Senator Dorinda Cox and the Government Senators had an extraordinary body of evidence placed before them during the Senate inquiry into Australia’s illegal tobacco crisis. They heard about organised crime, collapsing legal tobacco sales, billions of dollars in lost revenue, enormous quantities of illicit cigarettes entering Australia, widespread illegal vaping and the limitations of enforcement, yet Senator Cox and her Labor colleagues emerge from the inquiry largely defending the policy architecture that helped create the conditions now being investigated.
The majority report reaches an exceptionally serious conclusion. Australia’s tobacco-control system is approaching a “breaking point”, with the illicit market threatening the basic functionality of existing tobacco-control measures. Senator Cox’s response is effectively that smoking rates are falling, therefore the fundamental policy remains sound, but those two things can simultaneously be true. Australia can have declining smoking prevalence while also having catastrophically distorted the remaining cigarette market. Indeed, the report records exactly that: daily smoking has continued declining while the proportion of smokers recently using illicit tobacco has doubled from roughly one in six to one in three. That should not be dismissed as an inconvenient side effect; it is evidence that the market has changed.
The contradiction in Senator Cox’s position is that Labor correctly argues cheap cigarettes undermine quitting, yet cheap cigarettes are already readily available. They simply are not being supplied by the legal market; organised crime is supplying them. The government has therefore lost control of the very price mechanism upon which its tobacco policy increasingly depends. Saying that higher prices reduce smoking is no longer enough when consumers can walk away from the regulated market and buy dramatically cheaper cigarettes from an illicit supplier.
The majority makes a very specific recommendation on vaping. It does not recommend deregulating vaping or selling unrestricted products to children. Recommendation 3 says Australia should adopt settings similar to New Zealand to establish the legal sale of regulated nicotine vapes and other non-smoking nicotine products as comparatively less harmful alternatives for Australian smokers. Yet the Government Senators’ dissent characterises this approach with rhetoric about “letting vapes rip”, which completely misrepresents the recommendation. Regulated adult access is not deregulation. Age restrictions, product standards, nicotine controls, ingredient standards, retail licensing, and penalties for selling to minors are all forms of regulation.
What Australia has today is arguably much closer to “letting vapes rip”: an enormous illicit market operating outside those controls. The committee heard estimates that approximately 95.7 per cent of e-cigarettes sold in Australia were illicit, and the majority concluded that the pharmacy-only model had pushed consumers towards the black market. Senator Cox should confront the implications of that finding rather than attack those proposing an alternative model. If almost an entire consumer market has migrated outside the regulated system, declaring the regulation successful because it looks tough on paper is not enough.
The Government Senators’ dissent also states categorically that “Vapes are a gateway to smoking.” But even accepting concerns about youth vaping does not answer the question before policymakers: can an established adult smoker reduce their health risk by completely replacing combustible cigarettes with a regulated non-combustible nicotine product? That is a different scientific and public-health question. The majority report recognises precisely that distinction when it describes regulated vaping as likely to be significantly less harmful than continuing to smoke. Senator Cox and the Government Senators instead appear to collapse two very different populations into one: young people who have never smoked and adult smokers seeking alternatives. Public-health policy should be sophisticated enough to protect the first group while helping the second. Those objectives are not mutually exclusive.
The inquiry also heard evidence warning that spectacular seizure numbers do not necessarily demonstrate that the illicit market is shrinking. Dr John Coyne warned that seizures can merely “sample the flow” without affecting criminal profitability. At the same time, Dr Nicholas Coatsworth described such statistics as potential “metrics of policy failure” when demand simply moves from legitimate retailers to criminal suppliers. That presents Senator Cox and the Government with a straightforward question: what evidence would convince them that enforcement alone is insufficient? Another billion cigarettes seized, another billion after that, more tobacconists closed, more firebombings, more excise revenue disappearing? At what point does increasing enforcement activity cease being proof that enforcement is succeeding and start becoming evidence of the enormous scale of the market it is failing to suppress?
The majority is not even demanding an arbitrary tobacco tax cut. It does not recommend One Nation’s 75 per cent reduction or an arbitrary 80 per cent reduction. It recommends immediately pausing further increases and commissioning an independent review to determine an appropriate excise level, with modelling of alternative levels released publicly. That should appeal to anyone claiming to favour evidence-based policy. If Senator Cox believes reducing excise would increase total smoking sufficiently to overwhelm any reduction in illicit-market share, demonstrate it through transparent independent modelling. Model legal cigarette consumption, illicit consumption, quitting, switching to lower-risk nicotine products, government revenue, organised-crime profitability and enforcement costs, publish the assumptions and let everyone see the trade-offs. Simply declaring that high excise worked historically does not answer whether today’s extraordinarily high excise remains optimal in today’s extraordinarily different market.
This is ultimately what troubles me most about Senator Cox and the Government Senators’ position. Australia continues allowing combustible cigarettes to be sold through ordinary retailers while heavily restricting legal access to products smokers could use instead, while criminals sell both cigarettes and vapes. The result is almost perverse: the legal system preserves convenient retail availability of the most dangerous nicotine product while making legal access to a non-combustible substitute considerably more difficult, the black market fills the gap, and when someone proposes correcting that imbalance Senator Cox and the Government Senators describe it as “letting vapes rip”.
That is not a convincing answer to Recommendation 3; it is a slogan. Senator Cox does not have to like vaping, approve of nicotine use or trust tobacco and vaping companies, but none of those things answers the public-health question. If an adult is going to continue using nicotine, should Australian policy make it easier for that person to obtain a regulated combustible cigarette or a regulated non-combustible alternative?
For fourteen years, my answer has been informed by lived experience as much as policy debate: harm reduction does not require perfection. It requires giving people a realistic pathway away from the thing most likely to kill them.
The Senate majority has finally asked whether Australia’s tobacco and nicotine policies still make sense when judged against the market that actually exists rather than the market policymakers wish existed. Senator Dorinda Cox and the Government Senators are entitled to disagree with the answers, but after an inquiry documenting an enormous illicit tobacco market, widespread organised-crime involvement, serious limitations to enforcement and a vaping market overwhelmingly operating outside the legal system, simply defending the existing philosophy is no longer enough.
The burden of proof should run in both directions. Those proposing reform should demonstrate that their reforms are likely to work, but Senator Cox and the Government should now also have to demonstrate that continuing the present system will. That is the debate Australia should finally be having.
Most people who have read the majority and minority reports, released today, of the Senate inquiry into Australia’s ‘Illegal Tobacco Trade’ will conclude that the majority report has by far the better of the arguments. We have been over these arguments again and again for several years. Alan Gor has once again done a superb job in getting to the nub of the problem. While Senator Cox had enough of an open mind to switch from one political party to another, from the Australian Greens to the Australian Labor Party, she displayed a shockingly closed mind when hearing the evidence. As so often when policy makers persist with a policy which has clearly failed, the delay in correcting the current dysfunctional policy causes even more damage when it inevitably and eventually happens including damage to the reputations of the True Believers who persisted supporting a policy that clearly didn’t work. Policies firstly have to be effective. Tobacco control argues that smoking rates fell based on the National Drug Strategy Household Surveys of 2025 compared to 2022. But we can’t be certain the 2025 survey was comparable with 2022 because supply had predominantly changed from legal to illegal. In addition, several large state surveys and the nicotine waste water analysis suggest smoking may in fact be increasing. But policy not only has to be effective, it also has to be safe. That is, unintended negative consequences have to be acceptable. But how can it be considered acceptable when due to the government’s smoking and vaping policies, there has been rampant extortion of retailers, firebombing of 300 retailers, increased insurance for retailers, six alleged homicides (including one bystander uninvolved with the legal or illegal trades), the loss of many billions of dollars every year from cigarette excise revenue and 80% of nicotine being sold in Australia according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics is provided by organised crime? Senator Steele-John, representing the Australian Greens, concurs with the two Labor Senators in a separate minority report. The majority opinion was supported by Senators from a number of parties. The longer cigarette excise remains sky high and do you have availability of vapes is so severely restricted that almost their entire supply in Australia is provided by organised crime, the worse unintended consequences will get. Maintaining cigarette excise so high that it provides an economic incentive to organised crime to supply increasing quantities of illegal cigarettes, illegal tobacco and illegal vapes, means the increasing shortfall of revenue comes at a time when the federal government is under growing pressure to stop the budget deficit and produce a budget surplus. At present, Victoria has more crime and violence than other parts of the country. The smoking and vaping policy anomalies greatly contribute to that. When Labor loses the Victorian elections in three months, as now seems inevitable, the exorbitant cigarette excise will be identified as a significant contributing factor along with the punishing cost of living and the massive corruption in infrastructure construction. Tobacco control simply cannot put smoking and vaping policy to bed because an increasing number of community members and journalists sense that something is seriously wrong. And they’re quite right to think that.
Senator Cox has to defend Mark Butlers line and the things that Freeman and Chapman were whispering in the governments ear. Even, on the hearing she said that " vaping causes cancer" a nonsense that was debunked in less than 24 hours.
What worries me is that throughout this illegal tobacco saga, vapes have become a secondary issue and almost hardly ever mentioned.
Nick Coatsworth although a supporter of vaping is recommending "flavour restrictions". And if he becomes one of the new "experts" Australia will not move much further from the situation that we are in right now.
What worries me is that they will take some measures to eliminate the illegal tobacco market but will leave vapes and vaping out of it, or will come up with some halfarsed solution that will not satisfy anyone.
Nicotine vaping is such an individual and diverse thing that any "stricked regulations" will leave a big hole for black market to operate.