Terry Young (Longman, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm going to touch on a taboo subject today, and that's tobacco consumption. I go around in my electorate and see that legitimate businesses out there are suffering because of all of these illegal tobacco shops opening up and selling this illegal product. It's costing about $4.2 billion a year in revenue to the federal government. There are two ways to handle this. Of course, one of them is to reduce the tax on it so that there's not such a big price difference, and that removes the black market altogether. At the moment, we collect around $12.7 billion in taxes and excise from legitimate sales. The cost to the health system is about $6.8 billion, so we are in front. That doesn't include the conservative estimate of $4.2 billion that we're missing out on.

The other thing is that we've seen recently that there has been bombings in Melbourne and in Brisbane, because the outlaw bikie gangs have got involved in this now because it's so lucrative. That's caused an entire new issue. Sometimes, with governments, we have the best intentions. We all want smoking rates to drop. This has helped somewhat, but it has gone too far. It is akin to putting the speed limit down to 20 kilometres an hour. It's just gone too far. It's time to look at this and maybe change the way that we do things. We need to reduce the price of the tax on the legitimate cigarettes so that there's not that big of a difference, and we need to drive the black market out of business because it's got to go.

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