Policy objective
A levy on soft drinks will contribute to the government’s plans to reduce childhood obesity by removing added sugar from soft drinks. The levy encourages producers of added sugar soft drinks to:
- reformulate their products to reduce the sugar content
- reduce portion sizes for added sugar drinks and importers to import reformulated drinks with low added sugar to encourage consumers of soft drinks to move to healthier choices
If they do this, producers and importers of added sugar soft drinks can pay less or even escape the charge altogether.
So it has no quantified objective and uses subjective words like contribute, encourage, reduce without qualifiers.
Thus it's a wishy, washy, untestable, open-ended, wide scoped, open to interpretation bit of standard modern politics.
Also, "government plan's" is not defined, except to "contribute to reduce childhood obesity" (noted this is without a deadline).
So the only testable aspect of this, and it requires some assumptions, is if it does contribute to the governments plans to reduce childhood obesity and ... the only possible test for that is the reduction of childhood obesity.
Ergo it can only be said to have worked if it reduces childhood obesity.
For example, what if it turns out that sugar is not the problem? What if it turns out that the campaign against sugar sends children elsewhere to something as bad or worse?