Medical Journal of Australia study estimates a 5% fall in fresh fruit and vegetable consumption if GST includes fresh food

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

Scrapping the goods and services tax exemption for fresh fruit and vegetables could cost lives and add more than $1bn to the health budget, doctors have said.

Research published in the Medical Journal of Australia last year estimated that fruit and vegetable consumption would decline by nearly 5% if the GST were broadened to include fresh food.

“We calculate that [this] could cost about 100,000 health life-years over the lifetime of the 2003 Australian adult population,” said the University of Queensland authors Lennert Veerman and Linda Cobiac.

Possible consequences included “an additional 90,000 cases of ischaemic heart disease, stroke and cancer” each year, increasing healthcare costs by around $1.04bn.

Speaking on ABC radio on Tuesday, the Queensland Liberal senator Ian Macdonald called for the GST to be broadened to include fresh food, in line with the original model proposed by the former prime minister John Howard in 1998.

The idea was swiftly ruled out by Tony Abbott, who told 2UE radio his view was that Australians “pay more than enough tax already”.

The West Australian premier, Colin Barnett, last week also signalled his support for broadening the tax, saying it was “silly” to exempt fresh food from the GST while still applying it to food in packages.



Public health advocates say a tax increase on healthy food would have “devastating consequences”.

“We know low-income people spend a large proportion of their income on food, and it has the potential to be regressive at a time when the recent dietary survey showed that people are not eating nearly enough fruit and vegetables,” said Jane Martin, executive manager of the Obesity Policy Coalition.

“Price is a key driver around food decision-making … We need to be providing incentives for people to eat more healthily, not disincentives,” she said.

This was especially important “given the cuts to prevention in the budget”, she said, referring to the budget plan to close the Australian National Preventative Health Agency.

In recent years poor diet and obesity have overtaken tobacco as the leading cause of disease among Australians.

