QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE: TAKE NOTE OF ANSWERS

Senator STERLE (Western Australia) (15:06): I rise to take note on a couple of questions that were put today, if I have time, but first I want to talk about illicit tobacco. And I want to clarify, for the record, that I was a smoker in my previous life. If I hadn't had my three packets of cigarettes a day between Perth and Darwin and back, there was something wrong.

Thankfully I don't partake anymore. But I want to talk in layman's terms about driving through the suburbs in the best part of Australia—where you and I are from, Deputy President Brockman—and every fifth or sixth shop is a tobacco shop. And I see, like every other senator travelling through this great country, in Melbourne, Sydney or Brisbane, tobacco shops everywhere.

And I think to myself that it doesn't matter who you talk to—if you're on a plane, if you're in the airport, if you're at the train station or if you're at the footy—everyone relates these tobacco shops to the underworld, to the crooks, to the thieves, to the worst of the worst of society and the trash that is left in the distribution of illicit tobacco. Yet—and this might get me into a few pickles with some of my own, but I really don't care—as a hardworking taxpayer and Aussie for 50-odd years in this nation, I can tell you, if I broke the law in my previous employment as a truck driver and I happened to go past a policeman in my truck and I was doing a little bit more than five kay over, I got pulled over and I copped a fine; I got a good whack.

And trust me, I got quite a few good whacks on my way home. And I can say this to every hard worker in Australia: it gets a little bit hard to accept that these crooks under everyone's noses can keep getting away with it. But I will defend this spend from the government.

I've got to do that, because there is a good spend. But for crying out loud, is it that hard to go in and shut it down? Is it that hard to go and get these crooks?

The ABF are doing a magnificent job on our borders, and good on the ABF, and I see some of the figures here. There's a kilotonne of illegal tobacco. In my world, you got paid by the tonne or by the cubic metre.

Think about a thousand tonnes of tobacco. If a kilo of tobacco fell on your head as you walked past a building site, it wouldn't hurt. But if a kilo of bricks fell on your head as you passed a building site, it damn well would hurt.

So start thinking about the volume of a thousand tonnes of leaf, let alone the 3½ million vapes and all that sort of stuff. The ABF have cut these crooks off at the borders, and good on the ABF, as I said before. But for crying out loud.

I listened to Minister Wong's response, and it's a very encouraging response. But as she said quite clearly, it can't be done just by us in federal Labor. This is about the states.

From my hard work in industry, where I come from, if you made a mistake in your logbook—and I'm not going to hang the regulator out to dry here; they just enforce crap laws—you're going to get a good fine. If you make a spelling mistake in your logbook, a poor old truckie on your way to work or on your way home, you're going to cop a damn good fine, too—around 800 bucks, for a spelling mistake.

We can't get this trash off the streets. We can't get around to these illegal shops. I'll tell you what: Why don't we do something different in this nation?

Why don't we actually put some laws in place and send the mongrels off to jail? Give them a damn good kick in the backside. That's the way to penalise the underworld—lock them all up.

I've had an absolute gutful that hardworking decent Aussies always get targeted—the easy ones. It's so easy just to go out there and get the lowest common denominator, the low-hanging fruit. For God's sake, grow some, and put some laws in this nation that locks these mongrels up and get this crap off the streets.

And as for reducing the excise, you people are on another planet. You're on drugs. (Time expired)