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

Mr HILL (Bruce—Assistant Minister for Citizenship, Customs and Multicultural Affairs and Assistant Minister for International Education) (17:38): I thank the member for Canning for the tone in which he brought that. He could probably give some tips to the other leader of the opposition about the way to prosecute an argument with substance. The government is not going to agree to these amendments.

I appreciate that it's the opposition's policy to get into a bidding war with organised criminal syndicates, but that's not the government's approach. We've reached a farcical situation over the last couple of months. Last year they were talking about a 30 per cent cut to excise, then it was a 50 per cent cut, then One Nation pre-empted them and said they were going to do a 75 per cent cut, and the next week they announced 80 per cent.

By next sitting week they'll be back here paying people to smoke! The difficult reality is that, despite whatever fantasy modelling or advice—if you can call it that—that underpins what passes for their policy, even if you wiped out all tobacco excise the illegal products would still be cheaper. In addition, criminal gangs have significant elasticity in their profit margins to adjust their price downwards.

This is a global issue. There's a massive surplus of cheap production of tobacco globally that's been weaponised and industrialised by these organised criminal syndicates. They're like multinational businesses.

They're highly sophisticated, and they're attacking nations across the world regardless of their excise policies. That's just the reality of it. In addition, they're commodity agnostic.

It's not enough. There's no magic solution. I wish there was.

I genuinely wish there was, as other nations do. But they're commodity agnostic, and you've still got to go after them and dismantle them. The kind of money they're talking about just doesn't do that.

Look at the money the government's investing through the federal police in chasing organised criminal syndicates onshore and offshore. You've got to think about this stuff pre border, at border and post border. Pre border, the best container of illegal tobacco is one that never reaches Australia.

I'm proud of the work of the Australian Border Force. They've been dialling up their international partnerships. We're working with trans-shipment points across the world—the cooperation with the Chinese customs authority has been well publicised—and with the UAE, Singapore and other nations.

At border, the Australian Border Force have achieved record levels of seizures of tobacco and vapes over the last 12 months—over a kilotonne in just four months. That's a thousand tonnes through Operation Printwall, which is ongoing. Operation Printwall is still achieving those results.

But it's post border that the biggest gains can and need to be made. As I said in summing up on the bill and as I've said before, we need the states and territories to dial up the urgency and shut the shops. We don't have the constitutional power to do that, but the states and territories do, and $98 million is now flowing over just two years to support them in that work.

I'll address the other points that were made in the amendment there. I get the seductive argument. It's a charlatan argument; it's not real, and it doesn't stack up.

But I get the seductive nature of the argument around excise and price. The most pernicious and evil part of what the coalition are proposing is to let vapes rip—to legitimise and legalise vapes and put them in every corner store and to tax them. So their genius policy is to cut tax on cigarettes and legalise vapes and tax them.

That's the only way it stacks up with so much revenue, which they've now spent 2½ times, since they announced their policy, on other measures. It is peak irony. I heard the conspiracy theory of the member for Barker in his contribution—that the data wasn't right, somehow.

Well, the gold standard data that was released two months ago by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare shows that, despite everything these organised criminals are chucking at our country, adult smoking rates have continued to decline to the lowest on record—around 5.8 per cent—tracking towards the national goal of under five per cent. The government is not going to surrender those hard-won gains.

Today 66 Australians will die of a smoking-related illness. Tomorrow 66 more will die, and 66 every day after that. The most important thing in the long run, though, is to stop young people ever taking it up, because if someone doesn't take up smoking by the time they're 25 they almost certainly never will.

That's the pernicious evil in the vapes policy. They are not a way to get off cigarettes. If you want to do that for people, they can already go and get them on a prescription.

They are a pathway to taking up cigarettes, which explains why those opposite have not released and will not release any credible modelling. They know it will kill untold thousands of Australians and condemn them to disease and early death. This idea that you let vapes rip as some kind of cool flavoured thing and then tax them is deeply irresponsible.

I'll say it again: it's not the Labor Party or the government that takes donations from big tobacco and the vaping lobby. The same cannot be said for the National Party. The government's approach is to double down, not back down to organised crime.