THE alcopops tax has driven drinkers to the bottle - of full-strength spirits, a liquor industry survey of alcohol sales has found.
The 70 per cent excise increase designed to discourage young people from turning into binge drinkers has cut sales of ready-to-drink alcopop products sharply, but fuelled a rise in sales of bottles and hip flasks of the real thing.
The industry says the net result is that sales of alcohol by volume may even have increased - an outcome that would contradict a Treasury forecast.
The Distilled Spirits Industry Council of Australia commissioned Nielsen ScanTrak to conduct a survey, which found that in the fortnight after the tax rise on April 27, sales of alcopops plunged by 38 per cent.
But sales of 700ml bottles of spirits rose by 21 per cent.
The survey did not measure sales of larger bottles of spirits, or lower-taxed beer and wine.
A spokesman for the council, Stephen Riden, said that when these were accounted for, "it is likely that the total volume of alcohol purchases in this period has actually risen".
The finding was "the first hard and unequivocal evidence of the unintended social and health consequences of the Government's RTD take hike", he said.
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