Mary Aldred (Monash, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the unfolding national crisis that has hit my community in Monash most significantly in recent weeks. I speak about the illegal tobacco trade, which is terrorising Australian small business owners, seeing retail staff assaulted, and seeing the ATO shortchanged. Just a couple of weeks ago, the Longwarry Friendly Grocer store in my electorate, a great local small business—they do the right thing and contribute to the community—received a ransom note. The owners did all the right things and went to the police, didn't pay the ransom, and, a couple of days later, a ram raid destroyed half their shop. I rang Janet, the business owner, a couple of days after. She said, 'We got the ransom note, and my husband and I looked at the CCTV at our shop day after day. We didn't sleep.' Eventually, at 3:30 in the morning, a car was rammed through their business. We need to have a national and honest national conversation about where things are at with the illegal tobacco trade.

We saw another five per cent increase in the excise tax at the start of the new financial year. That has seen a 282 per cent increase since the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government in 2013. What those sharp increases are doing is driving people to the illegal market. We saw in the 2022-23 financial year over $6 billion in illicit tobacco attempted to be smuggled into the Australian market. If they are not being imported then illegal cigarettes are being stolen from legal retailers and sold on the black market. At the moment, the ATO gets to pocket about $28 out of a legal pack of cigarettes, which retail for about $50. On the illegal market, they sell for anywhere between $10 and $15. I think we seriously need to look at the excise tax. I'm proposing that we look at taking it back to 2018-19 levels, which would effectively see a legal packet of cigarettes go back to $25.

If the excise tax increases were working on deterring people from smoking, I would be the first to support them. But the fact is that they are not. ABS stats show that there has been a 22 per cent drop in the smoking rate, but the Australian Crime Intelligence Commission's wastewater report shows that more people are taking up smoking or that there was more tobacco in the wastewater last year than there was eight years ago. I have serious concerns that we have already seen one person killed. I have serious concerns about more people being harmed or hurt further in the illegal tobacco wars. I am calling on the government to review its position.