Customs and Other Legislation Amendment (Illicit Tobacco Enforcement Modernisation and Other Measures) Bill 2026

Mr JOYCE (New England) (16:36): At the start, I move an amendment to the amendment moved by the member for Kooyong, as circulated in my name: That all words after "the" (first occurring) be omitted with a view to substituting the following words: "House, whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, calls on the Government to immediately reduce the tobacco excise by 75 per cent to encourage consumers to move back to legal products, smash the black market and reduce the rampant organised crime which is now widespread in tobacco retailing".

I'm sure the member for Farrer will second it—I hope!—in a short period of time. It's pretty simple economics. If you reduce the price of something, you will have more people buy it.

If you increase the price of something, it becomes unaffordable for people. It's a very fundamental design of economics. Whether it was Marshall, Keynes or Friedman, they were all pretty keen on the idea.

It works pretty well. What we have with cigarettes is an issue. You have an addiction.

Cigarettes are addictive. Nicotine is very addictive. You have very much a static market there.

You have a demand, to be quite frank, that is pretty constant. The elasticity in that is to where they buy them from. There are a couple of unfortunate things about cigarettes.

One is they kill you. You die if you smoke cigarettes. Sometimes you'll die quickly; sometimes it'll take longer.

But, if you keep smoking, smoking will kill you—unless something else kills you first. If you're going to die, it'd probably be better to die with a regulated product than an unregulated product. To have more people smoke a regulated product, we have to reduce the price.

It is a reality that we have legal cigarettes for about $55 a packet, or something like that, and illegal ones—we all know, because they're everywhere; they're ubiquitous—are about $15 a packet. So people are making an economic choice. They are buying the illegal ones and, by so doing, sponsoring the mafia.

Who is actually missing out? Well, it's the government. A couple of years ago, there was about $12 billion, I think—it might have been a bit more—in excise revenue.

Last year, I think we got a bit better than $4 billion. Where's that money going? I can tell you where it's going.

It's going to the same group that has been burning down shops and blowing people up and shooting up places. It's pretty violent where the cigarettes are coming from. If we want to take control—well, we're never going to get rid of it completely, but if you want to have some semblance of it and get it back into orbit, you have to bring the price of the legal cigarettes back into an orbit where the illegal ones are.

Then people will probably pay a little bit of a premium because they'll want to know more about the regular cigarettes that are killing them, because you have no idea what you're getting in a packet of unregulated cigarettes. If they're going to bring them in illegally, they're probably not too worried about your health or about quality control. This is something that we've got to deal with.

Here's another interesting thing. To be quite frank, you're ripping people off with a product that's killing them: cigarettes. You're ripping people off because, after you've said it's evil, the biggest commercial beneficiary of cigarettes is the government.

The government says, 'Smoking's evil. You shouldn't do it. But, by the way, we're going to take most of the money from it.' Who smokes?

Unfortunately, it's poor people overwhelmingly. The people who can least afford it are the ones who smoke. So the government is getting a benefit from the poorest people in society.

That is wrong on a whole range of levels. What we in One Nation are asking for is a reduction of 75 per cent in the excise. This, as stated in the actual amendment, will encourage consumers back to the legal products.

We've seen in other places such as Canada that this works. We're getting some mixed news that's going around out there. People are saying, 'They've increased the policing and it's brought down the consumption.' The only way, ultimately, you can check that is by the analysis of sewerage and things like that, because you can pick up nicotine levels.

Some of the other studies say that it's pretty constant at about one in 10 people smoking, and that's not surprising because it's addictive. One of the issues we have with illegal cigarettes, of course, is that, when the people who bring in the illegal cigarettes are not riding Harley-Davidsons and going to chapters of their clubs, they're bringing in other things, such as methamphetamines, heroin and a whole list of drugs that are very, very bad for you.

They're much worse than cigarettes. Cigarettes will kill you, but if you're having a cigarette while driving down the road, it shouldn't really affect your capacity to drive; however, if you're on methamphetamines or even marijuana, it's probably best that you don't drive. There is vastly more of an issue with illegal cigarettes, which is that they are being used to develop a wider drug market.

There's a massive profit to be made in illegal cigarettes. One of the issues is the monitoring, and I'm sure the member for Farrer, who is vastly more across this than me, will go further into it. Let's just say our capacity to monitor the ports is not as good as it should be, so you have many containers—the vast majority—that are not inspected.

If you can get a fair few cigarettes in one container, or even in a part of, there's a big profit to be made. What we are trying to do is bring economic sanity back into this issue of a product that has a similar product that is less than a third of its price and of the thinking that people are going to buy the legal one. If you want to get a real insight into how this whole process of dealing with illegal cigarettes is going, you should go to a shop that sells legal cigarettes.

They will give you a very clear insight into what's happened to their client base. Their client base has basically walked out the door. In this parliament, where we talk in riddles, let's remove one riddle and ask: how often now, when you see someone smoking cigarettes, do you see that there are no real health warnings on the packaging because they don't come from Australia?

They're illegal. In fact, I reckon it's sometimes hard to find someone smoking legal cigarettes, and that shows what a failure in policy this is. One Nation came up with this policy, and, like everything, it took merely a period of less than 24 hours and—God bless them—the coalition followed our policy, and that was good.

They are following our policies. At times they're following our lines. They're now calling the people on the other side 'socialists', as they are.

Even though there are no labourers on the frontbench of the Labor Party, there are socialists, ex-student unionists, who have a big issue about small things. But within another 24 hours, the Premier of New South Wales also said what a great idea One Nation's policy is. Now, there's nothing remarkable about that because the policy is just common sense.

It's just the most obvious thing to do. There are also other parts. People who are addicted to nicotine can find other ways to get nicotine.

There are patches, but there are also forms of chewing tobacco, forms of pouches—I don't even know what they call them, but they put them in their lip and walk around with them. Mr JOYCE: What do they call them? Mr JOYCE: A plug—there you go.

Now you're seeing more of them and they're also illegal. We could get some common sense about this, maybe put this one through the PBO. That'd be a good one.

Put this one through the PBO and ask this very simple question: if we reduce the price of legal cigarettes by reducing the excise, will we sell more legal cigarettes? It shouldn't take the PBO too long to get to an answer. Then ask this: if the government sells more legal cigarettes, will the government get more excise revenue?

And that shouldn't take the PBO too long to work out either. I think they are two very quick questions. They will be able to work out that you're vastly better off if you reduce the price of a product if you are desirous of the idea of wanting to sell more of them.

Ultimately, how do we actually stop people smoking cigarettes? There's no argument that that would be great. Well, the first thing is you can't just order people to stop, and you can't just make it so that you build it on a financial rock, because all people do is go to the illegal product.

You have to continue to do it with an education campaign, continue to do it with good role models, continue to do it with a process of basically just appealing to their common sense of trying to look after their own body and their own health. I used to smoke—very naughty boy. I had my first cigarette when I was in sixth class, so it didn't take me long to get off them—about 30 or 40 years.

But it's a tough game. Through the whole process, I think we have done a good job. In essence, now there's a lot more of a health-conscious vibe going through schools.

It's helping the reduction of alcohol consumption as well. You find that there are a lot of people growing up now who just don't drink, and you can see that when talking to some of the some of the companies that produce wine. They say they're pulling out grapes, pulling out vines.

I ask: why? They say it is because a lot of people just don't drink anymore. So there is success.

Where could we get the money to run the health programs, because you always have to find your offset? Where would we get the money to run the programs to encourage people not to smoke? Well, you could get it from the excise that you would attain from reducing the price of cigarettes.

The mechanisms of starting smoking are not so much price; the mechanisms of continuing smoking and the product you buy are very much determined by price. People start smoking not because it's cheap but because they think it is a scene. It's a form of rebellion.

It's almost an iconography that they want to display. It's a statement about their independence. It's a range of things, but it's never really price.

But once you hooked, by gosh, it's price that is the big determinant of the product you are buying. In closing, I would say that this is just so self-evident. It's just right there in front of us.

I know that the government will decide to continue on this path of finding the poorest people in Australia, charging them more and then complaining about the growth of the mafia market. Let's try and stop it. This is self-evident.

I leave it to the House.