Karen Andrews (McPherson, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today I'd like to raise the concerns that have been raised with me by many people in my electorate in relation to illicit tobacco. I've been on the record a number of times raising concerns about illicit tobacco products and what they do to our local communities. I'll divide what I'm going to say into two parts.

There's clearly the role of the Australian Border Force in making sure that illicit tobacco products are not coming across the border, and there's the need to make sure the Australian Border Force is properly resourced to do that work. We don't want illegal products coming in, and there is significant evidence that illicit tobacco is often used to test the drug routes into this country. We know that the hardened criminals and gangs are very likely to use tobacco to check whether or not it's possible to bring significant truckloads or container loads of product into this country, and we need to get on top of that to make sure that we are getting drugs off the street.

At a local level we have legitimate sellers of tobacco, our retailers here, who are losing significant amounts of money because tobacco is effectively being sold under the counter. We need to crack down on this and make sure that we have appropriate taskforces in place to deal with this. I will stand by those people in my community who are losing tens of thousands of dollars in trade every single month.