Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I rise because, although we support these bills, there are a few things that I think we have to be aware of in this parliament. You can't keep putting up the tax on cigarettes and not believe that you're going to get a movement from legal, regulated cigarettes to unregulated cigarettes, and that's precisely what is happening. Currently, 95 per cent of vapes are illegal and about 30 per cent of tobacco is illegal. You get to a point where there's nearly no elasticity of demand determined by price. All that happens is that you have to acknowledge there is a market out there, an illegal market. The reason I rise to speak on this matter is that I live in the areas where you see it.

In this building we take this quasi-virtuous position of saying how evil cigarettes are, but we're quite happy to collect money from them. I believe there's an extra $3.3 billion in this. Let's be completely honest: it's $3.3 billion from killing people—that's what you're getting it for. If you believe it's not correct, don't take the money. Don't touch it, but you do touch it. Both sides touch it; I know that.

These bills around about increasing the tax on roll-your-owns. Maybe you don't see them as much in city areas, but in country areas you most definitely do. People are poorer, so they roll their own cigarettes. When you jack up the tax, they don't stop smoking; they just go and buy chop-chop, which is abundant. If you can buy dope within about half an hour of arriving in any town, you can buy chop-chop; make no mistake about it. You buy it from the same vendor.

Once upon a time, in the western suburbs of Sydney, people who were bringing this into the country would be driving around in flash cars; now they have Bentleys and Rolls-Royces. They're making an absolute killing out of it. We're not stopping it. We haven't stopped the sale of marijuana, or dope, and we haven't stopped the sale of any other drugs. The difference between these two, of course—and I don't draw, in any sense, a moral equivalence—is that, with a lot of illicit drugs, if you jump in a car you'll crash it, or, if you go home to your wife or your partner, the drugs can be an inspiration for violence, and you can't say that about cigarettes: 'Yeah, I'll kill you.'

Once upon a time, I smoked. Once upon a time, I vaped. I do neither. I do neither now. But I'm not fool enough to think that in regional areas this isn't there in complete abundance. You can go to your tyre repair place and see someone having a durry, and it's the ever-filling bag of Drum. It's amazing. The bag's like a hundred years old, but it's chock-a-block full. What a wonderful trick! It's illegal. It's all illegal tobacco. It's coming in. So what are you going to do with this extra $3.3 billion? Are you going to go out and try and stop this trade? I bet you it'll be absorbed into the general coffers. Are you going to put $3.3 billion into education at school level? I smoked my first cigarette in year 6. That was an incredibly stupid thing. At the state school I went to, people smoked. They just did.

You bet.

I'll take the interjection. He asked if anybody smoked at boarding school. Absolutely, they did. We'd chomp through a packet on the train on the way home. But you would understand, Member for Moreton, with me coming from St George, that this idea that somehow we go back to St George and we're going to stamp out chop-chop and stamp out vapes—it's all marvellous stuff that we say in this crazy boarding school down here, the virtuous boarding school, but it's just not the reality.

So what is the reality of what we're doing? We're finding the people who obey the law and making them poorer. That's precisely what we're doing. They're addicted to cigarettes. You're finding people who obey the law and making them poorer. And who are the people who smoke roll-your-owns? I tell you what, they're not at the royal cruising yacht club. I'll tell you where they are. They're in the weatherboard and iron, they're in the poor places, they're in the caravan parks, and they're struggling to pay for the milk, pay for the groceries and pay the rent. I'm not saying they're all wonderful people. Like all of us, there's the same disparity of character that you have in any group of people. But they don't have money. They don't have spare cash. So, if they obey the law, they become poorer, and today we are voting—and I acknowledge that I'm voting for it too—to make them poorer. Let's get that on the record. That's what we're doing.

The other thing that worries me is this. I know and I've told the police—I won't put it on the record here—where they sell ice. I know the house. I know all about it. I know how it comes in. I live in a small regional town. I'm very aware of the so-called hillbilly areas where it comes in. I've told all this information. We know how this game works.

What you're going to have now is that people are going to follow the market. Right now, a packet of smokes is about 50 bucks. A packet of illegal cigarettes—international cigarettes—is $15. Hard to get? Piece of cake—absolute piece of cake. And roll-your-own chop-chop is massively cheaper. So what are people going to do, unless they want to just give their money to the federal government, who they don't like? They're going to go to the illegal market to buy it.

Now, here's the trick. People who sell illegal cigarettes are not sole traders of that product. They've got the whole suite of products. You'll find that the person who sells chop-chop sells dope and sells ice. Out in the country, coke's not the issue. Coke's an upper-class, inner-suburban drug. Here it's like picking your nose and eating it. It's ice. It's the disgusting destruction of so many families. At St George, I've been to the funerals of wonderful people. It comes to a pretty ordinary outcome.

So why are we encouraging people to meet these people? Why are we encouraging them to get into their orbit? Do we think they have some sort of variant morality which, when certain people come to them, they won't try to value-add to the product they're selling to them? Of course they will! If we believe it's virtuous to put up the tax on this, why don't we just triple the price of cigarettes? Why not take it up by a thousand per cent, if it's virtuous to put it up, when the biggest beneficiary of the tax on cigarettes is us! It's this building, so we're part of it. We've all got the maligned outcome of what happens from this product in this building. We bank it in the budget and we laud its contribution to the surplus, or whatever it does. But we also know what we're doing: we're dealing with poor people with an addiction and we're using their money to prop up the books. What it costs them is completely the inverse of the incremental tax rate, because we're giving a greater proportion of poor people's money to those wealthier people who smoke and who probably can afford 50 or 60 bucks—it's not an issue. Yes, okay, I'm supporting this. But I'm flagging this: we've got to stop going back to poor people and belting them up even more, while still thinking it's virtuous to belt them up—that there's a morality in belting them up—and that it's probably A-OK to put that money in the sky rocket of the federal government.

Where we are is that about 10 per cent of people smoke. That's not changing now; that's about it. That's about where it is. We'd probably find that it's pretty similar to a lot of other things, like drug-taking—and we know that when we test sewage. Think of all the laws that outlaw people's use of cocaine. Basically, you can go to any university student and they'll you how much it's worth and where to buy it. We know from the testing of sewage that it's everywhere—absolutely everywhere in inner-suburban areas. So we have Buckley's and none of stopping that, and it can actually do real damage, there's no doubt about that. Not that any drug doesn't, but you don't want to jump in a car and drive after taking it; we've seen the actions of people who have taken it. We just aren't going to wipe that out.

We have to have a reality pill: cigarettes will kill you and vapes will kill you, without the shadow of a doubt. If you want to die earlier, then they're a great way to go about it. But we're not going to stop them, we're just not. When we say in this building that we are, we're just lying. We can bring the rates down—we've done that, and we've done a very good job—but they have now bottomed out. So what we have here is yet another bill where we're all, basically—including me—talking from both sides of our mouths, saying, 'Smoking is bad, but I want the money.' I just foreshadow that the day will have to come sometime when we say: 'Enough is enough. It's a really bad habit; you shouldn't do it, but I'm damned if it isn't the federal government that's going to be the beneficiary of the money you pay.'

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