The Antis Assemble

The Coalition has proposed a fundamental reset of Australia’s failed nicotine policy. The response from the public health establishment was entirely predictable.

The Coalition had barely announced its new tobacco and nicotine policy before Australia’s tobacco-control establishment assembled to condemn it.

The proposal is certainly bold. A Coalition government would reduce tobacco excise by 80 per cent for an initial two-year period, cutting the excise on a packet of 20 cigarettes from approximately $30 to $6. It would legalise and regulate adult access to vaping products and nicotine pouches, apply comparatively low taxes to those safer alternatives, spend another $200 million on coordinated enforcement and commit $60 million to public education about smoking and the organised crime behind illicit tobacco. Parliamentary Budget Office modelling reportedly estimates that the complete package could recover approximately $8 billion in revenue during its first four years.

It is one of the most significant departures from Australian tobacco policy in decades. It also recognises something the government and its public health advisers have resisted admitting: the existing system has comprehensively failed.

More than half the tobacco consumed in Australia is now estimated to be illegal. When vaping products and nicotine pouches are included, approximately 80 per cent of nicotine is reportedly being purchased outside the legal market. Legal tobacco revenue has collapsed, illegal tobacco shops operate openly, unregulated vapes remain readily available, and criminal syndicates have fought for control of the market through extortion, shootings and hundreds of firebombings.

Australia is not approaching a crisis. Australia is already living through one.

Yet the people who helped defend the policies that created this environment have responded as though the greatest danger is somebody attempting to change them.

Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek delivered perhaps the most dramatic response, declaring that the Coalition’s proposal “will kill people”. She asserted that reducing the excise would guarantee increases in smoking and vaping and therefore lead to deaths.

That is an extraordinary level of certainty about a policy that has not yet been implemented, particularly when the same certainty was conspicuously absent as Australia’s illegal nicotine market grew around us.

Where were the guarantees when the government forced legal vape shops to close? Where were the confident predictions when adult consumers were directed into a pharmacy system that many did not want to use? Where were the warnings about criminal markets when legal cigarettes became several times more expensive than their illegal competitors?

Apparently, predictions become guarantees only when somebody challenges tobacco-control orthodoxy.

University of Sydney public health professor Becky Freeman called the policy a “terrible idea” and compared it with the “tired drumbeat of the tobacco industry”. She argued that criminals could simply reduce their prices, creating a race to the bottom.

That possibility deserves consideration, but it is not a complete answer. Illegal operators can lower their prices only so far while retaining the enormous profits that made the market attractive. The Coalition is not proposing an excise reduction in isolation. It is proposed to reduce the legal-illegal price gap while simultaneously increasing enforcement against those who remain in the illicit market.

Price competition and enforcement are supposed to work together. Ignoring half the policy does not disprove it.

Freeman has previously suggested that an excise reduction is little more than a number “plucked” from the air. Yet the current excise was not delivered to us on a stone tablet. It is the accumulated result of repeated political decisions made under very different market conditions. A tax level that may have discouraged smoking when illicit supply was limited does not necessarily produce the same outcome when illegal cigarettes are available for a fraction of the legal price.

Policy must be judged by its present effects, not by the reputation it earned in the past.

Simon Chapman has been equally dismissive, saying that reducing the excise “will do nothing”. His central argument is that price remains a powerful deterrent to smoking and a strong incentive to quit.

That principle is broadly correct when consumers must pay the higher price. It becomes much less relevant when an enormous proportion of the market simply avoids the tax.

A tax cannot discourage purchasing if the purchase takes place elsewhere. Once avoidance becomes widespread, further increases may strengthen the illegal alternative more than they discourage consumption. Repeating that price reduces demand without distinguishing the legal price from the price consumers actually pay is no longer an adequate analysis.

The Australian Medical Association described the proposal as reckless, simplistic and something that might have been dreamt up by tobacco executives. AMA president Dr Danielle McMullen warned that cheaper legal cigarettes could increase smoking among young people and disadvantaged Australians, widen health inequalities and reduce quitting. She also argued that legalising retail access to vapes would weaken Australia’s pharmacy reforms and create another generation dependent on nicotine.

The concern about cheaper cigarettes is legitimate. An 80 per cent reduction is enormous and should be carefully monitored. But the AMA’s response again treats the proposal as though it simply makes cigarettes cheaper and stops there.

It does not.

It makes regulated, non-combustible alternatives legally available to adults. That matters because the central health objective should not be the elimination of nicotine at any cost. It should be the fastest achievable reduction in smoking and the disease caused by combustion.

If cigarettes become cheaper without attractive, safer alternatives, smoking could increase. If the reform simultaneously makes regulated vaping products and nicotine pouches accessible, affordable and substantially less expensive than cigarettes, the result may be very different. That is precisely why the whole package must be assessed rather than separating its most controversial component and pretending the rest does not exist.

Quit and Cancer Council Australia followed the same script. Quit medical lead Liam Egan warned against making addictive nicotine products easier to access when Australia should be preventing another generation from becoming “hooked”. Cancer Council tobacco issues committee chair Alecia Brooks said public policy should reduce addiction rather than shift consumers between addictive products.

That statement reveals the philosophical divide at the centre of this debate.

Shifting an adult from smoking to a much less harmful nicotine product may not satisfy an abstinence-based definition of success, but it can dramatically reduce that person’s exposure to toxic products of combustion. Tobacco harm reduction is built upon the reality that how nicotine is consumed matters enormously.

A smoker who switches completely to a regulated vape has not merely moved sideways between two equivalent addictions. The most dangerous part of smoking is the inhalation of smoke, not the presence of nicotine itself. Treating all nicotine use as essentially the same may preserve an ideological preference for abstinence, but it obscures the health difference that matters most.

The Public Health Association of Australia warned that the Coalition was abandoning decades of bipartisan tobacco control and claimed the tax reduction could primarily boost tobacco-company profits unless it was passed through to consumers. It also argued that there was no evidence that an 80 per cent reduction would eliminate the illegal market.

The pass-through question is important and easily addressed. The policy should include price monitoring, transparency requirements and a review mechanism to determine how much of the excise reduction reaches consumers. If tobacco companies retain the savings, the policy will not achieve its purpose.

But the absence of certainty is not an argument for preserving a demonstrably dysfunctional system. There is also no credible evidence that continuing Australia’s present approach will eliminate the illegal market. We do, however, have extensive evidence of what that approach has already produced.

Health Minister Mark Butler has argued that even eliminating the excise would not necessarily make legal cigarettes cheaper than illegal ones. He says governments should not enter into price competition with organised crime.

But the government entered that competition the moment it imposed a tax that created an extraordinary price difference between legal and illegal products. It then lost the competition while insisting that price had nothing to do with the outcome.

Organised crime did not invent the demand for nicotine. It exploited the gap between what consumers wanted, what the government permitted and what legal products cost.

The most striking feature of the criticism is how little responsibility the critics accept for the status quo. Every possible risk of reform is amplified, while the known damage caused by present policy is treated as background noise. Cheaper legal cigarettes may increase smoking, they warn, but illegal cigarettes already sell cheaply. Regulated vapes may attract young people, they warn, while unregulated disposable vapes are already sold through criminal retailers. Tobacco companies may benefit, they warn, while organised crime is earning billions of dollars under the system they defend.

None of this means the Coalition’s plan should escape scrutiny. An 80 per cent excise reduction is a radical intervention. It should have firm pass-through safeguards, independent evaluation and clearly defined measures covering smoking prevalence, youth use, illicit market share, switching to safer products, crime, revenue and health inequalities. The review must be genuine, and the policy must be adjusted if the evidence shows unintended harm.

But at least the Coalition is proposing a testable response to an obvious failure.

The antis appear to be offering more of the same: retain the unaffordable legal market, preserve the failed pharmacy-only vaping model, intensify enforcement and hope that criminal organisations eventually lose interest in one of Australia’s most profitable illegal trades.

That is not a cautious policy. It is institutional stubbornness disguised as a public health principle.

The real choice is not between a perfect existing system and a reckless experiment. It is between a controlled, measurable reform and an uncontrolled experiment already taking place in tobacconists, convenience stores, suburban warehouses and burning shopfronts across Australia.

For years, tobacco-control advocates demanded that policy follow the evidence. Now, the evidence is telling us that Australia has lost control of its nicotine market.

The Coalition’s proposal may not have every detail right. It may require safeguards, refinement and adjustment. But it finally begins with the reality in front of us rather than the Australia that public health authorities would prefer to imagine.

The antis have assembled to protect the old policy.

The question Australians should ask is simple: after everything that policy has produced, why should they still be trusted to define what happens next?