The state and territory governments have today agreed to remove GST from sanitary products including tampons, pads, menstrual cups and maternity pads.
Earlier this year, Prime Minister Scott Morrison described the tax on menstrual products as an ‘anomaly’ and vowed to remove it. When he was Treasurer, Joe Hockey agreed to lobby state and territory treasurers to remove the tax, but then Prime Minister Tony Abbott put a pin in those plans less than a day later.
The debate around the 10% Goods and Services tax on menstrual products was invigorated in 2015 by an online petition created by University of Sydney student Subeta Vimalarajah, but similar petitions have been floating around since at least 2012, and criticisms of the tax have existed for as long as the tax has (for 17 years, since the GST was introduced in 2001).
The criticisms can be boiled down to the fact that menstrual products are taxed where other essentials, like condoms, are not. Like the GST on everything else, the tax on menstrual products is about 10%, so if you’re paying $7.60 for a box of 32 tampons, the GST would work out to 76 cents, or 2.3 cents per tampon.
Subeta Vimalarajah in 2015.
If you bought 12 boxes of tampons a year, the axing of the tampon tax will save you about $9.12. So it’s more of a symbolic victory than a tangible one, and both the Greens and the Labor Party agree, with the Sydney Morning Herald explaining that the two parties believed “that the symbolism of giving both male and female sanitary products the same tax status was more valuable than any monetary gain”.
The axing of the tax will cost about $30 million a year, but according to people who are more knowledgeable than me, the loss won’t really be felt because the government is already receiving way more GST than expected.
Kenya became the first country in the world to scrap a tax on menstrual products all the way back in 2004, while Canada did the same in 2015 following an online petition that garnered more than 70,000 signatures. The EU approved a law in January that will allow Britain to scrap its tax on menstrual products from 2022.
Meanwhile, Scotland became the first country in the world to offer free sanitary products to those on low incomes when they introduced a pilot scheme last year.
Ensuring that everyone has access to essentials should be a key aspect of any country’s welfare system, but access to sanitary products is an often-overlooked aspect that impacts already-vulnerable people the most.
Considering how long it took for the government to axe the tampon tax, I won’t hold my breath that sanitary products and other essentials will be given to those on low incomes for free any time soon. But particularly now that the tampon tax has been axed, a conversation about access to everyday essentials is well overdue.
(Header photo courtesy of DreamWorks Pictures)