Customs and Other Legislation Amendment (Illicit Tobacco Enforcement Modernisation and Other Measures) Bill 2026
Ms MILLER-FROST (Boothby) (15:24): Here are a few hard facts. Smoking kills. Smoking kills more than 20,000 Australians a year.
That's 66 people every day. There is no safe level of tobacco use. Smoking kills.
Vapes are no better than cigarettes and in many instances may be much worse. And, while Australia's national accounts suggest that the purchase of legal tobacco has halved since 2020 and AIHW data shows that the number of smokers in Australia continues to drop to record lows, we know that rises in nicotine residue in wastewater supplies show us that some people who do smoke are increasingly using products with higher nicotine levels—that is, illegal tobacco and vapes, unregulated.
Who knows what may be in them. Some vapes have been shown to have the same amount of nicotine as nine entire packets of cigarettes. If big tobacco doesn't care that their product will kill you, imagine how much organised crime cares.
It is estimated that, in 2025, illicit tobacco constituted 80 per cent of the total consumption of tobacco in Australia, an increase of 12 per cent since 2017. The total value of the illicit market is estimated to be between $4.1 billion and $6.9 billion. Legal tobacco continues to pose a significant threat to the health of the Australian public.
The unregulated illicit tobacco market also poses a significant threat to the Australian public, our health system, our communities and our economy. To be blunt, people die and are dying from smoking every single day, and these criminals are facilitating Australians' deaths. The problem is that Australia's current regulatory framework with respect to illegal tobacco is outdated.
It is not fit for purpose. While criminal syndicates and organisations are getting more and more sophisticated, Australia's current regulatory framework is an attractive proposition for these criminals. It's low risk and high reward.
It was designed to target minor revenue infractions, but these are multinational outfits that operate outside and inside Australia. They are a global operation. They are lawyered up.
They consider product losses due to Border Force and other regulatory activities to be a cost of doing business. They understand Australia's laws and actions against illicit tobacco inside out. These criminal organisations and syndicates are motivated by one thing: money—nothing more, nothing less.
They don't care about the individuals at the receiving end of their illegal activity. They don't care that over 20,000 Australians die every year as a result of smoking and that a fair number of them are smoking their illegal tobacco products. They don't care that their products don't adhere to any standards.
Not only do they not care but it's probably a positive to their business model if their products have additional nicotine in them, making them even more addictive. An addict is a great target market—that's their business model. Currently, internationally, there is a massive oversupply of cheap tobacco, and they can produce cigarettes at an input cost of mere cents.
Organised crime has industrialised and commercialised illicit tobacco at scale purely for their own profit. Our response needs to keep pace with the sophistication of the challenge and the scale of the challenge. But we also need to be clear about what we're tackling here and not undermine our world-class public health measures that have resulted in record low rates of smoking.
We are tackling organised crime here. We are not competing in the market with them. We are not enabling legal tobacco to become a more affordable product, as big tobacco would like us to do.
Smoking kills, whether it is legal tobacco or illegal tobacco. Smoking kills, and we need to continue our world-leading efforts to help Australians quit tobacco products and vapes and to stop a new generation of smokers and vapers from starting the habit. This bill is about tackling the organised crime that is profiting from illegal tobacco and all the additional societal issues that come from organised crime operating within the country.
We know that this works. Queensland's recent crackdown on illegal tobacco resulted in a 55 per cent increase in sales of legal tobacco—people leaving the illegal market and going back to legal tobacco—but, more importantly, a doubling of the calls to Quitline. The Customs and Other Legislation Amendment (Illicit Tobacco Enforcement Modernisation and Other Measures) Bill 2026 addresses these deficiencies in Australia's current regulatory framework.
It will introduce new offences for the import, possession and distribution of illegal tobacco, including an aggravated offence. Authorities will no longer have to prove criminal intent. Instead, they only need to prove that their suspicion of criminal activity satisfies one of the indicators—for example, non-compliant retail packaging, non-compliant tobacco products, concealing tobacco sales to avoid detection or underselling below market value.
And illicit tobacco will be designated a tier 1 prohibited good in line with other goods that are controlled at the border. This bill will streamline seizure practices because authorities are bogged down by and are spending excessive time on paperwork and the documentation process of individual seizures. It will mean additional licensing for facilitators and intermediaries who maintain illicit tobacco in their storage facilities, freight networks, depots and other supply chain infrastructure while operating under the cloak of legitimacy.
Further restrictions will be placed on customs brokers and other licence holders from participating in the supply of illicit tobacco—a positive obligation that will be imposed on them to show that they've taken all necessary measures and met all requirements to avoid facilitating the importation of illicit tobacco. These measures will improve regulatory oversight, tightening our control over the supply chain and enforcement at every point along the distribution trajectory of illicit tobacco.
This bill will also target the criminals themselves. It will ensure that criminals can't profit from their operations and, in the process, will deter potential criminals from engaging in this conduct. It will, for example, allow courts to obtain the necessary documents and other relevant information after the commencement of and during a proceeding or criminal investigation.
It will free authorities from the jurisdictional limitations that may currently prevent them from acquiring these documents. It will make changes to the pecuniary penalty order framework. This means that criminals will no longer be able to take the risk of relatively minor fines and penalties when they engage in illegal activity while profiting from their supply of illicit tobacco, which currently is seen by organised crime as a bearable cost of doing business.
This measure will comprehensively deprive individuals of the benefits gained from their offending. It will take away the assets of criminal actors—because crime should not and will not pay. This is not a victimless crime.
People are literally dying. This bill ensures that total wealth is properly calculated for the purposes of determining unexplained wealth or identifying tainted property during a criminal proceeding. As a result, confiscation procedures and prosecutions will be streamlined, and individuals won't stand to gain from their illegal conduct.
The Customs and Other Legislation Amendment (Illicit Tobacco Enforcement Modernisation and Other Measures) Bill complements the Albanese Labor government's National Tobacco Strategy 2023 to 2030, which aims to reduce many of these impacts and harms. In 2024, the government committed more than $365 million to tackling the illicit tobacco black market. We established the Illicit Tobacco National Disruption Group—in addition to the Illicit Tobacco Taskforce from 2018—made up of the Australian Border Force, the Australian Federal Police, state and territory authorities, the Criminal Intelligence Commission, the Therapeutic Goods Administration and health and tobacco authorities.
This group targets, disrupts and dismantles these crime syndicates and organisations—because what is needed is a whole-of-government approach that includes both traditional and non-traditional agencies to create an environment in which criminals dealing in illicit tobacco cannot and do not have the opportunity to thrive. That is also why, in our most recent budget, the Albanese Labor government invested $33.5 million in the Criminal Assets Confiscation Taskforce to target the proceeds of illicit tobacco, including $17 million to state and territory law enforcement agencies, because we can see that, where states and territories are cracking down on organised crime and their illicit tobacco products, illicit tobacco reduces; and, where they don't, organised crime runs rife.
We will continue to expand the powers of law enforcement and increase penalties and consequences. We know that illicit tobacco is a global market. Because it defies defined borders, it requires a combined response that pre-empts illicit tobacco long before its arrival in Australia, that stops illicit tobacco at the border if and when it does arrive and that continues to relentlessly pursue illicit tobacco once it's in this country.
Every checkpoint along the journey needs to be guarded. But we know that our actions to clamp down on illicit tobacco are working. In 2025-26, more than 2,300 tonnes of illicit tobacco and 13.2 million vapes were seized by the Australian Border Force.
That's an increase of 496 per cent in cigarette stick seizures and 232 per cent in illicit tobacco seizures since the previous financial year. These are record levels of seizures. We've seen massive crackdowns across the country, from retail and convenience stores to your local pubs and hairdressers, and we've seen the recent successes in Queensland.
My home state of South Australia has taken a lead on this, with more than 320 shop closures and, as the South Australian government reports, increases to the cost of illicit tobacco, removing the basic rationale for criminals to operate successfully. Smoking rates are coming down, falling to 5.8 per cent among adults in 2025 from 7.7 per cent in 2022-23. Vaping rates have flatlined, and the number of young Australians between the ages of 14 and 17 who have never vaped is fast growing.
Vapes were initially sold as a way of getting off smoking, but then they started being sold in colours, flavours and designs that appealed to children. Vapes are not safe. While we don't have 20 years of data to show long-term death rates, we do know that vapes kill now and vapes cause cancer now.
Some of them have excessive amounts of nicotine and all sorts of other toxic chemicals. One vape can contain as much nicotine as nine packets of cigarettes, so they are no healthier than cigarettes—or, perhaps better worded, vapes are as toxic and as deadly as cigarettes. We now know that vapes are a gateway drug to cigarettes.
People who vape are five times more likely to start smoking, and just that proportion of the population, by itself, is estimated to cost the health system an extra $180 million per year. So, when big tobacco tries to get vapes legalised and deregulated—and some of those opposite led the charge on this, trying to stop our previous legislation restricting the import and sale of vapes—we have to remember that smoking kills and vapes kill.
We need to remember that big tobacco and organised crime are in it for the money. They don't care about the impact on the lives of Australians—our health, our life expectancy—or the impact that this has on our health system. They only care about making money, and addiction is their business model.
This bill is a massive stride forward, but there is so much more to do, and the important thing is that we stick to the path that we know works. I commend the bill to the House.