Jess Teesdale (Bass, Australian Labor Party) | Hansard source

Today I rise in strong support of the Combatting Illicit Tobacco Bill 2026. This bill is about public health, community safety and the rule of law, but it's also something very practical. It's reversing the equation for criminals. Right now, organised crime sees illicit tobacco as high profit and low risk. This bill is about making it higher risk, lower profit and harder to operate at every stage of the supply chain. The scale of this market should shock every member of the House, and the official numbers are moving fast. The ITEC Commissioner's 2024-25 report put illicit tobacco at 50 to 60 per cent of the tobacco market, but the more recent ABS estimates suggest that the problem has grown significantly higher in that short a time. Organised crime groups are estimated to have made between $4.1 billion and $6.9 billion in profit from this trade, and it's not petty noncompliance. That is industrial-scale criminal activity.

In 2024-25, the Australian Border Force seized 2.66 billion illicit cigarettes. Operation PRINTWALL has already detected more than a kilotonne of illicit tobacco across the broader continuum, including more than 87 tonnes seized in one week alone. That tells us two things. First, enforcement is working. Second, the size of the market we are up against is enormous. In Bass, people can see it. Across Launceston, in the CBD and surrounding suburbs, illegal tobacco and vape shops appear, disappear, rebrand and reappear again. Products that everyone knows are illegal are being sold in plain sight. They're operating in shopping strips next to legitimate businesses and in the heart of our communities. Recent reporting in the Examiner made clear the scale of the problem in northern Tasmania, with targeted operations led by Tasmania's Department of Health seizing nearly $119,000 worth of illicit tobacco products across the north. It's not a few packets under the counter; it's a substantial illegal market operating within our very community, and locals are right to ask why this has been allowed to continue.

We need to be very clear about what illegal tobacco is and what it is not. It is not harmless, it is not low level and it is not victimless. It is organised crime in a shopfront, and the profits do not sit neatly inside the tobacco trade. They're reinvested into serious criminal activity, drug trafficking, money laundering, intimidation, violence and exploitation. When an illegal tobacco shops in a local community like mine, we should not see it as a quirky retail or issue a minor regulatory breach. We need to see it for what it is: a business model that relies on addiction, undermines public health, undercuts legitimate business and helps fund organised crime.

I especially want to focus on the health harm, particularly with our local Assistant Minister For Health here. It's very important. It cannot be and is not being treated as just a revenue problem from our government. Tobacco remains one of the leading causes of preventable death and disease in Australia. Smoking causes cancer, chronic lung disease, cardiovascular disease and stroke. For us, it means more ambulance callouts, more GP appointments, more emergency presentations, more hospital beds, more surgery, more chemo, more palliative care and more families sitting beside someone they love facing news that could and should have been prevented. The Australian government estimates smoking kills more than 24,000 Australians each year. That's one person every 22 minutes. Around 20 per cent of Australia's cancer disease burden is actually due to smoking. Those are the costs that we don't put on the packet. It's carried by patients; it's carried by families; it's carried by nurses, doctors and paramedics; and it's carried by the taxpayer through our health system.

In Tasmania, this is a crucial point. In 2022—older stats—12.4 per cent of Tasmanian adults were current daily smokers, compared to just 10.9 per cent nationally. We know that those numbers have increased in that time. It's a major cause of cardiovascular disease, including heart disease and stroke. For us, that's not abstract. That's an ambulance called out in Scottsdale, it's a hospital bed in Launceston, and it's a family in George Town dealing with the consequence of preventable illness. Every time illegal tobacco becomes cheaper, easier to access or more visible, it makes quitting harder, it makes relapse easier, and it makes it easier for young people to start. It threatens decades of public-health work that has saved lives.

Australia has been a world leader in tobacco control. Plain packaging, advertising restrictions, health warnings, public education and excise have all helped to reduce smoking rates over time, and those policies worked because they made tobacco less attractive, less accessible and less normalised. This illegal market does the opposite. It makes it cheaper, easier to find, dodges health warnings, bypasses regulation and removes age checks. It puts unregulated nicotine products in the hands of people who never should have been sold them in the first place.

This is especially dangerous for young people. A cheap cigarette or a black-market vape are products sold without proper checks. These can become the entry point to years of addiction, and I've seen that up close in my work as a teacher. I've seen a 14-year-old selling illegal cigarettes sourced from a local shop, not because she understood the criminal market behind it but because she was trying to make friends and earn some money on the side. I've seen students leave school grounds at lunchtime to vape in a car together, and, by the end of lunch, one of them was vomiting, dizzy and suffering from severe headaches. That is what this market does. It reaches young people before they can understand the risk. It turns addiction into something cheap, accessible and social, and it leaves families, schools and health services dealing with the consequences. When we talk about illegal tobacco, we're not just talking about today's crime, we're talking about tomorrow's cancer diagnosis, tomorrow's stroke, tomorrow's lung disease, tomorrow's pressure on Medicare and hospitals, and tomorrow's grief for families.

There is also a basic fairness issue here. In Bass, I speak to small-business owners who do the right thing. They follow the law, they pay their taxes, and they comply with regulations. They absorb the cost of doing business properly and legally. Sometimes, next door or down the road, they see another shop selling illegal tobacco with fewer costs, fewer checks and, for too long, too few consequences. This is not a level playing field. It punishes honest businesses and rewards people prepared to ignore the law. It's damaged confidence in enforcement, in regulation and in the basic promise that, if you do the right thing, our system will back you.

This bill is about restoring that confidence. This bill strengthens the legal framework in key areas and increases penalties for offences involving the importation, possession, buying, selling, supply, production and manufacture of illicit tobacco. For some offences, those penalties will reach up to 15 years imprisonment. If criminals are treating this trade as low risk and high profit, then the law must change that calculation. It expands proceeds-of-crime tools because, if we're serious about organised crime, we have to follow the money, we have to strip the profits and we have to make sure that criminals cannot build wealth from products that harm our communities.

The bill also gives enforcement and intelligence agencies stronger tools to investigate and disrupt serious tobacco offences, because it's not a simple retail offending. You've got international supply chains, distribution networks, financial flows, criminal enablers and connections across jurisdictions. It means we cannot fix this problem at the border alone. We have to act pre border, stopping shipments and disrupting criminal supply before they reach Australia, we have to act at the border, where Border Force is already seizing record volumes, and we have to act post border in the warehouses, distribution networks and illegal shopfronts where the products are sold. The whole-of-supply-chain response is the only credible response. Shutting illegal shops is one of the fastest ways to choke the profits because, if criminals cannot sell the product, they cannot make the money and, if they cannot make the money, the business model starts to break.

We also need to answer the argument that tobacco excise caused this problem and simply cutting it would solve it. The tobacco excise is not just a revenue measure; it's a public health measure. It exists because smoking imposes enormous costs on people who smoke, on their families and on the public health system. Yes, criminals are exploiting the price gap, but there's no serious argument that we should surrender Australia's health policy to organised crime. Cutting prices would not make transnational crime syndicates pack up and go home. It would make smoking cheaper, make tobacco companies richer and risk condemning more Australians to smoking related disease and early death. The answer is not surrender. The answer is enforcement, disruption, prevention and support to quit. And that is what this government is doing. We're investing in the Australian Border Force, we're strengthening laws, we're improving national coordination and we're targeting money laundering. We're supporting people to quit smoking and vaping. Through this bill, we're making the illicit tobacco trade more dangerous and less profitable for the criminals behind it. No country will eliminate illicit tobacco entirely, but we can shrink it, we can disrupt it and we can make it harder to import, harder to distribute, harder to sell and much harder to profit from. We can send a very clear message: our communities are not open for this kind of business.

For Bass, this is not theoretical. It's on our streets. It's in our suburbs. It's affecting our small businesses. It's threatening public health. It's helping organised crime profit from addiction. This bill stands up to that. It protects public health, it backs legitimate businesses and it strengthens enforcement. It upholds the rule of law, and it says that Australia will not surrender decades of tobacco control success to criminal syndicates. I commend this bill to the House.

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