MOTIONS

Senator DUNIAM (Tasmania—Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate) (17:09): I move: That the Senate— (a) notes that Australia is facing an extremely serious illicit tobacco crisis, in which: (i) organised crime has taken near-full control of the tobacco market, (ii) legitimate businesses and wider communities have been subjected to firebombings, extortion and violence, and (iii) the illegal tobacco trade is generating enormous profits for organised criminal syndicates; (b) further notes that the Albanese Government has stubbornly refused to abandon the policy settings that have contributed to these disastrous outcomes, including repeated tobacco excise increases that have helped dramatically accelerate the movement of consumers into the illegal market; and (c) calls on the Albanese Government to urgently change course, reconsider its failed approach to tobacco excise and adopt policy settings that smash the criminal gangs and finally protect Australian businesses and communities.

This very important matter is one that I think has been largely ignored, sadly, by this government. It is one that is now a scourge on our society, and it has caused immeasurable damage to our community and our society. There have been lives lost, fire bombings, property damage and people going out of business.

But the people that are doing well out of this, of course, are the crime gangs. They are in business big time. Billions of dollars are being made by these hideous individuals, probably offshore, pulling the strings, calling the shots and doing terrible things to a range of people.

The stories we hear out there about how life now is in suburbia in some of these business communities where crime gangs are ruling the roost and calling the shots and the impact this is having on the lives of those who are affected by this are terrifying. Law-abiding citizens are caught up in, frankly, Underbelly 2.0, which has been let rip by this government's policies, and I'm sure, Acting Deputy President Polley, you'd agree with me that change is needed.

We, the opposition, have, of course, proposed that we need to address this on a number of fronts. Firstly, we need to look at what drove this industry. What actually brought about this huge spike in illicit tobacco consumption in this country?

Sadly, I have to say that it was the tobacco excise. We've gone too far. The tax has gone too high.

We have driven a market where people are looking for a cheap alternative, because they're going to find a way to smoke whether we like it or not. Of course, we don't want them to, but, because the price of a packet of legal cigarettes is, on average, between $40 and $60—$40 being a very cheap legal pack of cigarettes—and a 20-pack of illicit cigarettes is between $10 and $15, we know where people will go.

They will vote with their hip pocket and they'll make the cheap purchase. This is problematic. As a result, we've seen a collapse in the amount of revenue taken from the tobacco excise, because people have chosen to go for the illegal product.

It's bad for their health, it's bad for law and order and, of course, it's bad for our society and our country's economy. But, of course, it's not just about the excise, which has gone too far. It's about law enforcement.

It's also about education. And, sadly, I think we can see that we have, as a country, dropped the ball on educating Australians about why smoking is bad. We got things under control, and I think it was very much a multipartisan effort.

Governments of both colours, with the support of minor parties, were able to put in place arrangements to remind Australians that, if you want to make that appalling life decision to smoke, you're going to pay the price. The plain packaging approach that was taken, the 'lock it up behind the counter and not put it on display in shops'—the regulated model—is one that has worked, along with an education program.

Our policy that we announced just over a week ago was one in which we would cut the excise by 80 per cent for a period of two years, with a review to take place at the end of that period of time. Secondly, we would augment law enforcement capacity. There would be $200 million to assist the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Border Force, our intelligence organisations, including the Australian Signals Directorate, to break these crime cartels, these gangs, to drive them out of business and disrupt their capacity to supply the market.

That's $200 million of extra funding for organisations like the AFP and the ABF—organisations that are full of very good, hardworking men and women who actually want to protect us from bad things. But they are finding it incredibly difficult at the moment to do that, given the way things are, particularly with the illegal tobacco market. So augmenting our law enforcement approach to really smash these crime gangs and what they're doing when it comes to illicit tobacco is a big part of it.

And, as I said before, there would be $60 million to educate Australians about the ills of purchasing illegal tobacco. When you buy illegal cigarettes or any other illegal nicotine product, you are supporting crime gangs. You are committing a crime yourself.

That is what we need to stop, along with that very basic proposition, the health messaging, around smoking, vaping and the use of nicotine products being bad for your health to varying degrees, depending on the product you consume—reminding Australians that consuming any of those products is a bad health choice. It is a multipronged approach to dealing with this issue—an issue that, frankly, this government have given up on dealing with.

They are saying the business-as-usual approach is one that will deliver benefits. But, as we can see from the very numbers before us, that is not the case. The government says law enforcement is where it's at: 'We've just got to keep enforcing the law, keep doing what we're doing.' As I said, nothing is changing.

The dial has not moved. We are still seeing firebombings. We are seeing unprecedented amounts of illegal tobacco coming into this country.

That is what is driving this trade, and that is what is causing the harm. Then there is One Nation, whose proposal is to just slash the tax and not augment that with any further funding for law enforcement. So both of our political opponents are choosing one or the other.

They are not looking at a comprehensive plan to deal with this issue. Neither of those parties will actually be able to deal with this. Our plan has been supported by law enforcement experts, by health experts, by people who know a thing or two about needing to crack this crime cartel that is dominating health policy and dominating the tobacco trade in this country.

Much has been said about other countries and their experiences. Canada had a not dissimilar—not identical—set of circumstances that they confronted as a country, the difference being, though, that in the Canadian market a large proportion of tobacco products were manufactured domestically. The problem they had was that those products that were produced and manufactured domestically were exported from Canada without any tax or tariff applied to them and then smuggled back in to Canada, evading tax.

So, very cheap cigarettes were flooding the market. Between the years 1992 and 1994, Canada had a law-enforcement-only approach to dealing with illicit tobacco. It failed.

It saw tobacco consumption and nicotine consumption increase. When it was augmented, as in our policy proposal for Australia, with cutting the taxes related to tobacco products and changing the tax treatment, consumption went down. At that point in time, 1994, illicit tobacco consumption in Canada was at 28 per cent.

In 2024 it had dropped to 11 per cent. So those policy changes, not dissimilar to the approach we're taking, had an impact on the illegal trade. They found a way, with those multiple and complementary measures, to crash the business model of these illegal crime gangs.

That is the kind of thing we should be pursuing—not pretending everything's going okay and celebrating every seizure of tobacco products in this country at the border, or even within our borders, because that is just the tip of the iceberg. Sadly, for these crime gangs in Australia, it's a cost of doing business. They might lose one shipping container full of tobacco when they've brought 30 in.

They're happy to lose that. They're happy to pay the penalties, because it is a cost of doing what is a very lucrative business in this country. And while we keep doing this—the approach the Labor government has in place, which is that the settings as they are today are the right ones—these people will continue to make huge amounts of money.

I was at a tenancy in Melbourne earlier in the year. It was a small commercial tenancy, home to a number of small retail outlets. One of them used to be a tobacconist.

It was a small space—probably not much bigger than the clerks' table here. Their insurance premiums went from $2,000 a year to close to $200,000 a year, because of the risk associated with running a legal business, a legal tobacconist. The insurer for the building said, 'No, no, no: while that business entity is operating here, the insurance premium is going to go up, because we can almost guarantee that that tenancy, selling legal tobacco, is going to get firebombed.' That is a terrible situation for our country to confront.

We should be finding ways to deal with these issues, not saying, 'Oh, well: it's all too hard; it's tough, and we're just going to have to live with it as it is.' The fact that a legitimate business operator had to shut down because of this dominance of the crime gangs and the approach to business that they take—running others out of town, shutting them down—is not right.

The fact that people are living in fear of these sorts of activities from occurring is not right. It is not fair. Just last week we were in Abbotsford and, again, a fire bombing in a tobacco store tore through 10 commercial tenancies.

I met a woman who ran a nail and beauty clinic. She has not yet been able to gain access to her insurance at all because they're disputing the coverage that she should have in these situations. She's had to use her own money to try and set up shop somewhere else while her existing tenancy, one of 10 destroyed by this fire bombing, is rebuilt and refurbished.

A man who was selling menswear in the same set of shops can't get insurance to replace the stock that was lost through the smoke and fire damage, again, as a result of a fire bombing related to this illegal tobacco trade. It is rife, and they are using young people as the front men and women for their business to go and do these things, to set these fires alight, to do the nasty things that are occurring.

Of course, at the very, very sad end of what we see happening under this approach to how we deal with illegal tobacco in this country, people have died. People have been killed in mistaken identity hits, because the gang thought they were taking out a rival crime gang member or a runner for these products, and that is an appalling situation. We need to do more and it has to be on all fronts.

It can't just be law enforcement, police at a state and territory level. I should also mention Labor Premier Chris Minns of New South Wales has said the tobacco tax needs to drop. NSW Police are wearing themselves out at the coalface trying to deal with this issue because the floodgates are open, because of the taxation settings this government has in place.

Those taxes, of course, did increase under the last government too, and I think that was sadly a mistake. It was something that, at that point in time, at that decision point, seemed like the right thing to do but, over time, the continual increases have led to where we're at today. So it is today that we need to act.

We cannot ignore the situation that we're confronted with as a country. We cannot ignore the impact it's having on our society, on the revenues our country receives into the Consolidated Revenue Fund. We also cannot ignore the impact it's having on young people.

It's easier than it's ever been for young people to access illicit tobacco and nicotine products. You can go to just about any shop to access these products. I know many parents who have had to confront this issue with their children, and this is why also regulating the vape and nicotine pouch market is an important approach.

Treating these products the same way we do cigarettes is the way to go. Having pharmacists sell people vapes when they have prescriptions for high-dose products is not working. When we leave this building and go out to dinner or go to our meetings, go to our gatherings, whatever we do, we will pass people vaping in the street.

Do we seriously think all of these people have a script for those products they're consuming? They don't. They're illegal.

We'll be inhaling the vapour as they walk past us and exhale whatever it is they've taken in. We don't know the content of the products either because the market is unregulated. This stuff is coming in illegally.

It's being sold illegally under the counter to kids, and we're getting these people hooked on these products because there is no regulation of any meaningful value to our country in these situations. You hear about all sorts of terrible issues occurring right across our country, and our home state of Tasmania is no exception. I was talking to representatives of Tasmania Police just last weekend.

While we haven't had fire bombings and the like, it is alive and well down in our home state. So I think it is high time for this government to consider how they deal with these issues. We've put a proposal on the table.

We'd love to work with the government. We don't think One Nation's approach is in any way meaningful or worth pursuing, because they haven't done any work to back it in. It is one part of the problem that they're dealing with there.

But, of course, if they want to keep playing whack-a-mole, which is what, sadly, the current arrangement in Australia sees us doing, then that's their choice. We've put on the table a comprehensive policy proposal, and I hope this parliament supports it. (Time expired)