PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS

Ms MASCARENHAS (Swan) (12:26): The coalition wants this chamber to believe that the government has surrendered the fight against illegal tobacco. This government has fought and will always fight to stop the illicit tobacco trade, but we will not do so by giving in to big tobacco. The coalition would have us bending the knee to an industry that has spent decades hurting Australians.

The coalition wants to cut the tobacco excise by 80 per cent, which would see a guaranteed rise in daily smoking and vape rates and, just as awful, a guaranteed rise in revenue for big tobacco. Medical experts and academics have warned for decades that smoking is the No. 1 leading cause of preventable death. Professor Simon Chapman, a public health expert at the University of Sydney, said last week that the single most important thing that a person could do for their health is to quit smoking.

Smoking kills 66 Australians every single day. Those opposite want to legalise vapes, the gateway to smoking cigarettes. Disposable vapes have surged in this country since COVID, flooding the market in every imaginable flavour, like lollies at the corner store deli, and marketed as sleek and harmless.

This government has recognised the danger and acted in 2024 to ban the importation of disposable vapes. The member for Monash accuses the government of failing to arrest smoking rates. Yet the coalition's own policy is to legalise vapes, the very product driving people towards smoking in the first place.

Professor Mike Daube from Curtin University in my electorate of Swan has led the fight against tobacco for four decades. He warns that we are facing an extraordinary tobacco resurgence that risks undoing decades of progress and overloading our hospitals for years to come. Their own colleague the member for Mallee told this parliament that young people who vape are three times more likely to take up smoking.

Even those opposite know what this policy does, yet they still want to legalise vapes and other nicotine products. This motion points to the symptoms of illicit tobacco crime but not the cause. You can't cut a legal price and expect an illegal one to disappear.

Illicit tobacco will always be cheaper because it pays no excise at all. Cutting the excise does not shrink the market. Economics 101 says that this will do the opposite.

It will grow the whole market, both legal and illegal, by adding more smokers in the first place. That is not a solution. This is gambling with the country's health by still funnelling money into the same criminal trade that this motion claims to be worried about.

The excise is working to protect Australians. According to the 2025 National Drug Strategy Household Survey, daily smoking among adults has fallen to a historic low of almost six per cent, and, for the first time ever, daily vaping has stabilised at nearly four per cent. These reforms are working but there is more work to do before we can say that we have fully protected Australians from the harms of smoking and vaping.

We are not denying what's happening in Victoria and around Australia and that this needs addressing. This is the work of organised criminal syndicates who would deal in drugs, weapons or counterfeit goods just as readily if tobacco stopped being profitable. That is why this government has already committed more than $365 million since 2024 to stop illegal tobacco before it arrives, when it arrives and after it arrives in this country.

This year alone, the Australian Border Force has seized more than 230,000 tonnes of illicit tobacco, nearly a 500 per cent increase from the year before. We raised penalties, we gave police new power to pursue these criminals, and we introduced a bill last week to make it easier to prosecute anyone in the supply chain and to take away the cash, cars, houses criminals cannot explain.

That is what a real plan against organised crime looks like, because the solution to fighting crime is not about sacrificing public health. Enforcement is how you stop organised crime, not a tax cut.