Combatting Illicit Tobacco Bill 2026
Dr FREELANDER (Macarthur) (10:32): I rise to support the important Combatting Illicit Tobacco Bill 2026, and it is a very important bill. Illicit tobacco is a significant risk to our nation's public health and community safety—as indeed is smoking and vaping. By passing this legislation, our government will be helping tackle this major scourge on our society.
I've been involved in antitobacco campaigns for many years, particularly in the seventies and eighties. There was the BUGA-UP campaign, which people may have heard of—or maybe not, given that I'm getting older! BUGA-UP was the Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions campaign.
It ran against tobacco advertising in the seventies and eighties, often led by health people. In particular there was a doctor who was a member of the Greens in the upper house of New South Wales, Arthur Chesterfield-Evans, who led that BUGA-UP campaign. And it worked: we did eventually get rid of tobacco advertising.
Thanks to Nicola Roxon, the Labor attorney-general, we were able to get rid of tobacco advertising on cigarette packets etc. We went to plain packaging. We've done incredibly well in our antitobacco campaigns, and our smoking rates are amongst the lowest in the world.
But there are dangers. The dangers are, at least partly, the illicit tobacco trend. Tobacco, often as part of organised criminal networks, is coming into the country.
It's being sold without the excise payments, so it's very cheap, and that encourages people to smoke. South-west Sydney, my electorate, has a growing illicit tobacco problem that's only getting worse. We have really dodgy businesses with blacked out windows or limited shelf stock pretending to be cafes or pretending to be corner shops dotted all around the region providing cheap and dangerous illicit tobacco to anyone and everyone.
I've heard many members in this House note that they're experiencing the same thing in their electorate, including the member for Moore, noting that his Western Australian electorate experiences the same issue. It shows that, from South Western Sydney, across the Nullarbor and into Western Australia, illicit tobacco is a major concern for our country, and such a large issue requires a national response as well as a state response.
So our federal government is acting to support the states and territories and strengthen their fight against illicit tobacco with this bill. Let me make this quite clear: those that are calling for reductions in excise payments are really just requesting that we increase our smoking rates. We need to make sure that the price signal we're giving people with our excise on tobacco is quite clear and discourages people from smoking.
Reductions in excise will only increase smoking rates. We need to police our excise system appropriately at both the federal and state level. We need to get rid of organised crime.
We need to attack them on their business models. And we need to put resources into this. If it's not tobacco, organised crime will go to something else.
It'll go to illicit alcohol or some other illicit product. Organised crime needs to be confronted, not supported, and cuts to excise are not the answer. I've heard lots of people talking about excise reductions, but it's important to note that our anti-smoking campaigns are working, that we are actually getting reductions in our smoking rates, particularly in high-risk communities, like Indigenous communities.
Figures just released by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare have shown that, most recently. Smoking rates are coming down. Smoking rates are much, much lower than when I was a medical student and a young resident.
We were always seeing people with lung cancer or chronic obstructive airways disease presenting to our emergency departments, hospitalised and, in fact, dying. Respiratory wards were always full of people with these illnesses, who were dying from the effects of smoking. We've reduced it hugely.
We've dropped our smoking rates from over 30 per cent to now under 12 per cent and 13 per cent in many communities—fantastic effort; we need to keep it up. We do not need to encourage more smoking. At the moment, major crime organisations from abroad working with criminal groups and exploitative businesses here are reaping huge profits off the poor health and suffering of other Australians.
Their cheap, nasty tobacco is being sold to vulnerable people here, with profits being siphoned offshore, whilst we're left to deal with the crime, poor health outcomes and tax avoidance involved in the illicit tobacco trade. Our government is doing as much as it possibly can to reduce this trade. We need to give less income to these criminal groups.
We need to bolster public health services and law enforcement as well, to make sure that organised crime and illicit tobacco disappear. I'd like to speak on these three issues: firstly, the health consequences; secondly, the criminal consequences; and, thirdly, the financial consequences of illicit tobacco. Firstly, the health consequences—for years, we've seen a significant shift away from tobacco consumption, particularly in younger generations.
That's really important, because, the earlier you start smoking, the more likely you're going to get major respiratory damage with chronic obstructive airways disease, and the more at risk you will be of lung cancer. We need better awareness programs through education and social awareness. Unfortunately, the rise of illicit tobacco on our streets means we're seeing a shift backwards to younger people smoking, particularly young females.
The more young Australians and even middle-aged Australians there are who once didn't smoke but are now accessing tobacco products and getting addicted to cheap and nasty cigarettes and vapes, the more damage that's going to cause to our health system and to our productivity. On average, 66 Australians still die every day from the effects of smoking. That's a huge number.
It's in every state, in every hospital, in every health service. And 20 per cent of the nation's cancer burden comes from the effects of smoking. That includes not just lung cancer but breast cancer, bowel cancer, prostate cancer, bladder cancer—all risks are increased.
Oesophageal cancer, I should also say, is a rapidly increasing cancer in Australia. These are from the effects, at least partly, of tobacco related products. Two of every three long-term smokers will die of a tobacco related illness.
As of last August, illicit cigarettes now comprise about half of the cancer-inducing products sold to Australia's 2.7 million smokers. We need to get that number down, and that means controlling illicit tobacco. This doesn't include also the many Australians who have reduced work or health capacity due to the implications of smoking or those that are presenting to our health services—often time and time again—because of chronic lung disease.
This has huge health and economic consequences for our country and our health services. This leads me to the criminal consequences. Our law enforcement agencies are doing a fantastic job in shutting down and tackling illicit tobacco operations, imports and sales all around the country.
Recently, we had many of the well-known Metro service stations closed down for selling illicit tobacco products. It's a difficult challenge. No-one is saying it's not a difficult challenge.
Transnational organised crime groups from around the world, including those from the Middle East, South-East Asia and the Pacific, are flooding our market. They are being led domestically by local criminal organisations via the not-too-disguised black market. You can walk down many of our local high streets and see illicit tobacco openly, or semi-openly, being sold.
Recently, a local barber shop that I used to go to was closed down for selling illicit tobacco—shocking. Our law enforcement agencies are doing their best, but we need to support them and we need to fund them appropriately. In particular, we need to fund their intelligence organisations looking at the business models of these criminal groups.
They can be caught. They can be caught by looking at their income. They can be caught by looking at their assets.
They can be caught by looking at their taxation records—or non-records—similar to the way Al Capone was caught in the virtual Wild West of the speak-easy age in America. It's a difficult challenge, I agree, but these people can be caught. We need to work hard at it.
Unfortunately, some of these groups from the Middle East and South-East Asia have caused violent criminal acts that have the potential to damage innocent victims and cause destruction and distress in our communities—and they already are, particularly in areas of Sydney and Melbourne. This includes, as we've already seen, episodes of torture and even kidnappings.
We saw recently a completely innocent and very elderly man killed by these criminal groups. We have seen firebombings. They require enormous response time and effort from our police services.
We need to make sure we support police and fund them appropriately. In fact, there have been over 175 firebombings of tobacco shops in Australian communities in the last three years. This includes those that are linked to the illicit tobacco trade.
Also, violent robberies have grown by more than 150 per cent in Victoria since February 2024 due to tobacco related crime. As reported in the ABC in August last year, Viva Energy petrol stations reported a 27 per cent reduction in tobacco sales due to the rise in illicit tobacco sales elsewhere. I'd like to echo the comments made by the member for Bruce.
Australians are sick to death of the sleazy illegal shopfronts and groups that are popping up across towns and cities. They need to be caught. They need to be punished.
They need to be appropriately treated for what they are doing to damage our communities. They serve only the black market. They serve only criminal organisations and they will, if left unchecked, destroy our communities.
Our government is working with and supporting the states and territories to shut down the illegal shops and disrupt the trade. But more support is needed from the states themselves. The financial consequences of these issues are huge.
Despite the best efforts of past policies, it's unfortunately still quite lucrative for those foreign based criminal organisations I mentioned earlier to flood the Australian market with illicit tobacco products. This bill will rebalance the risk-to-reward calculation for criminal actors involved in the illicit tobacco trade by increasing the consequences. If this doesn't work, more will need to be done.
The reforms will ensure Australia's proceeds of crime regime provides law enforcement with more techniques and the ability to prevent offenders from benefiting from the criminal profits generated from illicit tobacco, empowering law enforcement to hit criminals where it hurts and keep doing it. It will also clarify, streamline and strengthen our existing information-gathering and confiscation mechanisms to increase the effectiveness of law enforcement outcomes.
As I've said, we need to concentrate on the business models of these groups. Getting information to the right law enforcement bodies to respond appropriately is important. These reforms will enable information obtained through proceeds of crime investigations to be shared with other Commonwealth regulators and law enforcement activities.
It'll help those regulatory bodies responsible to identify and act against those that continue to assist these criminal actors. These are not benign crimes; these are life-threatening crimes, and they need to be treated appropriately. This bill also recognises the need for a coordinated whole-of-government response to combat illicit tobacco markets.
This includes local government, state government, planning authorities and federal government. We all need to work together on this, and we will do so. It recognises the need for all governments to work together.
Further, the work that AUSTRAC and the banks are doing to shut down the money flows that keep illicit tobacco profitable is critical to disrupt the trade. Our entertainment and clubs industry also needs to be involved in this with their propensity to allow money laundering to occur in gambling venues. That needs to be treated appropriately and seriously by law enforcement.
There are hundreds of high-risk bank accounts being reviewed and closed down, and suspicious transactions are being reported. This needs to occur in the gambling industry as well, which can be used for money laundering. Law enforcement will benefit from the modernisation of the existing proceeds-of-crime search warrant framework, and it's important that we strengthen that.
When the Proceeds of Crime Act was enacted in 2002, its search warrant framework mirrored the Crimes Act at that point. However, it's now been widely expanded, and this is very important. The amendments would strengthen our law enforcement partnerships and the national response to combat illicit tobacco, and we need to continue to do so.
The nature of organised crime and the sophistication of cross-border networks are increasingly challenging, but we can meet that challenge and get rid of illicit tobacco. We must continue to do that. Calls to reduce the regulatory frameworks and to reduce the excise are ridiculous, don't understand the health consequences and should not be tolerated.