Annual dental checks, and necessary procedures being covered by medicare would be more beneficial.

Not going to happen. The ALP is losing strugglers to One Nation across the country. They feel abandoned and have a perception Labor is out of touch with cost of living and in the pocket of lobbyists and big business.

To be very clear I think One Nation are full of shit and people putting their trust in them are being scammed and are putting our whole country in danger. But with the cost of petrol and smokes and rent and food and stagnant wages, living standards are going down for many people. I don't think they are going to see any regressive tax as a positive. A policy like this will only sell well amongst affluent educated Labor and Greens voters and they aren't the ones deserting Labor. Free dental on the other hand is a winner.

While I support this, why do none of these studies or articles talk about carbonic acid, which is what makes soft drink fizzy? This directly erodes enamel and causes tooth decay. By simply rinsing your mouth with water after soft drinks, you massively reduce the amount of time your teeth are exposed to acid. Same for orange juice etc. This also work for the sugar in the drink - dilution in action.

Sugar is the bane of maintaining basic human health. Its more harmful than drugs I'd wager.

The losses for dentists and sugar manufacturers would be immense and lead to the destruction of countless paying jobs for the dental staff, farmers, factory workers.

---Some capitalist probably

If they want to prevent dental issues, they can start with preventing gronks in local councils from removing fluoride from the water.

They've been talking about this for ages. I hope it happens.

A tax on sugary drinks is literally a poor tax. You're taxing poor people for one of the few pleasures they have in life that they can afford easily.

You know what would improve dental health across the board? Offering free dental insurance to every man woman and child in the country. You know what would stop people from having to buy sugary drinks so often? Fully fund food stamps across the board. Give people the ability to buy healthy whole foods to feed to their kids.

Edit: My mistake in not realizing this article was about Australia. My point still stands though. A tax on sugary drinks is only going to punish poor people unnecessarily and not lead to a dramatic reduction in soft drink consumption. It was tried here in my state and failed spectacularly.

This just means more corn syrup. A lot of things are sweet, and way worse for you than sugar.