Tobacco is an evil weed; It was the Devil sowed the seed. It stains the fingers, burns your clothes; And makes a chimney of your nose.

Today is February 1 - one of two days on which, every year, the Australian smoking community heaves a rasping, sclerotic sigh of resignation at yet another excise increase.

For all the current excitability surrounding great big new taxes, it's comforting to know that there is one revenue stream that is apparently immune to all criticism.

Ever since the Hawke years, fag taxes rise automatically on February 1 and August 1; a device that was engineered to escape the opprobrium of the dreaded "BEER, CIGS UP" headline after federal budgets in which federal governments raided the gasper jar.

Back then, of course, raising cigarette taxes was politically unpopular.

These days, to impose a new tax on smokers is as politically restorative as a mild assassination attempt.

Smokers are so unpopular that almost anything can be done - with impunity - to inconvenience them, and as a result they find themselves proxied into all sorts of unrelated political disputes.

In May 2009, when the Rudd government proposed a means test on the private health insurance rebate, the Turnbull-led Coalition - not wanting to compromise the Liberal-invented rebate but not fancying, either, the accusation that it was blowing holes in the budget - struck upon a master stroke.

Oppose the means test, but make up the $2 billion budget saving by increasing cigarette taxes by 12 per cent!

Outrageous, sputtered Mr Rudd, while wishing he had thought of it.

One year later, tearing around like a scalded cat after the revelation of serial policy reversals (emissions trading scheme, child care funding, insulation scheme), the self-same prime minister presented his own trump card.

A $5 billion tax increase on cigarettes, teamed with mandatory plain packaging of all brands; an initiative so radical, and so contrary to international conventions on intellectual property rights, that no-one else had tried it.

The new Liberal Leader Tony Abbott rehearsed a few lines in opposition to the idea, but quickly adjusted his stance to one of reluctant support, thinking no doubt of the accusations that might otherwise come his way in light of the Liberal Party's receipt of tobacco money.

(Tough luck for the tobacco industry, this; imagine realising that your hefty corporate political donation had helped bring an outcome exactly the reverse of what you had hoped to achieve.)

Cigarettes are terrible, smelly, addictive things - no doubt - and governments are right to discourage their consumption wherever possible.

But in our haste to align ourselves against the unattractive street-corner habit and the sinister practices of the industry, we abandon smokers to the vagaries of political opportunism.

In no other field of taxation is the criticism of "regressiveness" - so common in every other tax debate - so routinely suspended.

Tobacco taxes fall much more heavily on poor and Indigenous Australians than they do on other socioeconomic groupings, but that never helps them on the first of February or August.

No group of individuals (with the exception of professionals employed in the global nuclear industry and - in the case of Marrickville Council in NSW - the entire Nation of Israel) - has as much to fear from local government, where entire tracts of land are regularly declared out-of-bounds for their filthy habit.

In New South Wales, the State Government has decreed that its citizens will incur $250 fines if spotted having a puff in a vehicle that also contains a child below the age of 16.

Thanks to some quirk of fate, no member of the NSW Government - a social grouping that has done its best collectively to cover off most other prohibited forms of behaviour - has yet been booked for vehicular child fumigation.

But the moral prescription from NSW Labor in this area does not seem to evoke the hoot of derision it might in any other field.

Mr Abbott, back in his reckless days, responded to the NSW ban by saying that he wouldn't, personally speaking, "get hung up on something... as smoking while the kids are in the car".

"Being hard-hearted to your kids; not encouraging them to be their best, I think, are more serious parental crimes."

Whether he would dare to make the same remarks now, I don't know.

On the bright side, today also marks a genuinely variation on the February 1 excise-hike tradition: the inclusion, for the first time, of nicotine patches in the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

Up till now, packs of nicotine patches have cost three or four times the cost of a packet of cigarettes.

But from today, smokers in the quitting mood can get a four-week prescription course of patches for $33, instead of $140.

Concession card holders will only pay $5.40.

The cost of gaspers still goes up today.

But the cost of quitting goes down, which is a welcome change.

Annabel Crabb is ABC Online's chief political writer.