Combatting Illicit Tobacco Bill 2026
Mr McCORMACK (Riverina) (12:25): Too little, too late. But, with so many of the policies brought forward by this Albanese Labor government, it is all too often too little, too late. The Combating Illicit Tobacco Bill 2026 is another sad example of that, and I feel sorry for those authorities whose job it is these days to clamp down on the illicit tobacco trade.
I'm in regular contact with one of the highway patrol officers in the Riverina electorate in relation to this matter. He texted me just last week and said this: 'We searched a vehicle last week linked to one of the illicit Cootamundra tobacco shops and seized $5,000 cash but also their detailed ledgers. The shop does between $4,000 and $11,000 of trade a day in Cootamundra!
The organised crime groups are laughing all the way to the bank.' Sadly, unfortunately, they are. In one sense, I feel for some of the shop owners because they are being heavied by very nefarious people, bikie gang thugs, to sell illicit tobacco. If they don't, then they are at risk.
Their families are at risk. We've seen all too often in Melbourne Molotov cocktails being thrown not just into the tobacco shops and the vape shops but indeed the shops on either side, so much so that insurance companies are refusing to insure stores right next door to tobacco shops—tobacco shops which to all intents and purposes are legal entities. I don't smoke—never have, never will.
My late father, Lance, did. It probably put him in an early grave, it's sad to say—very sad to say. I miss him every day.
I feel for those people who have an addiction, because there's no worse addiction than tobacco. People who smoke just crave it, and it's very hard to kick the habit. It's also very expensive.
Four out of five cigarettes being smoked in Australia today are illegal cigarettes, and the amount of excise being lost by Labor, which has done nothing, you could argue—they will argue—until now is costing the economy. It's costing money that could be otherwise used on public health campaigns in public hospitals on just about anything that might be and would be good for society.
On the public NSW Police website, on Friday 19 June, the headline was: Traffic and Highway Patrol seize more than $4.5m in tobacco, vapes in three separate vehicle stops. This just goes on and on, particularly along the Hume Freeway between Melbourne and Sydney. It is a corridor of commerce.
It's also a corridor of illegal activity when it comes to drivers whose vans and vehicles are full of illegal vapes and illegal tobacco. We had that bizarre case that went through the courts. People were pulled up, but the case was thrown out because the court found that those who were appearing had been racially profiled.
Well, I would argue that these two men who were in a truck full of illegal cigarettes and who were pulled up by the police were not, in fact, racially profiled at all. They were breaking the law. They were both 38-year-olds, and just because they weren't of Caucasian appearance the district court judge threw the case out.
Just listen to this. They were stopped in Gundagai. Officers found 2,135,200 Double Happiness cigarettes weighing 1,379 kilograms with an excise worth $2,539,822.54.
That's a lot of money and a lot of cigarettes. It's a lot of illegality—but not according to New South Wales District Court Judge Jennifer English. She found the decision to search the pair's associates involved racial profiling before ordering 'no further proceedings'.
Go figure! What do you think the New South Wales police think when they read a judgement like that. They're doing their job.
They're pulling up crims. They're charging them. They're bringing them before the courts, and we get some woke judge who throws it out.
The cops must shake their heads. It's just bizarre. I was on the public website of the police the other day, and the reading is horrendous.
These vehicle stops are seizing more and more cigarettes and vapes. The member for Cowper—I've got a lot of time for him—brought before the parliament and to the notice of the public a better way to deal with this issue. I respect him greatly, not just because he's somebody who often thinks outside the square but because he's also a former officer of the law, a former New South Wales policeman.
This legislation before us now does not have the same teeth. They are needed. As I said at the outset of this contribution, it is too little, too late.
The government is playing catch-up. What this bill contains isn't, quite frankly, doing the job. Right across our suburbs and cities and towns and regional communities in particular we've got bikie gangs.
This is their method of making money. This is their way of conducting their nefarious activities. Woe betide if they come knocking on your legal tobacco store and if you are a legal shop owner attempting and trying at every step of the way to do the right thing by yourself, by your family, by your customers, by your community.
Cigarette selling is still a legal activity, but, in a cost-of-living crisis, bikie gangs are strongarming, in many cases, these shop owners, and the shop owners are going out backwards if they don't comply. The other thing is that so many of the people who are buying this illegal product are in the lowest socioeconomic section of the community. They are doing it tough, and this government is not doing anything, or very little, to help them make ends meet.
When you've got a situation where you can pay $50 a pack for cigarettes or $20 a pack for cigarettes and when you've got a cost-of-living crisis, when you can't put food on the table and when you're struggling to pay your power bills, it's very tempting to justify not spending $30 more on a packet of cigarettes and do it under the counter—chop chop—than it is to do the right thing and pay the excise.
I understand why the shop owners and, indeed, their customers are, unfortunately, faced with this situation. There's no condoning anybody breaking the law. But I'll tell you what—when some of these bikie gangs, laden with baseball bats and the like, come a knocking, you do feel for those shop owners who are just trying to do the right thing in a legal environment and in a legal way and method and who are being heavied by these thugs, these nefarious characters.
This bill is a partial, belated and wholly inadequate approach to a crisis that has exploded on Labor's watch. I feel for our hardworking patrol officers, such as my friend in the highway patrol, because they should be catching people who are speeding and breaking the road rules. They should be monitoring road safety, not babysitting this government, which has to be doing more at the border.
I realise that you can't go through every 20-foot container. I understand that, but the government needs to have a far better response to this growing crisis. If this growing crisis remains in place, there will not be a legal cigarette sold in this country in the years to come.
There will not. And this is on Labor's watch.