try to cope.

There is a long history of hitting the poor with “sin” taxes on alcohol, gambling, tobacco, sweets and so on, or restricting charity or social services to the “deserving poor”. The old age pension was originally only given to people of “good character”; Aborigines were long denied social security, as were single mothers and people living in “sin”.

This reflected stuck-up middle class prejudices that frowned on the few pleasures of the masses but fawned over the lavish lifestyles of true parasites at the top. It was also an attempt to discipline workers to be more reliable and exploitable factory fodder.

Smoking kills an estimated 15,000 people a year in Australia and costs $31.5 billion. But instead of punishing the victims, what about hitting the giant multi-national tobacco companies who have for so long profited from this death and misery?

The tobacco companies and the politicians who protect them have known for decades that smoking kills, yet they have been allowed to go on profiting from it. They should be compelled to pay all the billions in medical expenses.