The Illusion of Consensus: When Uniformity Replaces Thinking

What stands out from the recent submissions to Australia’s illicit tobacco inquiry isn’t diversity of thinking. It’s a suffocating uniformity that borders on intellectual stagnation.

Across law enforcement bodies, health organisations, councils, and advocacy groups, the same prescription is repeated with near-identical language and logic: more policing, tougher rules, higher pressure. There is no meaningful deviation, no genuine contest of ideas, no sign that these institutions have independently interrogated the problem they are supposedly trying to solve. The conclusion appears preloaded. The submissions simply orbit around it.

This is not a consensus built on careful reasoning. It is a convergence built on an assumption.

The sheer breadth of that convergence is what makes it so revealing. Organisations as structurally different as the Northern Territory Police Association, AUSTRAC, and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission arrive at the same endpoint as public health bodies like the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, the Australian Medical Association, and the National Heart Foundation of Australia. Advocacy organisations such as Cancer Council Australia and Tobacco Free Australia reinforce the same position, echoed by prominent figures like Simon Chapman and researchers including Michelle Jongenelis.

They are joined by regulatory and economic bodies like the Australian Taxation Office and the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, alongside industry-facing groups such as Master Grocers Australia, the Shopping Centre Council of Australia, and the Freight & Trade Alliance. Community and health-focused organisations, including Lung Foundation Australia, the Matilda Centre for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use, and the Australian Council on Smoking and Health, fall into line, as do local governments like the City of Stonnington and Bega Valley Shire Council.

Different mandates. Different expertise. Different responsibilities. One answer. That is not normal. It is not healthy. And it is not how robust policy ecosystems behave.

Because real policy ecosystems are characterised by friction. By competing interpretations of evidence. By disagreements about trade-offs. Due to uncertainty about unintended consequences. By people being forced to justify their assumptions in the face of challenge. When all of that disappears and is replaced by a single, dominant narrative, it usually means that the system has stopped functioning as a marketplace of ideas and has started behaving more like a closed loop that recycles its own conclusions.

And increasingly, it looks less like a coincidence and more like coordination, not in the conspiratorial sense, but in something more subtle and arguably more concerning. It looks like everyone has simply “got the memo.”

Not a literal memo, but a shared understanding of what is acceptable to say, what conclusions are expected, and what positions carry institutional safety. A quiet alignment around the boundaries of the conversation itself.

What is most striking is not just the uniformity, but the complete absence of intellectual discomfort. There is no visible tension between what is being proposed and what is actually happening in the real world. There is no sense that these institutions are grappling with contradictions or even acknowledging that contradictions exist.

Australia is not dealing with a hypothetical problem. The illicit tobacco market is not an emerging risk. It is already entrenched, adaptive, and expanding. Organised crime involvement is not speculative. It is embedded. Regulatory visibility is not improving. It is deteriorating. Consumers are not simply quitting. Many are shifting, substituting, or disengaging from legal channels altogether.

These are not side effects. They are direct outcomes of the current policy environment.

And yet, across these submissions, there is almost no serious effort to confront that reality. Instead, reality is treated as something to be overridden. Something that needs to be brought into line with policy, rather than something policy should respond to.

The dominant response is escalation. More enforcement. More restrictions. More intensity. It is a model that assumes the problem is insufficient pressure, rather than flawed design. That assumption is never meaningfully interrogated. It is simply repeated, reinforced, and amplified.

This creates a self-sealing logic that is almost impossible to penetrate. If the strategy produces poor outcomes, the conclusion is not that the strategy is wrong, but that it has not been applied forcefully enough. If the illicit market grows, enforcement must increase. If enforcement increases and the market continues to grow, enforcement must increase again. Failure is not a signal. It is fuel.

And this is where “getting the memo” becomes most dangerous. Because once institutions internalise the expectation that the answer is always more enforcement, they stop asking whether that answer is correct. They start competing only on how strongly they can endorse it. Nuance disappears. Alternatives disappear. Doubt disappears.

There is no off-ramp in this model. No mechanism for reconsideration. No point at which the system pauses and asks whether it is heading in the wrong direction. It is not a strategy. It is a ratchet. And ratchets only move in one direction.

What is absent is even the most basic form of policy humility. There is no serious engagement with the possibility that the underlying approach may be contributing to the very harms it is trying to eliminate. There is no meaningful exploration of alternative frameworks that might operate on different assumptions about behaviour, risk, and incentives.

That absence is most glaring when it comes to safer nicotine alternatives.

Across these submissions, there is almost a deliberate refusal to engage with the role that products like vaping, nicotine pouches, or other non-combustible alternatives could play in reducing harm. These products are not fringe phenomena. They are widely used globally and increasingly used within Australia, often by people actively trying to move away from combustible tobacco.

Yet instead of being treated as a potential solution, they are framed as a threat, a complication, or simply ignored. They exist in the policy conversation only as something to be controlled, restricted, or eliminated. That, too, feels like part of the memo.

Do not legitimise alternatives. Do not explore substitution. Do not acknowledge that risk exists on a spectrum. Because once those ideas are allowed into the conversation, the entire enforcement-first framework becomes harder to defend.

This is not just an oversight. It is a structural blind spot reinforced by expectation. Because once safer alternatives are excluded from consideration, the policy framework is left with only one lever: suppression. And suppression, in the presence of persistent demand, does not eliminate behaviour. It distorts it.

By restricting access to regulated, lower-risk products, the policy does not reduce demand for nicotine. It pushes that demand into less visible, less regulated, and more harmful channels. Some users return to smoking. Others turn to illicit supply. Many operate across both. The system loses control in both directions.

This is the central paradox. A framework that claims to be driven by harm minimisation is actively constraining the very tools that could reduce harm, while intensifying the conditions that increase it. This is not harm reduction. It is harm amplification through misdirection.

The refusal to seriously engage with safer alternatives also exposes a deeper tension at the heart of the policy environment. It suggests that the goal is not simply to reduce harm, but to enforce a particular behavioural ideal. One in which nicotine use, in any form, is treated as inherently unacceptable.

That position may be morally coherent within certain frameworks. But it is disconnected from behavioural reality. People do not simply abandon demand because the policy disapproves of it. They adapt. They substitute. They find workarounds. And when policy refuses to account for that, it does not eliminate the behaviour. It loses the ability to shape it.

Institutional incentives reinforce this rigidity. Law enforcement agencies are structurally committed to enforcement. Health organisations have built decades of authority around abstinence-based messaging. Advocacy groups derive influence from certainty, not nuance. Researchers operate within paradigms that reward alignment with established narratives rather than disruption of them.

None of this requires coordination. It produces coordination as an outcome. Over time, this creates an environment where deviation is not just discouraged but effectively filtered out. Where alternative perspectives are marginalised before they can be seriously considered. Where the range of acceptable thought narrows until only one position remains visible.

That is what “getting the memo” looks like in practice. Not a directive, but a boundary. Not an order, but an understanding. And once those boundaries are internalised, the system no longer needs to enforce conformity. It reproduces it automatically.

That is what is now being reflected in these submissions. Not a robust consensus, but a constrained one. And constrained systems do not adapt well to complex, evolving problems. They simplify. They reduce. They default to familiar tools, even when those tools are no longer producing the desired outcomes.

The consequences are already visible and increasingly difficult to ignore. Markets are moving further underground, becoming more sophisticated and harder to penetrate. Criminal networks are expanding their influence. Consumers are navigating increasingly opaque supply chains. Product quality and safety become less predictable. Enforcement costs rise while effectiveness plateaus.

At the same time, opportunities to channel behaviour toward lower-risk alternatives are being actively undermined. The system is not just failing to reduce harm. It is closing off pathways that could. And still, the response remains unchanged.

More enforcement. More restrictions. More pressure.

There is something profoundly circular about this. The policy creates the conditions for its own failure, then uses that failure to justify its continuation. It becomes self-perpetuating, not because it works, but because it cannot conceive of an alternative.

That is the deeper problem. Not just that the policy may be ineffective, but that the system evaluating it appears structurally incapable of recognising that ineffectiveness. A functioning policy environment is not defined by agreement. It is defined by its ability to challenge itself. To test assumptions. To respond to outcomes. To change course when necessary.

What is visible here is the opposite. A system that filters out challenges. That treats alignment as validation. That responds to failure with escalation. That prioritises control over understanding, and in doing so, sidelines the very tools that could make a difference.

Uniformity, in this context, is not reassurance. It is a warning. It suggests that the debate has narrowed to the point where only one answer is allowed to exist, regardless of whether it works. It suggests that the system is no longer exploring solutions, only defending its own assumptions.

And once a policy ecosystem reaches that point, the problem is no longer just the policy itself. It is the inability of the system to correct it.

At that point, they haven’t just reached the same conclusion.
They’ve all got the memo.