MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE

Ms ALDRED (Monash—Opposition Whip) (15:32): There's an old saying: insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. That is exactly what the Albanese Labor government is doing—same excise policy, same enforcement-only rhetoric, same denial—and every single day it is putting Australians at risk. I'll pick up on a couple of points from the previous speaker.

Smoking rates are going up across the country and in different states. You only need to look at the Australian Bureau of Statistics data to see a 40 per cent increase between 2017 and 2025. I don't know whether the government are contesting the data from the ABS.

You can also look at state-by-state data. For example, Western Australia has recorded an uptick for the first time in 30 years. New South Wales, our most populous state, has just hit 15 per cent.

I care about driving down smoking rates. My grandfather passed away from smoking induced lung cancer. Many of us in this place, on both sides of the chamber, care deeply about this.

But I say in the strongest possible terms: if you genuinely care about driving smoking rates down, the current approach is not working. The previous speaker raised the issue of vaping. Illegal vapes are dangerous and addictive, and they are fuelling organised crime.

There is a 97 per cent illegal market for vapes in this country. Illegal vapes have no manufacturing standards and no mandated nicotine doses. They have things like cottonwool buds as the ignition point.

Dr Nick Coatsworth, the former deputy chief medical officer of Australia and no less than a respiratory specialist—you could not get a better qualified person on this—says that legalised vapes with a standardised amount of dosage and manufacturing standards are an important bridge to harm minimisation. For people who genuinely want to quit smoking cigarettes they're an important tool, and I think that should be acknowledged.

In question time today and yesterday, the Prime Minister handballed every question on this issue to different ministers. I had to look back a long way to see the last time the Prime Minister was on the record about the tobacco excise. It was back in June of this year, and he ducked and weaved and tried to pass off a straightforward answer onto any other issue.

It is really interesting that, at this point in time—he is doing anything possible to provide an answer on the record on the issue of tobacco excise tax. The government love to say that Australia is a world leader on tobacco. Well, they are.

A fortnight ago, we passed 300 arsons, so that's world leading. This morning in Sunshine, in Melbourne's west, we had people inside a building where a suspected illegal tobacco shop was torched. That's five people—not statistics.

That's five human beings. In the Minister for Health and Ageing's home town of North Adelaide, residents living above a tobacconist scrambled to safety in the middle of the night. South Australia has been held up as a poster child of nationwide enforcement, but the firebombings are continuing after three years.

This is happening in Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane. This is a national crisis. Consider who is actually paying the price.

A teenager in Bega had a handgun pointed at her during a robbery for a packet of cigarettes. Staff across this country now work behind roller shutters and CCTV because the government they pay tax to has allowed organised crime to set up shop next door. And these are not statistics.

This is somebody's daughter; this is somebody's son. They're often young. They're retail staff.

For many of them, this is their first experience in a workplace environment. I think this government should care more about their safety and wellbeing. And then there is Kaz Hamad, who is a man law enforcement has linked to a terrorist act on Australian soil.

Indeed, he was the AFP's No. 1 national security target. He has run an illicit tobacco empire that has been funded by the very price gap this government's excise settings have created. This government's own figures now show the illicit market has surged past half of total tobacco consumption—worth billions of dollars every year.

This is not working. The Minister for Home Affairs says it's an enforcement problem. The customs minister admits, correctly, that the excise gap is driving the black market.

They cannot both be right, and Australians are the ones that are caught in the middle of this contradiction. So I say to the Prime Minister, the health minister, the Treasurer, the home affairs minister and the government stand up and do your job.