On the “tampon tax”

Ken Lambert writes: Re. “The tampon tax is a convenient distraction. Period.” Chris Kenny got it just about right in this weekend’s The Australian. Hockey showed his buffoonery by being hopelessly trapped on Q&A by special pleading activists in a well staged stunt. If women’s sanitation should not be GST’d then what about men’s condoms, or incontinence pads or prostate massagers, KY jelly? Show me a tampon and I’ll raise you a condom!

Richard Davoren writes: Agreed tampons should not be defined as a luxury items and attract GST. But what about toilet paper? It attracts GST too. 50% of our population will use tampons some of the time for some of their life. Toilet paper is used by all of us for all of our lives. Is wiping your bum a luxury? One suggestion is to use a used Murdoch paper, for the task. But the purpose of toilet paper is to remove crap from your bronze, not to add to it.

Examining the stats

H S Mackenzie writes: Re. “On radicalisation” (yesterday). Richard Middleton in criticising the war on terror claims that “The risks of dying after falling out of bed or choking on a peanut are approximately 1000 times greater than that of being killed due to the actions of some disaffected nutjob”.   They are nowhere near it.  The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ report, 3303.0 Causes of Death, Australia, 2013, records 44 deaths from “Fall involving bed” and 56 deaths from “Inhalation and ingestion of food causing obstruction of respiratory tract” only a small proportion of which would be obstruction by peanuts.