My constituents often raise with me their concern about the sale of illegal tobacco in our community, the stores that are selling it and that seem to be getting away with it and the impact that it's having on people, particularly children and young people who might be encouraged to take up smoking in spite of the decades of action that we've taken to prevent this. This bill, the Customs and Other Legislation Amendment (Illicit Tobacco Enforcement Modernisation and Other Measures) Bill 2026, is all about taking the fight up to the suppliers and sellers of illegal tobacco and nicotine products in our communities. For too long, these insidious purveyors of illegal tobacco have been able to get away with their crimes because of gaps in policing and loopholes in law. Organised criminal syndicates have looked at the illicit tobacco trade and seen an opportunity for big profits. Comparatively low risk and penalty regimes have not kept pace with the scale and sophistication of their operations.

While our law enforcement agencies have worked tirelessly with the tools available to them, those tools have simply not been sharp enough for the job at hand, and this bill will sharpen them. The only way to address the scourge of illegal tobacco is by giving the Australian Federal Police, Customs and police in the states and territories all the tools they require to take on sellers and by implementing reforms that prevent importing and profiting from illegal tobacco. We cannot tinker around the edges of this problem. We cannot rely on piecemeal, jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction responses to what is fundamentally a national and, in many respects, an international criminal enterprise. This bill recognises that reality and responds to it with a coordinated, modernised legislative framework.

This bill will amend the Customs Act 1901 and the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 to implement reforms relating to illicit tobacco enforcement and proceeds-of-crime investigations. The bill will modernise illicit tobacco offences, restore customs control over duty refundable tobacco, amend seizure and forfeiture arrangements, introduce tobacco-related licensing conditions, amend production order and pecuniary penalty order frameworks and enhance the efficiency of the unexplained wealth framework. Taken together, these measures represent the most significant modernisation of our illicit tobacco enforcement architecture in a generation.

Existing tobacco offences often require proof that tobacco was imported with the intention of defrauding the revenue. In practice, this has proven to be an exceptionally high bar for prosecutors and investigators to clear. Criminal networks are sophisticated. They structure their operations specifically to obscure intent, to distance the organisers from the physical goods and to ensure that, by the time law enforcement catches up with a shipment, establishing the precise state of mind of those responsible is close to impossible. This is precisely the kind of loophole that has allowed the illicit tobacco trade to flourish largely unchecked.

This bill will close that loophole by introducing new offences relating to the importation, possession and transportation of illicit tobacco products based on reasonable suspicion that goods have been unlawfully imported or that importation would result in a defrauding of the revenue. This is a commonsense, proportionate reform. It brings our tobacco offences into line with the standard of proof used effectively in other areas of customs and border enforcement, and it removes an artificial barrier that has for too long protected the people at the centre of this criminal trade rather than the community. This is about giving police and customs officials the tools they need to take the fight up to illegal tobacco importers and sellers. It is about ensuring that when our officers identify a shipping container, a warehouse or a retail outlet dealing in illicit tobacco the law empowers them to act decisively—to seize the product, to pursue forfeiture, to shut down the business and to follow the money back to the organisers who are profiting from this trade—rather than being tied up in proving an intention that the criminals themselves have gone to great lengths to conceal.

The reforms to the unexplained wealth framework are just as important. We know that the illicit tobacco trade is not simply about cigarettes changing hands on a street corner. It is a multibillion-dollar criminal enterprise that funds broader organised crime and in some documented cases has been linked to violence, extortion and arson attacks on competitors as well as legitimate retail businesses that refuse to stock illegal product. By enhancing the efficiency of the unexplained wealth framework, this bill helps to ensure that the proceeds of this criminality can be identified, traced and clawed back, hitting these networks where it hurts most: their bottom line. Restoring customs control over duty-refundable tobacco addresses another significant gap that has been exploited by those seeking to move product outside legitimate channels. The introduction of tobacco related licensing conditions gives regulators a further layer of oversight, making it harder for illegitimate operators to gain a foothold in the market in the first place.

It would be remiss of me not to address the response from those opposite. The populist parties of the Right—the Liberal, National and One Nation parties—are engaged in a race to the bottom with their frankly bizarre calls for tax on tobacco to be cut. This is an absurd proposition. Making tobacco cheaper would not prevent sellers of illegal tobacco from undercutting the price of legal products. It is a policy response built on a fundamental misunderstanding or a wilful misrepresentation of how the illicit market actually operates. Illegal tobacco will always be cheaper than legal tobacco, even if taxes were to be completely removed. That is because the entire business model of the criminal syndicates behind this trade depends on evading duty, evading regulation and evading the costs that legitimate businesses are required to bear. You cannot outcompete an operator who pays no tax, follows no packaging or quality standards and answers to no regulator simply by lowering the tax paid by legitimate retailers. That gap will always be there. The criminals will always find a way to keep their product cheaper, because undercutting the legal market is the entire point of what they do.

Only tougher laws and better enforcement can possibly stop the criminal activity around tobacco supply and sale. That is the plain, unavoidable truth that those opposite refuse to confront. It is far easier politically to promise people cheaper cigarettes than it is to do the hard work of modernising customs offences, closing legal loopholes and giving police the investigative powers they need. The Albanese Labor government is not interested in easy answers that leave Australians worse off. Of course, making cigarettes cheaper would achieve the attraction, addiction and killing of countless thousands of new smokers. That is basic economics and basic public health—evidence recognised in this country and around the world for decades. When the price of a harmful addictive product falls, consumption rises, and it rises most sharply among young people and low-income Australians, who are the most price-sensitive and most vulnerable to developing a lifelong addiction, Cutting tobacco tax is not a victimless piece of economic tinkering. It is a policy that would put more cigarettes into the hands of more teenagers, in more schoolyards and in more communities right across this country, including here in my community of Canberra.

Making cigarettes increasingly expensive has been an enormous success in driving down the numbers of smokers in Australia. Successive governments, both Labor and coalition, have understood that price is one of the most powerful levers we have to reduce smoking rates, particularly among young people who have not yet formed the habit. This has had obvious benefits for the general health of Australians and helped to reduce the costs of tobacco related illnesses on our healthcare system—costs that are ultimately borne by every taxpayer, every hospital and every family who has watched a loved one suffer through a smoking related illness that could have been prevented.

It is simply incomprehensible for anyone to suggest that it's a good idea to undo decades of progress on smoking rates by cutting the price of cigarettes. We would be trading away a public health success story, built up carefully over generations, in exchange for a short-term political talking point—and for what? To hand a competitive advantage to criminal syndicates, who will simply drop their own prices further to stay ahead. It defies logic, and it defies the responsibility we all hold as members of this place to legislate in the long-term interests of the Australian people, not the short-term interests of a headline.

Whether we like it or not, cutting tobacco tax would mean fewer quitters, smokers smoking more cigarettes every day and more kids taking up smoking, all of which equals more tobacco related disease and death in Australia, and the opposition haven't even bothered to cost the impact on government health budgets of that happening. In fact, the coalition policy would give the multinational tobacco industry a multibillion-dollar tax cut that they are not even forced to pass on to customers. Their policy would do nothing to eliminate the illicit trade or the violence over market share going on between criminal sellers.

The coalition's financial estimates on their tobacco policy simply don't make sense. They claim that $8 billion over four years, or around $2 billion per year, will be raised by cutting by 80 per cent a tax rate that currently raises around $4 billion per year from imported tobacco. It's sloppy calculations like this that go to the heart of why the coalition cannot be regarded as a party with economic credibility. They imply that what will magic up this outcome will be that smokers currently buying cheap, illegal cigarettes will all willingly shift to buying taxed cigarettes. But that would require nearly eight times as much legal tobacco consumption as is happening today, and why would any smoker currently buying cheap, illicit smokes do that, when the illegal sellers will still have lower prices on day one and plenty of room to go lower if they need to? They also think that a new tax on vaping would somehow contribute financially, but we've already got a regime for people to get regulated vapes from chemists to help quit smoking, and you can't sensibly tax them.

The coalition even had the nerve to claim that their imagined increased revenue would pay for increased enforcement funding to offer to the states but that, at the same time—like the magic pudding—it would also pay for petrol tax cuts right here in 2026. What a total fraud on the Australian public. All this is being justified by a mythical 'PBO costing' document, which they are too afraid to let anyone see, including the media. In fact, the coalition leadership know that their cost estimates are a fantasy, which is why they won't even share it with the shadow health minister.

Making cigarettes cheaper isn't what parents in my electorate of Canberra want to see. They tell me that they want their children to grow up free of the scourge of nicotine addiction. They tell me that they want their kids to grow up in a society that is free of the temptation to buy a pack of cheap cigarettes to try with their friends or to be lured towards vaping and nicotine products marketed and sold entirely outside any regulatory oversight. They tell me that they want to see government take strong action to destroy the illegal tobacco trade, not hand it a competitive gift by making the legal product cheaper and, in doing so, growing the overall pool of smokers that the illegal trade can also draw from.

I have heard from local small retailers in Canberra who are doing the right thing—selling tobacco legally, paying their duty, following the rules—and who are watching illicit tobacco outlets undercut them, sometimes operating brazenly and openly without fear of serious consequence. This is not a level playing field, and it is not fair to the businesses in our community who play by the rules. This bill is about restoring that fairness, as well as protecting public health.

This government is committed to a comprehensive approach: strong deterrence through the tax and excise system to reduce the number of Australians taking up smoking in the first place, combined with strong, modern law enforcement powers to dismantle the criminal trade that has sought to profit from addiction. Those two elements work together. They are not in tension as those opposite would have us believe. Weakening one does not strengthen the other. It simply hands more ground to organised crime while doing nothing to protect the young Australians we should all be trying to keep away from a lifetime of nicotine addiction.

I commend the work that has gone into developing this bill, including the consultation with state and territory police forces, customs officials and health experts, who have long called for these reforms. This is legislation that responds directly to what those on the front line of this fight have been telling government: 'Give us the powers, close the loopholes and let us do our jobs.' The people of Canberra, and Australians right around the country, deserve a government that takes the fight up to organised crime, that protects public health and that does not cave to simplistic slogans dressed up as policy. This bill delivers on all three fronts, and I commend the bill to the House.

I'm pleased, as always, to see a number of young people in the galleries. I say to those young people what I say to all young people when I visit schools and when they come to parliament. My electorate has more schoolchildren, as I understand it, who come to parliament than any other electorate—first of all, because it's such a big electorate and, second of all, because it borders the Australian Capital Territory. I say to those children two things: don't smoke, because it's expensive, it's dumb and it's unhealthy, and, when you go online, don't write something that you wouldn't like said about yourself. They are two pretty easy principles to follow and they lead to good values and good health outcomes. So please follow this old fellow's advice. You'll go okay if you follow just those two basic principles.

My late father, Lance, died, ultimately, from having too many cigarettes. Dad was a pack-a-day smoker for many, many years and he died before his time, it's sad to say, back in 2008. Never a day goes by that I don't think of my dad and miss his presence. I know he would have been able to provide some really valuable advice because he was a good, practical, commonsense, salt-of-the-earth type of person. I've never put a cigarette to my lips—I haven't. I don't begrudge those who do. I know how addictive nicotine is and I don't knock anybody for smoking should that be what they want to do. We live in a free world. We're adults—apart from those schoolchildren, who need to heed my advice.

I am really concerned about what we have seen, in Victoria particularly, in recent times with small businesses which are able to sell cigarettes. There are little tobacco shops and, as long as the sale of cigarettes is legal, then they are perfectly entitled to do just that. I note that there are two Victorian members, a minister and a shadow minister, here at the table. I have to say that the trade of illegal cigarettes has become so totally out of control in Victoria that insurance companies are now no longer providing cover for shops next door to those particular stores selling legal tobacco, because of the Molotov cocktails being thrown at these legal entities and because of the pressure being brought to bear and the number of stores being firebombed. Sadly, the illegal nicotine trade has become the source of revenue for bikie gangs. It has—there is absolutely no question. Police are almost powerless to stop these firebombings, to stop these bikie gangs and to stop the violence and thuggery that have occurred as a result. It's simply not right.

We've got an election coming up on 28 November in Victoria, and the voters of Victoria are going to have a very clear choice to make. I think the choice has to be for change and has to be to a Wilson-O'Brien Liberal-Nationals government. The Customs and Other Legislation Amendment (Illicit Tobacco Enforcement Modernisation and Other Measures) Bill 2026 will not be opposed by the coalition. It will not be. I say that at the same time as I want to very much put on the record a commendation for two particular coalition members: the member for Cowper and the member for Monash, who have been strident in the work that they have done to bring about better legislation and better policy in this particular area.

All politics is local; we know that. In April 2026, my local newspaper in Wagga Wagga, the Daily Advertiser, reported the number of local shops, both at Wagga Wagga and at Gundagai, having been shut down due to the sale of illicit tobacco. I know, from speaking to highway patrol officers—who contacted my office because the Hume Freeway intersects my very large New South Wales electorate—the number of times that they have pulled up vans, the drivers of which were speeding. That's why they were pulled up, but then when they went through these particular vans, these particular vehicles, they were laden with illegal cigarettes, illegal vapes and cash that was in eye-watering amounts.

Yet, unbelievably, along the Hume, one of these drivers, who was pulled up for breaking the law, for breaking the traffic rules, and was found to have a stash of cash that was unimaginable as well as illegal product, went to court, and the matter was thrown out. Now wait for this. It was thrown out of court because—let's just say that the driver wasn't of Anglo-Saxon heritage, and the magistrate in said court said that the officers had failed in their duty because they were racially profiling. I don't know about anybody else, but when you've got a lidar or radar and you're aiming it at a car and the car is going well and truly over the 110 kilometre an hour speed limit, you don't know what nationality that person behind the wheel is. You're just pulling the person over because they're speeding, breaking the law and placing people's lives in danger. That just seemed oblivious to this magistrate. I think a lot of things are oblivious to magistrates, sometimes, these days, when I look at certain judgements in domestic violence and certain judgements about environmental law and, certainly, when it came to this. It's no wonder that police are frustrated. It's no wonder that the Victoria Police—and they do a fine job, just like all of our other state police—just shake their heads in wonder at the legislators in this country and what we're doing to protect them but, moreover, to protect the people of Australia.

This particular legislation contains some sensible measures. We have to be able to provide Commonwealth law enforcement and border agencies stronger tools to combat the illicit tobacco trade. We must do that, but I'll tell you what we also need to do. We need to encourage, from this place and wherever else we are, whether that's singing in the church choir or at the local fair or at the local sporting ground—we have to make sure that we send a message. This will become very prevalent on 28 November and on 13 March next year, when we've got the Victorian and New South Wales elections, respectively. We must make sure, at the ballot box, that we send a very strong message to Spring Street in Melbourne and Macquarie Street in Sydney that enough is enough, that our police need support and that, when they bring charges to the courts, there are provisions within the act, and pretty stringent provisions, so that we can't have magistrates going off on a folly. We can't have them going off on a frolic and doing judgements like they did in the case of that Hume pull-up where the driver was speeding and carrying lots and lots of illegal tobacco and money—nefarious people at best. There must be stringent penalties for those law-breakers. The state voters of New South Wales and Victoria have a big job to do.

Australia's illegal tobacco crisis has become so serious that I read a report recently where four in five cigarettes sold and smoked in Australia are illegal. That's 80 per cent. Can you imagine the excise duty that this government is not collecting when only one in five cigarettes is legal? Let me tell you, that excise duty payable to Treasury has just gone south, absolutely nosedived, since Labor came to office in May 2022. I appreciate that the government has done all it can to talk about the health implications of smoking. I get that. I understand that. Having had a father die from smoking related cancers, I appreciate that. I do. But this government has a duty to do so much more. Whilst this legislation goes some of the way, it doesn't go all the way.

I have to say that the policy areas that we've been enunciating recently as far as reducing excise and making other provisions in relation to this particular policy area should be listened to closely by the Labor government. They should not, as they always do, get the Sussex Street talking points and announce it. The government has, quite frankly, shown ineptitude and incompetence on the issue of illegal tobacco.

This bill makes certain changes to the Commonwealth enforcement framework applying to tobacco imported into and subsequently possessed and/or moved within Australia. I also appreciate that those border officials cannot possibly check every 20-foot container that comes into Australia. But, at the same time, our borders need bolstering. I don't think that we've paid enough attention and provided enough funding to our border security situation to have the staffing and the resources that we need at those ports when those 20-foot containers come in and, somehow, some way, they just seem to be laden with illegal tobacco.

When we talk about the vapes, the government has just been sitting on its hands when it comes to making sure that we stop these illegal vapes coming into Australia. The difficulty is we just don't know what's in those vapes. I wouldn't want to put one of those things to my mouth for love nor money. They have all these wonderful-sounding flavours like strawberry, banana and passionfruit, and names that make you think you're going to find romance and find a whole new utopia if you actually put one to your mouth. Well, it's not the case. God only knows what they've got in them. I'll tell you what, it's not going to be good for your lungs or any other vital organ in your body if you put one to your mouth, but people do. Sad to say, it's out of control. It actually is out of control.

In particular, the bill establishes a clearer offence framework covering the unlawful importation of tobacco and its subsequent possession, movement, sale and supply across this nation. Unfortunately, because of Labor's horrendous mistakes and failed predictions, the coalition, whilst supporting the bill, have little confidence that the changes will get the effects that Labor is hoping for.

The bill also seeks to address longstanding evidentiary difficulties by allowing the illicit character of tobacco to be established through objective and observable circumstances, giving rise to a reasonable suspicion. Relevant matters can include extremely low prices, noncompliant packaging and an inability to demonstrate a legitimate source or supply chain. That's all well and good. Try telling that to the police officer who is doing a call-out for domestic violence. They've got to monitor the situation because the state health department has told them to go and investigate illegal supply of tobacco and packaging et cetera over the counter. Our police are under so much pressure. And I appreciate that that is a state matter.

Whilst the coalition supports this legislation and whilst there are elements of it that are very good, Labor could have done so much more—and it could have done so much more so much sooner. But, in typical Labor style, it has left it to the last minute. It always leaves it to the last minute. It always leaves it until you open up Pandora's box and the evil genies are out of the box and spreading their harm, and that's the case with this. All I can say, unfortunately, is: typical Labor.

Illicit tobacco is not a victimless crime. It damages public health, it exposes Australians to an unregulated and dangerous market, and it's become an enormously profitable business for serious and organised crime. The Customs and Other Legislation Amendment (Illicit Tobacco Enforcement Modernisation and Other Measures) Bill 2026 is about changing that equation. For too long, illicit tobacco has offered organised crime an attractive proposition: extraordinarily cheap global supply, enormous potential margins and enforcement laws that have not always kept pace with the way modern criminal organisations operate. The market has changed. Our laws need to change with it. That is what this bill does. This is the most significant modernisation of Australia's illicit tobacco customs enforcement framework since 2018. It builds on legislation recently passed by this parliament which increased penalties, expanded law enforcement tools and strengthened our proceeds-of-crime laws.

These reforms start with an important understanding of who we're dealing with. These are not simply people moving a few packets of cigarettes to avoid duty. We're dealing with sophisticated criminal organisations. They operate across borders; they use complex supply chains; they exploit freight, warehousing and distribution networks; and they are not particularly loyal to tobacco. They operate rather like multinational businesses—just without the annual report or the inconvenience of obeying the law. If there is money in tobacco, they will sell tobacco. If there's money to make somewhere else, they will go somewhere else. The product changes. The motive does not. They want to make money. So if we want to disrupt the market for illicit tobacco we have to change the calculation being made by the people supplying it: make illicit tobacco harder to import, harder to conceal, harder to move, easier to seize, easier to prosecute and much harder to keep the profits. That is the structure of this bill.

The first problem we are addressing is a very practical one. Our existing tobacco offences can require prosecutors to establish not simply that tobacco is illicit but also what somebody knew about its importation and the duty that should have been paid. Modern criminal organisations understand this. They separate the different parts of their operations. The person storing the tobacco may be nowhere near the person who imported it. The person transporting it may have nothing to do with the paperwork at the border. And the people directing the operation can deliberately insulate themselves from both. The further somebody is removed from the original importation, the harder it can become to prove precisely what they knew. The conduct may be obvious. The evidence required by the existing law may be buried inside a supply chain deliberately designed to conceal it.

This bill responds to the world as it actually exists. The new framework allows law enforcement to rely upon observable indicators of illegal activity: Is the tobacco in non-compliant branded packaging? Is it a prohibited product? Has it been concealed? Are the import records missing? Is it being sold for less than the excise and the GST legally payable on it? Those are facts that investigators can easily establish. Where the statutory test is met, those facts can establish the reasonable suspicion necessary to establish the new offence. That is much more practical as a law enforcement tool. Instead of requiring investigators to reconstruct every stage of a deliberately hidden criminal operation, the law allows them to act on the evidence in front of them. Importantly, the law follows the tobacco—importation, possession, transport, distribution and sale. The objective is not simply to intercept a container at the border; it is to make the entire illicit supply chain more vulnerable to enforcement.

The bill also closes an important gap involving duty-refundable tobacco. This is tobacco supplied through duty-free arrangements for export or sale to eligible travellers. Under the existing framework there are circumstances in which that is not subject to customs control. That creates an opportunity for diversion. The bill restores customs control until the tobacco is actually exported or sold to an eligible traveller. It sounds technical, but the principle isn't. If there is a gap in the supply chain through which illicit tobacco can flow, close it. Criminal organisations are very good at finding those gaps. Government needs to become equally good at closing them.

The bill also modernises seizure and disposal. The volume of illicit tobacco being intercepted has increased significantly, but some of the administrative machinery surrounding seizures belongs to a different era. Frontline officers can spend hours documenting and processing individual seizures. That is time they are not spending examining another consignment, investigating another importer or intercepting other prohibited goods. Paperwork is necessary, but paperwork is supposed to support enforcement. It should not become the enforcement. These reforms streamline seizure and disposal, strengthen the response to tobacco imported contrary to permit conditions and reduce opportunities to manipulate notification processes simply to delay enforcement and destruction. That gives operational time back to the people whose job it is to protect Australia's border.

The bill also recognises a basic feature of organised crime: tobacco does not magically move from an overseas factory onto an Australian shelf; it needs freight, storage, warehouses, depots, transport, some documentation and distribution. Sophisticated criminal organisations therefore look for opportunities to exploit the infrastructure through which ordinary commerce moves. The bill strengthens obligations applying to customs brokers, depots and warehouses. It requires licence holders to take reasonable steps to prevent their operations facilitating prohibited tobacco imports and strengthens oversight across critical parts of the customs supply chain. If you occupy a trusted position in Australia's customs system, that trust comes with obligations. If organised crime depends upon access to infrastructure, government should make that access harder.

But perhaps the most important principle in this legislation is also the simplest: organised crime is organised around profit. Prosecutions matter. Seizures matter. Penalties matter. But, if we seize one shipment while the criminal organisation keeps the profits from 10 others, we may have disrupted the business without fundamentally changing the business model. That is why proceeds of crime matter. The bill strengthens pecuniary penalty orders. It improves the way criminal benefits are calculated. It allows restrained property to be used more effectively to satisfy those orders. It strengthens production orders so investigators can obtain financial information as investigations develop, and it improves the unexplained-wealth framework so that we can better identify and recover wealth generated through criminal activity.

There is a simple principle underneath a lot of complicated law: crime shouldn't pay. A penalty is a penalty; it is not a business expense. You don't make $10 million from crime, subtract the penalty and call the remainder your profit. That is creative accounting in the most generous sense. The objective is to make the consequences real. Take the tobacco, take the proceeds, take the property bought with those proceeds, increase the chance of detection and increase the consequences for being caught, and suddenly a market that once looked high profit and low risk begins to look rather different. That is how we attack the economics of organised crime.

Enforcement cannot be separated from public health. Australia has spent decades reducing smoking. Those gains were hard won. The most recent national data shows smoking reducing. I know there's contest, but the pattern is very clear. We've been reducing our smoking rates for a very long time. Tobacco nevertheless remains one of Australia's greatest causes of preventable disease and death. So our objective is not simply to change where Australians buy cigarettes; our objective must be to have fewer Australians smoking them. We want people who smoke to quit. We want fewer young Australians becoming addicted to nicotine. We want to dismantle the criminal economy that has attached itself to these products. That requires enforcement, but it also requires prevention, health promotion, education, cessation support, better intelligence, better border detection, better financial investigation and laws that continue to evolve as organised crime evolves.

There is no simple lever marked 'solve illicit tobacco'. Every government would be happy to pull that lever if it were obvious and there in front of everyone. It is a complicated market. It requires sustained pressure across the system, and that is what this legislation provides.

There is another approach being advanced by the coalition and One Nation. I want to deal with it fairly, because I accept that they are, perhaps in good faith, seeking to address what is a serious problem. And the starting proposition has force. There is an enormous difference in price between the taxed and lawful tobacco and that which is being sold illicitly. But their proposed response is a dramatic reduction in tobacco excise, with the coalition proposing an 80 per cent reduction, on the basis that cheaper legal cigarettes will draw consumers away from illegal tobacco and undermine the criminal business model. There is some intuitive logic to that proposition. My concern isn't with their intention; it is with the distance between their confidence of the prescription and the strength of evidence supporting it. An 80 per cent reduction in tobacco excise is an enormous intervention, and its success depends on a sequence of events and assumptions about what happens next.

I looked at the PBO modelling underpinning it. It assumes that the illegal market doesn't respond in any way to that change in market forces. It assumes that the price of illicit cigarettes remains exactly the same as it is, notwithstanding the price reduction. That would be quite a deviation from all conventional economics. We know that there is room in the profit margins from illicit tobacco to keep up with price. So the risk is that what we would really be doing is, effectively, creating a price war where the price of smoking goes down. The coalition's own analysis and the PBO reports that underpin it make clear that there is a connection between price and take-up. So, even if you don't believe it is a likelihood, you have to accept that there is a material possibility that you'll be making smoking cheaper and that you will have more people smoking as a result of that approach. When making those suggestions I think it's important to at least have the humility to appreciate that there is a real, material risk of making the problem much worse and that a bidding war with illicit tobacco, as it is currently structured, is a war that the legal market is very unlikely to win. We could be exacerbating the problem manyfold.

So then the question is whether enforcement alone is enough. And now we have data from Queensland: a 55 per cent increase in the take-up of legal cigarettes and significantly more calls to Quitline because the Queensland government has taken enforcement on as a serious idea. They are shutting down shops. They're using orders to conclude leases. They're creating obligations. And they're backing it up with resources. The Albanese government is backing them up as well, recently announcing an additional $2.7 million of support for their important enforcement work. We have to appreciate, as the member for Riverina said, that the resourcing of enforcement is a key aspect. What we see from that demonstration in Queensland is that the Albanese government is ready to stand shoulder to shoulder with state governments of any political persuasion to take this serious issue on. The Queensland government is to be commended—as is the South Australian government, which has followed through with very similar laws. We've seen across the country, including in my home state of Victoria, shops being shut down and this being treated with the seriousness it deserves.

The question is: have we done everything we can to exhaust the capacity of enforcement to respond to this issue? The truth is that, up to this point, we have not. The laws have not been fit for purpose. We are addressing that now in this bill, and it is being addressed by state governments across the country. It is important that we all take the initiative and that we put the resources into it to ensure that we are facing this crisis head-on. My fear is that a simple bidding war with organised crime is not going to have a happy ending. We're going to see more smokers. We're going to see more health issues. We're going to see the lawlessness continue as it's going right now.

We need to ensure that we are rigorously reviewing and analysing all of the assumptions underpinning policy proposals. And, with the greatest respect to my colleagues on the other side of the House, I would posit that the analysis is incomplete. It relies on PBO analysis that does not seek to project future behaviour and does not account for the fact that the illegal market may shift its pricing as well. Those are fundamental issues with any economic analysis of the likely outcome of that excise change. It is an incredibly risky and dangerous proposition, one that Queensland has proven is not inherently necessary to deal with this organised crime issue. We need to make sure that the laws are right, that the enforcement is backed up and that we are doing everything we can to change that risk-reward equation for organised crime. And that doesn't mean propping up other tobacco products. It doesn't mean promoting vaping in shops around the country. It means dealing with this as both a criminal and a health issue simultaneously, because, ultimately, we want fewer smokers and we want healthier Australians.

The more grounded course is demonstrated by this legislation. We can strengthen enforcement. We can close the legislative gaps that criminals have been exploiting up to this point. We can increase the probability that illicit tobacco is intercepted. We can make distribution harder. We can improve intelligence, attack criminal finances, confiscate proceeds, strengthen international cooperation, invest in prevention, help Australians quit, prevent young Australians becoming addicted in the first place and measure what works. Those measures attack both sides of the illicit market. They make the criminal business harder to operate, they make it harder for individuals who are recruited in it to get away with what they're doing and they ensure that organised crime will be kept up with. As they adapt, so will we, and we must be as ready as the organised criminals are to adapt at all times. We are never going to settle on laws that are perfect, and we do have to be ready to come back in to this House and do whatever is necessary to take this very serious issue on. So I proudly commend this bill to the House.

I rise also to speak on the Customs and Other Legislation Amendment (Illicit Tobacco Enforcement Modernisation and Other Measures) Bill 2026. I appreciate the comment of the previous, government speaker that what we want is fewer smokers and less smoking. He acknowledged that that is what people on both sides of this House want and the difference of opinion is in how we go about it. I appreciate him for acknowledging that; not all of his colleagues have. There have been some spurious accusations that somehow our policy seeks to have more smokers. That is not the intention. It's just how we go about it in terms of a public policy response.

There is something that I see regularly as a Victorian—as someone from a Victorian regional city. In the cities and towns of my electorate of Nicholls, there are outlets that freely trade in illicit cigarettes and vapes. I could take you to a convenience store in the CBD of Shepparton. It has lollies on the shelves and giftware on display, but behind the counter there are loose tobacco, cartons of manufactured cigarettes and vapes. It is open seven days a week, there is a steady stream of customers and there is no great effort to conceal what is happening because the illicit market has become normalised, brazen and deeply embedded.

A carton of Manchester Cigarettes imported from the UAE—10 packets of 20 cigarettes—can be bought for $120 cash or $140 by card. That's $12 a packet if you're using cash. A carton of the equivalent legal product at a major retailer costs $489.90, just under $50 a packet. Earlier this year, there was even a shortage of illicit tobacco. That wasn't caused by effective enforcement in Australia. It followed disruption to the market—to the international shipping—associated with the conflict involving Iran. The illicit market adapted, and cigarettes produced for the Australian market, complete with health warnings and apparently sold as seconds, appeared for just $9 a packet.

I wanted to bring up that example from my electorate—and it's happening across Australia but very prevalent in Victoria—because it tells us three things. The first thing it tells us is that illicit tobacco is not confined to back alleys or obscure criminal exchanges. It is being sold through ordinary-looking retail premises. The second thing that it tells us is that the price gap between legal and illegal products is so extreme that it has created an enormous commercial opportunity for organised crime. The third thing is that the supply chains behind this trade are international. They are resilient and they are capable of adapting quickly.

I think it's against that reality that this House needs to consider the bill. The coalition's position is that we will not oppose this bill. We support sensible measures that give Commonwealth law enforcement and border agencies stronger tools to combat illicit tobacco. This crisis is far too serious for this parliament to reject practical improvements merely because they are incomplete. They are practical improvements, but the response of this government is incomplete and the response of the Victorian government is incomplete. I note that the Victorian government has been there since 2014 and the federal government since 2022, and the problem is getting worse.

This bill amends the Customs Act 1901 and the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. It creates a clearer offence framework for tobacco that's unlawfully imported into Australia and then possessed, moved, sold or supplied within Australia. It seeks to overcome longstanding evidentiary difficulties by allowing the illicit character of tobacco to be established through objective circumstances that give rise to a reasonable suspicion, and those circumstances may include an extraordinarily low price, packaging that does not comply with Australian government requirements or an inability to identify a legitimate source or supply chain. These are sensible reforms. An enforcement framework should reflect the practical reality facing the investigators and the people who have to lay charges in relation to this. When cigarettes are sold at a fraction of the lawful retail price from premises that are unable to demonstrate a legitimate source, the law should not require agencies to perform the impossible before they can act.

The bill also strengthens the proceeds of crime measures. That matters because product seizures alone are not enough. Organised crime treats stock losses as a business expense, and the previous speaker enunciated this very well. The more effective response is to follow the money, restrain assets, recover criminal profits and prevent offenders from arranging their affairs in order to frustrate confiscation. The bill further tightens the integrity of customs depots and licensed warehouses through stronger licensing, compliance and oversight arrangements and it increases the scrutiny of licence holders, associated persons and those with access to customs controlled premises and goods. These are worthwhile measures to reduce opportunities for tobacco to be diverted into the black market.

It's a worthwhile bill and it will be supported, but support for these measures must not be confused with satisfaction from those on this side of the House, our communities that we represent or the broader community about the government's overall response to this problem. After years of failed predictions and a rapidly expanding black market, there is little basis for confidence in Labor's management of this issue. No-one should mistake this bill for a comprehensive answer. Illicit tobacco is now a major organised crime, border security, community safety, public health and revenue crisis. The government's own Illicit Tobacco and E-cigarette Commissioner estimated that illicit products accounted for between 50 and 60 per cent of tobacco sold in Australia in 2024-25. The estimated value of that market was between $4.1 billion and $6.9 billion while estimated excise and duty evasion was between $7.7 billion and $11.8 billion, so billions of dollars are flowing away from legitimate businesses and into criminal networks.

The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission has warned that organised criminals regard illicit tobacco as low risk and high reward. It should be high risk and low reward. It has previously observed that, on some importation models, one successful container out of 30 can be enough to return a profit. That's an economic proposition that Australia has allowed criminal syndicates to exploit. This is not simply about somebody buying cheap cigarettes under the counter. Australia has seen deaths, firebombings, intimidation, extortion and violence linked to the illegal market. Legitimate small businesses have been threatened, communities have been placed at risk, and revenue that should support hospitals, schools, roads and essential services is instead financing organised crime, not to mention that, when those businesses located next door to the illegal tobacco suppliers get firebombed, they get affected and have to deal with the insurance fallout as well.

AUSTRAC has identified the trade as a serious organised financial crime problem. Cash deposits, private ATMs and EFTPOS facilities can all be used to move and disguise illicit proceeds. That's why the proceeds of crime provisions in this bill matter, but it's also why legislation must be matched by intelligence, operational capacity and sustained financial disruption. There have been some significant seizures. The Australian Border Force reported that, in 2025-26, it seized more than 2.2 billion cigarette sticks, more than 586 tonnes of loose-leaf tobacco and more than 13.2 million illicit vaping products at the border. Those results demonstrate dedicated work by officers, but they also reveal the extraordinary scale of the trade that they are confronting. And while record seizures occur at the same time as the illicit retail market continues to grow, it demonstrates that interdiction alone is not a silver bullet.

A policy failure on this issue is that Australia has reached this position despite new offences, higher penalties, funding announcements and repeated assurances that enforcement has been strengthened. Labor's fundamental mistake has been to treat the crisis principally as an enforcement problem while refusing to confront the policy settings that have made the illicit market extraordinarily profitable. In the May 2023 budget, Labor imposed an additional tobacco excise increase of five per cent in each of the three successive years on top of an existing twice-yearly indexation. Those increases took effect in September 2023, 2024 and 2025. The government forecast that this higher excise would raise an additional $3.3 billion over the forward estimates. Instead, tobacco revenue has fallen dramatically as consumers shift towards the illicit market.

So the policy didn't eliminate demand. It redirected the demand into a criminal supply chain. And it doesn't diminish the profound health harms caused by smoking. It means policy must respond to evidence and to the unintended consequences. A tax that is avoided on a massive scale does not produce its intended health or revenue outcome. It produces a windfall for organised crime. The government points to hundreds of millions of dollars in additional enforcement funding, yet the illicit market continues to expand. Former senior border officials have described the response as 'an under-resourced game of Whac-A-Mole' with inadequate intelligence and too few experienced personnel. The central problem underlying this bill is therefore straightforward: police can be given stronger powers, but if the potential profit remains extraordinary and the risk remains manageable then organised crime will continue to enter, adapt and ruthlessly exploit the market.

The coalition's alternative is a substantially more comprehensive policy. It's designed not only to pursue criminals after an offence but to destroy the business model that sustains them. Our plan combines tougher enforcement with the reform of the tax and regulatory settings that have pushed consumers into the black market, together with stronger measures to reduce smoking and nicotine harm, and that's what we want to achieve. First, the coalition proposes an 80 per cent reduction in tobacco excise. This would lower the excise component of a standard pack of 20 cigarettes from around $30 to $6, with the rate reviewed after two years. The purpose is not to encourage smoking—absolutely not. The purpose is to collapse the extraordinary price differential that's made Australia one of the most lucrative illicit tobacco markets in the world and to shift consumers away from organised crime and back to a lawful regulated market and then hopefully out of tobacco altogether.

Secondly, we propose a $200 million nationwide law enforcement blitz. This would support additional raids, arrests, seizures, investigation, shop closures and border disruption with a stronger operational focus across the Australian Border Force, the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and AUSTRAC. Third, we would establish a legal, regulated and taxed adult market for nicotine vapes and nicotine pouches while maintaining firm protections for children. The current arrangements have handed too much of this market—and it is a market; I don't like that it's a market, but it is a market—to unregulated sellers. A controlled adult framework would impose lawful standards, reduce the black market and protect minors more effectively than a system that is widely evaded. Fourth, we would invest $60 million in a national public awareness and education campaign.

Australians should understand that a cheap packet of cigarettes or an illicit vape is not a harmless bargain. It can be part of a supply chain involving tax evasion, money laundering, intimidation and violence. At the same time, the campaign must reinforce the dangers of smoking and help people access effective cessation support, because that's what we all want to achieve. It's not enforcement instead of prevention, regulation or education. It's an integrated approach. That's what we've been missing: an integrated approach that recognises that supply, demand, price regulation, health and organised crime are interconnected. Done properly, this is how the House ensures that urgent action can work.

The coalition's position is straightforward. We're not going to stand in the way of sensible new enforcement powers, and this bill is part of that. We support measures that help border and law enforcement agencies identify unlawful tobacco, disrupt distribution, secure the customs supply chain and seize criminal assets. But we will not pretend that another set of enforcement amendments, by itself, can solve a crisis that has continued to deteriorate under this government.

I want to start speaking on this bill, the Customs and Other Legislation Amendment (Illicit Tobacco Enforcement Modernisation and Other Measures) Bill 2026, by being very clear about what we are tackling here. Organised crime is flooding the world with cigarettes that are produced for less than a dollar a packet. The illegal trade in tobacco is booming in the EU and, according to a report by the European Court of Auditors, almost one in 10 cigarettes there is produced illicitly or smuggled, causing an estimated 13 billion euro loss in tax revenue each year. In the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, anywhere from eight to 21 per cent of the approximately 264 billion cigarettes consumed in the US avoid or evade taxes, which equates to up to a US$6 billion loss for local and state revenues, and that's largely because of organised crime buying in low-tax jurisdictions and reselling in high-tax jurisdictions. The point is that, where organised crime sees an opportunity, they will take it, and Australia has not had the right regime in place to tackle their activity.

Back before the 2022 election, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission revealed that the amount of profit organised criminals make on just one container full of cigarettes means they only need one out of 30 containers to get through to still make a profit. They said that, while the profits were not as high as those for illicit drugs, the reality was that the penalties were less and the risk-reward pay-off was a lot more favourable to organised crime groups. We've been changing that, and this legislation is the next step in the government's ongoing crackdown on the criminals behind the illicit tobacco and vape trade. What we're debating today represents a comprehensive modernising of Australia's enforcement framework. The most comprehensive since 2018, it will keep pace with the increasingly sophisticated illicit market.

Before I speak to the detail of our measures, it's also important to acknowledge that there are many victims of this illegal trade, and they include those who've been victims of violence by organised crime. They also include legitimate businesses that are harmed by illegal sales: law-abiding retailers, small-business owners and local shopkeepers, who cannot compete with untaxed black market prices. Government and taxpayers are impacted because critical tax revenue is not paid and public health loses.

It says a lot about the good sense of Australians that smoking rates have continued to fall, with the latest data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare showing that fewer Australians are smoking than ever before—now down to 5.8 per cent for adults—and that vaping rates have stabilised, but smoking remains the leading cause of preventable death and disease in Australia. I saw recently, in the Daily Telegraph, reports on the dangerous chemicals found in five types of illicit cigarettes that they sent for lab testing: pesticides; cadmium, a heavy metal and carcinogen; and more nicotine than the label indicated. Similar results were found by researchers from the University of Auckland. Their tests found higher concentrations of several harmful substances in illicit tobacco, including cadmium. The levels were up to 60 per cent higher in the illicit tobacco tested than in legitimate tobacco products. The study also identified unusual levels of metals, including tin, lead, indium, caesium and uranium. These findings are concerning and demonstrate the potential additional health risks posed by illicit tobacco products. Tobacco itself contains around 7,000 chemicals, with more than 70 known to cause cancer. Whether sold legally through a licensed retailer or illegally as counterfeit or unbranded tobacco, all tobacco products pose serious health risks. Illicit tobacco isn't regulated, and tests have demonstrated that they contain additional harmful ingredients, so the health risks are real. But there are clearly broader risks beyond the health to our community by the illicit tobacco trade.

This bill is designed to turn things around. Actually, I'm wrong in saying that because we've already taken many steps to change the dynamic for those who are trading in illicit tobacco. What will change specifically in this bill? It will modernise the illicit tobacco enforcement framework to increase deterrence, strengthen supply chain integrity and support more prosecutions. Right now, a prosecutor has to prove that tobacco has been imported by a person with intent to defraud the government for that revenue. The prosecution has to show that the person was aware that the tobacco was subject to a duty collection framework and that duty should be paid on importation. But knowing this bar, knowing that it was quite a technical term, organised crime have been able to distance themselves from the importation process. So with the scale and the complexity and sophistication of the organised crime groups, we are looking at a new approach.

This new framework will make it easier to hold those involved in illicit tobacco operations accountable, and will improve the ability of law enforcement agencies to pursue serious offenders. What's different is that there will be a list of observable indicators of illicit activity. It won't be subjective. If any one of these indicators is established then that will be taken to satisfy the reasonable suspicion test for a criminal offence. It will allow enforcement agencies to focus on what they can observe and what is factual, rather than trying to prove every detail of a concealed illicit supply chain.

Some of the things that will be considered are whether the packaging is compliant or non-compliant retail packaging—something that is observable; whether there are non-compliant tobacco products like menthol cigarettes hiding in plain packaging—again, observable; whether tobacco has been concealed to avoid detection; whether there is missing import invoices or paperwork; or if there is a very easily observable fact, the tobacco sale price is below the excise and the GST combined,—that fact alone establishes a reasonable suspicion that it is an unlawfully imported product. This observable list will provide a powerful tool for the Australian Border Force and all state and territory police forces to go after serious and organised crime.

In fact, anyone involved in the illegal tobacco and vape trade is on notice. Australian Border Force or state and territory law enforcement agencies will be able to enter retail premises and establish any of those facts. If they can establish those facts, then action can be taken. While the focus will be on using the new offences to go after serious criminals, it is very clear it will now also be easier for law enforcement to target those operating retail businesses that possess illicit tobacco. It might be a tobacconist company, a warehouse company, a distributor, a transporter, a logistics company. They are also subject to these rules, can be investigated and, if found that there is reasonable evidence, prosecuted, so anyone involved in the illegal tobacco and vapes trade would be wise to take note of this legislation.

Another thing this bill does is introduce stronger consequences for the most serious forms of offending, ensuring that organised criminals who engage in conduct at that most serious end of the spectrum receive a sentence that is appropriate to the gravity of their crime. The bill also helps reinforce the seriousness with which Australia treats prohibited tobacco imports, ensuring that criminals cannot avoid meaningful consequences simply because enforcement is focused on a complex question around duty evasion rather than the more commonsense approach that this is an illegal product being imported. The breadth of these reforms will mean a more consistent treatment of illicit tobacco, alongside other high-risk prohibited goods, and enable enforcement responses that reflect the actual harms associated with this trade.

One of the other measures in this bill closes an important legal loophole that affects tobacco when customs duty has been paid. This relates to tobacco that would otherwise be offered duty free for people eligible to purchase that as they leave the country. The current framework means that there is no customs control, and that creates an opportunity for diversion into the black market at duty-free prices. So this bill reduces the opportunities for diversion and ensures appropriate oversight of these products through the supply chain. If you're a legitimate duty-free operator, these reforms pretty much formalise the existing expectations and the way that you work, so little will change. It's aimed not at imposing new burdens on businesses that already handle these products responsibly but at ensuring that the opportunities for diversion to the black market are closed off. There are also measures in this bill to streamline the seizure and disposal of illicit tobacco. Right now, in many states, we are seeing large seizures of illicit tobacco. Each month records are being broken, and it is on a scale that we haven't seen before. Officers can spend hours and hours documenting and processing individual seizure notices in a very old fashioned way. This is time that could be used to locate more illicit supplies rather than doing the paperwork. The reforms in this bill will enable faster and more efficient seizure and disposal processes.

Another measure contained in the bill, which is a comprehensive way of changing how we chase these criminals and make them pay the price for the crimes that they have been committing, has to do with the integrity across the customs supply chain. Illicit tobacco operators often rely on people who are facilitating the process—their intermediaries. They are part of the process but not necessarily easily identifiable. This bill introduces additional licensing conditions for customs brokers and customs oversighted depots and warehouses to ensure that they refrain from conduct that facilitates, assists or enables the importation of prohibited tobacco products. They are licensed and this imposes a positive obligation on the licence holder to take all reasonable steps to prevent such conduct occurring within their operations. Taken together, all these reforms strengthen offences, tighten controls over the tobacco supply chain, elevate the seriousness with which illegal tobacco activity is treated, improve enforcement outcomes and increase the accountability across critical points of the importation process.

The second part of this bill is about strengthening Australia's proceeds of crime framework so that criminal groups can't retain the financial benefits that they generated from unlawful activity. It strengthens the ability of agencies to strip criminals of the profits they're making from illegal activities. That component of the bill applies to much more than just tobacco; it's modernising the proceeds of crime regime.

The final part in ensuring that crime doesn't pay is that the bill strengthens Australia's unexplained wealth framework by clarifying the methodology used to calculate a person's total wealth. These amendments will improve the operation of the framework and capture property owned or controlled by a person at any time. Together, they will better equip law enforcement agencies to identify, restrain and recover the financial rewards that make organised criminal activities attractive in the first place. This changes the way the law operates so that we stop criminals from being able to get away with things they've been able to get away with for far too long.

The Customs and Other Legislation Amendment (Illicit Tobacco Enforcement Modernisation and Other Measures) Bill 2026 is one word for another bandaid on the bullet hole that is the illicit tobacco market in Australia today. Unfortunately, our illicit tobacco crisis has spiralled so far out of control and it has become so serious that this parliament can't reject any practical improvement to enforcement mechanisms, regardless of the fact that this bill represents a failure to comprehensively tackle this problem. We have seen some 300 firebombings. We've seen kidnappings and extortion. We have seen Australians killed on the front line of the black market for tobacco in Australia today. Unfortunately, this bill represents only a step in the right direction and is far from a smoking gun, if you'll forgive the pun.

The bill does make various changes to Commonwealth enforcement frameworks applying to tobacco and the movement and possession of that tobacco within Australia. It establishes clearer offences, and government speakers have spent some time articulating that. The issue—and the reason that we have such little confidence in the government's ability to respond to this—is that, after all of their horrendous mistakes and missteps, the failed predictions and the repeated mismanagement of this issue, these changes make Commonwealth laws only slightly more effective in terms of their enforcement. But they fail to deal with the fact that excise is pushing Australians to seek out black market cigarettes. It is plain human nature that, where they can obtain cigarettes at a fraction of the cost of lawful cigarettes in Australia, Australians who are doing it tough under this government's homegrown, inflation-driven cost-of-living crisis will do so.

Throughout human history we have seen that punitive measures on enforcement alone can never address a problem that is as far out of control as it is today. Indeed, the ABF themselves have said that you can't seize your way out of this crisis by playing some sort of whack-a-mole operation with limited resourcing. Albeit this bill increases their resourcing and addresses some of the measures under the Proceeds of Crime Act that we've seen play out, it again falls short of what a truly comprehensive response to this crisis would be. The reason we know that this falls well short of a truly comprehensive solution is that we have tabled one. Rather than—as we have under the Albanese government—watching illicit tobacco develop into a major organised crime issue for border security, community safety and public health and, ultimately, into a revenue problem, we've seen them ignore our calls for a comprehensive response, which includes dealing with excise.

The government's own Illicit Tobacco and E-cigarette Commissioner estimates that illicit tobacco represented some 50 to 60 per cent of tobacco sold in Australia in the 2024-25 financial year. The problem with that is that it's on the low end of estimates. Indeed, we see public estimates that indicate that, in the current environment, some 80 per cent of cigarettes sold and smoked in Australia are illegal. Not only does that mean that they are not paying excise—which, again, depending on the estimates you believe, ranges from some $8 billion to $11.8 billion a year in forgone revenue, which is desperately needed for a budget that's so deeply in deficit, as we see today—it also means that those tobacco products and cigarettes don't carry the health warnings that the Labor Party, when last in government, mandated. So, not only do they have the sexy branding and gold embossed packaging and the like; each cigarette, when lawfully sold in Australia, must carry its own health warning—failing to do so in some 80 per cent of cases. This is a crime crisis, it's a health crisis, and it's a revenue crisis. That's why the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission describes illicit tobacco as one of the most significant organised crime commodities in Australia. It's remarkable that you'd see an Australian government agency talking about black market cigarettes as a commodity in Australia today.

This problem, unfortunately, is not simply about people buying cheap cigarettes under the counter. As I said, hundreds of firebombings, intimidation, extortion and violence associated with this market have seen legitimate small businesses and innocent community members caught in the crossfire. This is across the country, including in my own electorate of Forrest. In the south-west corner of WA, even in smaller communities like Margaret River, we have seen organised crime seizing upon the extraordinarily lucrative and profitable opportunity that a market which is so deeply taxed and so underenforced has created.

The ABF has also described illicit tobacco as a low-risk, high-reward commodity—again, that commodity word, it's remarkable!—whilst observing that the market continues to grow in scale, complexity and profitability and that organised crime networks are exploiting the profitable price differentials that are presented through that extortionate tax and in the form of excise on cigarettes. So, despite the fact that there have been various bandaids slapped on this problem by the government—repeated penalty increases, funding announcements and new enforcement measures—we continue to see the problem spiralling out of control. We continue to see billions of dollars foregone in revenue that should be benefiting the budget and should be invested in health outcomes for Australians. We see legitimate businesses doing it tough, and we see innocent community members caught in the crossfire.

Senior ABF officers have described in Senate estimates to this very parliament that the government's response was a chronically underresourced and 'whack-a-mole' operation, alleging that there were no real intelligence collection and not enough experienced people left to do it. That's the central problem at the core of this bill. While we keep talking about trying to strengthen laws and at the same time organised crime figures can continue to achieve extraordinary profit margins, of course they will continue to enter and ruthlessly exploit the market, which effectively makes criminals out of ordinary Australians who are doing nothing except what could be reasonably expected when they're under such financial duress. It's not illegal to smoke tobacco in Australia, so why are we persisting with a regime that effectively makes criminals out of ordinary Australians who are making the choice to smoke?

We have presented a comprehensive and costed alternative, one that delivers some $8 billion of benefits in a budget, that includes an 80 per cent reduction in tobacco excise and that makes the cost of lawful cigarettes in Australia approximately comparable with those available on the black market. We also proposed a nationwide law enforcement blitz, supporting additional raids, arrests, seizures, investigations, shop closures and border disruption, with a stronger operational focus across all agencies including the ABF, the AFP, the ACIC and AUSTRAC. What that would do is deliver a comprehensive solution to address this multifaceted problem. At the same time, we would invest $60 million in a national public awareness and education campaign to address, in public, the rise of the issues associated with organised crime behind illicit tobacco and vapes and reinforcing the dangers of smoking.

We seem to have missed a trick with a whole generation of younger Australians who haven't grown up with the smoke aware campaigns that my generation certainly did. I think that's one of the glaring holes that I personally would love to see filled because, whilst I say that it is not illegal to make that decision, Australians should be fully informed about the risks to their own health and indeed the health of those around them and those near and dear to them that smoking represents. We're not going to stand in the way, because this is a step—another bandaid on the bullet hole—but it is far from a comprehensive and costed solution to the problem overall. I thank the House.

This debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 43. The debate may be resumed at a later hour.