There are numbers that should change a public policy debate, and three hundred firebombings are surely one of them. Australia has now crossed an extraordinary threshold, with the Tobacco Wars tracker reporting more than 300 firebombings nationally associated with the illicit tobacco conflict, while UNSW researchers recently reported that nearly 300 arson attacks linked to the illicit tobacco trade had occurred since 2023 alongside extortion, intimidation and murders. This is no longer an inconvenient black market operating quietly behind the counter. It is a violent criminal economy operating in Australian suburbs.
The question Australians should now be asking is painfully simple: how many firebombings does it take before governments reconsider the policies surrounding the market itself? Was 100 enough? Apparently not. Was 200? Apparently not. Now we have passed 300. What number comes next?
Australia’s tobacco policies were developed with a legitimate public health objective of reducing smoking, and for many years, increasing tobacco excise contributed to making cigarettes less affordable and encouraging smokers to quit. But good policy requires more than good intentions and past success. It requires governments to keep examining what happens when circumstances change, and circumstances have changed dramatically.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics produced extraordinary experimental estimates in June, estimating that consumption from illicit sources rose from 12 per cent of total tobacco and nicotine consumption in 2017 to around 80 per cent in 2025, while estimated nicotine consumption increased by almost 40 per cent over the same period. Treasury has also downgraded expected tobacco excise revenue by billions of dollars. These figures deserve some caution because the ABS estimates use wastewater nicotine metabolites and other economic data, so “80 per cent” should not simply be translated into “eight out of ten smokers buy illegal cigarettes”, but whichever precise estimate you prefer, nobody seriously disputes the central fact anymore: Australia has developed an enormous illicit nicotine market. (abc.net.au)
Even the federal government’s Illicit Tobacco and E-cigarette Commissioner acknowledged to ABC’s 7.30 that the illicit market now “dominates the Australian tobacco trade”. That sentence alone should have caused a fundamental reassessment of policy, yet Australia continues largely prescribing more enforcement, more raids, more seizures, more penalties, more shop closures, and more border operations. All of those measures have a role because organised criminals should be prosecuted and illegal products seized, but we must distinguish between attacking the symptoms of an illicit market and changing the economics that sustain it.
Former Australian Border Force commissioner Michael Outram recently gave an extraordinary illustration of the profits involved, telling ABC that 10 million cheap cigarettes could potentially be purchased and imported for about $250,000 and translate into approximately $7.5 million on the Australian street market. When the potential return becomes that large, confiscating one shipment doesn’t necessarily destroy the business model because it creates another opportunity for someone willing to take the risk. Close one shop, and another can open; arrest one distributor, and another can replace them; intercept one container, and another can be sent.
Australia demonstrated the scale of its enforcement response this month when more than 100 service stations were raided nationally in an operation involving almost 300 personnel and 15 federal and state agencies, yet the obvious question remains: if enforcement keeps increasing while the illicit market keeps flourishing, when do we examine the incentive creating the market? That does not mean abandoning enforcement. It means recognising its limitations.
Australia has made legal cigarettes extraordinarily expensive. The excise alone is now around $1.52 per cigarette, according to ABS reporting, meaning tax represents more than 80 per cent of the price of some legal cigarettes. A legal packet of 25 can cost well above $50 while illicit packets may sell for around $25. For decades the public health logic was straightforward: increase cigarette prices and cigarette consumption falls. But that relationship becomes more complicated when consumers can easily obtain dramatically cheaper cigarettes outside the regulated market because the relevant price is no longer simply the price of a legal cigarette, but the price difference between legal and illegal cigarettes. Eventually, taxation can reach a point where another incentive becomes increasingly powerful: avoiding the tax altogether.
This isn’t an argument for cheap cigarettes. It is an argument for recognising basic economics. A tax that consumers overwhelmingly pay can discourage consumption, while a tax that consumers increasingly evade can instead create an enormous profit opportunity for criminals. The question is whether Australia has crossed that line, and there is now enough evidence that governments should at least be prepared to ask it.
What was once almost politically unspeakable is now being openly discussed. The Coalition’s Illegal Tobacco Taskforce has reportedly recommended an 80 per cent reduction in tobacco excise, alongside legalising and regulating vaping and strengthening enforcement, while the federal government rejects the excise approach and continues to emphasise enforcement. Parliamentarians have also begun openly connecting taxation, organised crime, and violence, with parliamentary debate in June referring to the extraordinary number of tobacco-related firebombings and questioning whether enforcement alone can solve the problem.
An 80 per cent excise reduction is a dramatic proposal and deserves proper modelling. Nobody should pretend there are no risks because if legal cigarettes became dramatically cheaper without other changes, cigarette consumption could increase, but dismissing excise reform without seriously examining it is equally irresponsible. The choice isn’t between protecting public health and surrendering to criminals. There is a third option: redesign the market.
This is where tobacco harm reduction becomes essential. The objective should not be to make cigarettes cheaper so people continue smoking. It should be making the criminal cigarette market less attractive while making substantially less harmful alternatives to smoking more attractive.
Australia currently permits combustible cigarettes, the product responsible for the overwhelming majority of tobacco-related death and disease, to be sold through ordinary retailers, yet nicotine vaping products are restricted to pharmacies. The predictable consequence has not been the disappearance of vaping. There has been the emergence of an enormous illegal vape market alongside the illegal cigarette market. We have somehow designed a nicotine market in which criminals frequently provide consumers with greater convenience and product choice than the regulated system, and that should trouble anyone genuinely interested in public health.
A different strategy is possible. Australia could maintain meaningful taxation on cigarettes while reconsidering whether today’s extreme excise level is sustainable, allow tightly regulated adult retail access to vaping and other substantially lower-risk non-combustible nicotine alternatives, establish enforceable product standards, strictly enforce age restrictions, license legitimate retailers and concentrate law enforcement resources on the criminal networks rather than trying to suppress adult demand for nicotine altogether.
The purpose would not be to make smoking attractive again. The purpose would be to make the legal market more attractive than the criminal market and safer nicotine products more attractive than cigarettes.
That is what a genuine harm reduction strategy would look like.
Australia does not have to choose between high smoking rates and a gigantic black market. That is a false choice. We can discourage smoking, provide attractive lower-risk alternatives, regulate nicotine products properly, and simultaneously destroy much of the extraordinary profit margin that organised crime currently enjoys.
What we cannot reasonably do is continue insisting that today’s policy settings are beyond question while the consequences accumulate around us.
Three hundred firebombings were never part of Australia’s tobacco control strategy. Neither were murders, shootings, extortion, criminal tobacco empires, billions of dollars in lost excise revenue, or an illicit nicotine market capable of supplying consumers on an enormous scale.
These outcomes were not intended, but unintended consequences do not cease to matter simply because nobody intended them.
Good public policy is not measured by how strongly governments defend the policies they introduced. It is measured by what those policies actually produce in the real world.
When circumstances change, policy must be capable of changing with them.
Three hundred firebombings should therefore be more than another grim milestone. They should be a line in the sand and the trigger for an independent, comprehensive reassessment of Australia’s entire tobacco and nicotine framework, including excise, illicit market economics, vaping regulation, safer nicotine access, border enforcement and organised crime.
Nothing should be protected from examination simply because it was once considered a successful tobacco control policy.
The objective is not to vindicate one side of the tobacco debate. The objective is fewer people smoking, fewer people dying from smoking, and fewer criminals becoming extraordinarily wealthy by supplying products Australians continue to demand.
If Australia’s current approach is no longer delivering those outcomes as effectively as another approach could, then changing course is not an admission of failure.
It is what evidence-based policy is supposed to look like.
We have passed 300 firebombings. If that is still not enough to trigger a fundamental rethink, Australians are entitled to ask one very uncomfortable question: what number will it be?
Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 campaign for President of the United States often used the phrase ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ to draw attention to the difficult economic times which had developed during President George HW Bush’s term of office. This campaigning devise worked well for Clinton and undoubtedly helped him to become President. But Australia’s True Believers in sky high cigarette excise and quasi prohibition of vapes have got away so far with ignoring the economic cause of the crime wave they have caused as well as the increased economic hardship jacking up cigarette prices have led to especially for low income smokers during a cost of living crisis. Australia’s hardline advocates for zealous implementation of tobacco control have produced a plethora of nasty unintended consequences. Meanwhile our political, media and academic supporters of these policies have provided a Masterclass in how to ignore reaping what you sowed. But ‘things that can’t go on forever, don’t’. One of these days, the music will stop and it will be crystal clear for all regarding why it all went pear shaped and who recommended the policy. In the thirty years of careful monitoring of HIV Infection among Australians who inject drugs, the Kirby Institute found that HIV prevalence varied between 0.8% and 2.5%. This was achieved because harm reduction was the guiding principle of policy. Authorities recognised that law enforcement could never eradicate the heroin market in Australia. They accepted that what was needed was an inclusive approach with explicit peer based education about the basic survival facts people who inject drugs needed to know, needle syringe programs, a much liberalised and greatly expanded methadone profane and user organisations run by people who inject drugs for people who inject drugs. In the process, many lives, many hospitals beds, much misery and many dollars were saved. No wonder the first finding of the recent NSW Legislative Council report on smoking and vaping policy was to restore harm minimisation as the central guiding principle of Australia’s response to tobacco. But around 2011, then Health Minister Nicola Roxon accepted advice to adopt a tobacco control policy which excluded harm reduction. Is there any wonder that the results of leaving out harm reduction was a policy train crash?
Corruption, stupidity 🙄, sheer igerrance or ??¿¿