Keith Wolahan (Menzies, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

When the member for Wide Bay asked if I would second this motion and showed it to me, I was more than happy to do that for a few reasons. One is I have high regard for him as a person of integrity both in this place and as someone who wore a police uniform. He put his own safety on the line and knows a lot about this area, and sophisticated and unsophisticated criminal networks. I was also happy to support this because, like all of us, there are moments in our lives, especially when we are younger when we experience the first death of a loved one. For me, that was my grandmother, who died in her early 60s from smoking-related illnesses. I saw that the heartbreak on my family when she was robbed of another 20 years of life. In the late 1980s, that was quite common—a lot of people had relatives who lost decades of their lives because of the harm of smoking.

One of the things we see in many different areas of public policy is well-intended legislation that has unintended consequences. This is certainly one of those. It is easy to think that taxes and advertising will solve every problem. If that were the case, we wouldn't have many problems here to solve, because we're very good at taxing things here and there is a lot of money to run advertising campaigns. They are effective to a point, but when we squeeze too much on one side of an equation and ignore the other, we are not solving the problem—we're just making ourselves feel good. So the consequences of just focusing on the tax side of the equation, especially in a cost-of-living crisis, is that many people on low income—and most people who smoke are—will go and buy their product somewhere that it's cheaper. And where they are buying them cheaper is in the illicit tobacco trade.

The member for Higgins has a distinguished career as a professional doctor, and has quite rightly pointed out the trend of statistics over the last few decades, but sometimes you get a glimpse of a change in that in the short term, and we are hearing that from other medical professionals. Here is an article from 11 September this year, titled 'Surgeon unmasks 'open secret' making underworld fortunes'. Cardiovascular surgeon John Crozier has devoted his whole life to assisting people who have been affected by the tobacco trade, and when he saw an increase in people coming to his hospital, he started to ask why: why is this increase happening so suddenly? And he's finding that they're buying tobacco from illicit areas across Sydney, and we're seeing across Melbourne. In this particular article that I've got here, there was a quote that really struck me. It said: 'The trade is so good that the first faction in it immediately attempted to monopolise distribution by stamping tobacconists with an 'earn or burn' offer. That is, 'Sell our illicit tobacco, which has none of the shocking warnings or none of the taxes that come with it, or we will torch your shop.' We know that that's happening because we are seeing, particularly in Melbourne and Sydney, illicit tobacco shops being burnt down. So, in addition to the problem that this is creating for people's health, it is creating gang wars through our cities.

Of course we should focus on taxing this. In part that offsets the health budget consequences. It is so important that we look at the enforcement end of this. Criminal organisations are rational. They will look at the enforcement in hard drugs like cocaine and other areas and say, 'Why would I take that risk when I can make us as much money as this and I can put the risk for me onto someone who is probably in fear of being deported, who is easy to influence and then are told they will be subject to violence or have their store burnt down if they don't do it?' I am also hearing from many small grocery operators who are doing the right thing, those who run IGA stores who do sell this and it is a big part of their income. They are seeing that drop off. People doing the right thing are being punished. People who are doing the wrong thing are getting away with it. At the moment, we are letting local councils enforce that. I have a lot of respect for local councils, but dealing with violent, well organised criminal organisations is not their job. We need to make sure that we resource the group that can do it.

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