An ACT specific study has found a tax on sugary drinks will disproportionately hit low socio-economic Canberra communities, but experts are saying this is not a bad thing.
The Australian National University's associate professor Ben Phillips looked at a combination of census data and household expenditure survey data from the ABS to understand the socio-economic characteristics into how much any given household spends on sugary drinks.
It was found distribution of sugary drink consumption is higher in low socio-economic suburbs of the ACT compared to more affluent parts of Canberra.
"These sort of households tend to spend more money on sugary drinks, therefore they would be impacted more heavily by a sugar tax and, of course, that's kind of the point of it," Dr Phillips said.
Further to this, Dr Phillips found this correlated to low socio-economic groups spending a higher proportion of their income on a sugar taxed substance.
Suburbs such as Conder, Chisholm and Dunlop are examples of suburbs "impacted more heavily" while high socio-economic areas spend "about 40 or so percent less per head" on sugary drinks.
This data is "unsurprising" to researchers and it's argued to be "a positive thing if it does change behaviour", which chief executive of the Australian Medical Association Omar Khorshid echoes.
The 20 leading public health bodies behind the Rethink Sugary Drink campaign are urging the next federal government to prioritise a 20 per cent levy on sugary drinks to address Australia's growing obesity crisis.
"We don't want to avoid this issue. This is the great thing about this proposal, because it is those sort of low socio-economic groups that have the greatest consumption of those drinks," Dr Khorshid said.
Findings indicate a 20 per cent levy would reduce consumption of sugary drinks by 31 per cent by 2025-26 due to sending a price signal to consumers and incentivising manufacturers to reformulate drinks to reduce the sugar content and avoid the levy.
"Sugar taxes are not new, there's ... up to 60 jurisdictions around the world that have brought them in and the research that was done and allows us to be confident that behaviour changes on the introduction of these taxes, consumption is reduced," Dr Khorshid said.
"The tax is small. It's not like we're taxing it out of people's price range, it's a small dollar impact, designed to create a moderate or a slight change in behaviour that over time just magnifies, but it's got to be done."
Cancer Council Victoria and the Australian Dental Association are part of this campaign calling on the next federal government to place a levy on sugary drinks.
Organisations cited data released last month from the Australia Institute of Health and Welfare that being overweight is the most costly risk factor for Australia's health spending by disease, contributing to 18 per cent or $4.3 billion of health spending on diseases from modifiable risk factors.
Currently Australians are drinking 2.4 billion litres of sugary drinks every year and experts say changing behaviour of consumers is vital.
"We know that increasing the tax on sugary drinks, it may not change so much the amount of consumption but it can change the behaviour of the companies in terms of how much sugar they put in drinks," Dr Phillips said.
"So at the moment in Australia, you might typically have say 10 or 11 teaspoons of sugar, but it probably doesn't need to be quite as much as that."
