QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE: TAKE NOTE OF ANSWERS

Senator CADELL (New South Wales—Nationals Whip in the Senate) (15:19): It's great to follow on from Senator Ciccone, a senator from Melbourne—or the home of the firebombing in the illegal tobacco wars, as we talk about. He talked about the rates that are continuing to be put up and the lowering of smoking. They're from statistics of normal businesses that sell these things.

It's not normal businesses that sell them. I'm pretty sure the Alameddine crime family don't report their business statistics in their sales through these networks. I'm pretty sure the Hamad family syndicate don't put their sales through the Better Business Bureau and show up at the Melbourne business awards to collect their awards for being responsible people in their syndicates.

I'm pretty sure that the Chinese crime families and the Haddara family don't put all their sales of illegal tobacco through the same networks that judge these things. What we're seeing in the sewage outlets—we're seeing this in sewage detection—is higher tobacco use. Why?

It's because tobacco has become so cheap thanks to these things. If we go back to law 101, which were three of the best years of my life, we can look at different rules of interpretation. 15:20:30 We have the mischief rule, and we talk about the rocks and the thing of putting this excise on to lower tobacco use. That is what it was there for.

These taxes, these excises, were to lower tobacco use. They are no longer doing that because 80 per cent of the tobacco market is now illegal—no excise. So we go to that mischief.

The mischief this was meant to do—it is no longer fit for purpose, and that is why we have come up with a way we can both get control of this situation again and get in front of these crime gangs by increasing the law avoidance. They talk about the actions taken by states. Let me tell you about, in my home of the Hunter Valley, when the Rutherford tobacco store was shut.

It was shut because they were selling illegal tobacco. They brought the shutters down. Three days later, it reopened—not 30 days, not 90 days.

When it was shut down again a week later, they put a sticker on the front of the shop that you could scan and have the cigarettes delivered to you. That is the reality of what happens. It's not what we think or what we want; it is the reality of what happens in the world.

We have seen more than 200 firebombings in Melbourne and more than 300 across Australia. We've seen 51 shootings in New South Wales. All of this is linked to the massive money that is made in illegal tobacco.

We've seen Premier Minns, a Labor premier, come out and say he supports this policy because he knows it's required to get on top of the gangs and because he's not living in gaga land. He's living in reality. He's living in a world where this happens every day.

He's living in a world where we need an answer, where we need to be able to compete. We need to take the profit out of these criminals and get back in control. That's why this side, the opposition, will have a policy to reduce the excise—to do what?

To get back to the mischief of lowering smoking and controlling the distribution. There's nothing more simple than that. I note the answers today are in absolute disbelief of what the facts are.

We go to the vaping. We talk about vaping numbers. I said yesterday in here that I—someone that looks like a narc, like me—went to a service station.

I could buy a $30 vape six months ago. Now I've got to buy an $80 vape, but I can still get the same vape because illegal crime controls that. Vaping has been historically the No. 1 way that people have gotten off smoking.

So the young people that want tobacco now who can't afford a vape are going to cigarettes because they're cheaper. This government, through its policies, is driving young people to cigarettes and driving that money to organised crime. Billions and billions of dollars are going to organised crime families like the Alameddines, like the Haddara family and like the Hamad syndicate.

It is not good enough when you are driving billions and billions of dollars to the very worst people in society. That is why we will change it.