The cutting of pleasures, the trimming of delights and telling people how they can enjoy life, is the sort of thing that will be tolerated, up to a point. Otherwise liberal countries do suffer moral convulsions, be it about sex, drug taking, smoking and boozing. Regulations and laws are inevitably passed, much of it tolerated. But instead of addressing the vice in question, invigilating rule makers and bureaucratic needlers often end up creating something worse. That’s when questions start being asked.
The demon tobacco is particularly relevant here. While tobacco companies deserve their satanic reputations for ruining health, knowingly denying medical science and encouraging addiction, governments and state authorities have also capitalised. The smoker, in effect, has become a unique exploited species, derided by the moralists for taking to the puff and polluting sacred air, seduced into addiction, and having the wallet raided by the severe excises levied upon the product.
The relentless battle against tobacco consumption has had a curious turn of late in a country which counts itself one of the most successful in restricting it. Over five decades ago, the Marlboro Man vanished from Australian billboards and was nowhere to be seen on television. An aggressive health campaign, accompanied by images of graphic savagery and brutal steep rises in the tobacco excise, accounted for a decline in consumption. (From 2013, the Commonwealth legislated 12.5% annual increases, followed by further rises in the excise.)
In recent years, however, a few problems have emerged. In 2025, the revenue model that the Commonwealth had relied upon was no longer providing expected returns. Legal cigarette and tobacco sales had fallen by 29% in the year through to September. The Australian Tax Office, in calculations made for 2023-24, estimated a net loss of A$3 billion.
Economist John Quiggin explains this decline with admirable clarity: “The short answer is that, over the past decade or so, the tobacco excise has been steadily increased to the point where there are big profits to be made from dodging the tax.” The Australian Financial Review, with a dash of cynicism, also noted that the unquestionable harm caused by smoking had “given successive governments social license to ratchet up taxes on tobacco products for decades while enjoying the accompanying budget bonanza.”
A paper by the conservative Centre for Independent Studies published in November last year argues that a misalignment of priorities has emerged in the policy of taxing tobacco consumption. The Commonwealth, in the main, had been “rewarded for over-taxing while states and local communities bear the health, policing, and insurance costs of the disorder that results.”
Punishing excises have, effectively, encouraged smokers to shop elsewhere. The number of tobacconists and innocuous convenience stores have proliferated, profiting from under-the-counter sales of untaxed tobacco with plain packaging and illegal vapes. The variation of price between a legal pack of 20 cigarettes (about A$50) and one available at such stores (say A$16), should make policy makers blush. The onus has fallen to the States to try to punish infringements, something they have been doing with a certain degree of leniency. To this can be added a throbbing surge in violent crime, thriving criminal syndicates and, if any concession to abject failure was needed, an increase in smoking rates.
In the face of such a collapse in policy, government wiseacres and health advocates remain stubborn to any change on taxing tobacco. Terry Selvin, chief executive of the Public Health Association, sees no reason why the tobacco lobby should be placated, placing the stress, as all fundamentalists on controlling behaviour do, on stiffer regulations. “I think it’s perfectly legitimate for the current excise rate to remain at its current level to allow time for proper enforcement to be put [in] place.” The Australian treasurer Jim Chalmers and the federal health minister, Mark Butler, have both refused to lower the excise. This is despite Butler’s admission in September last year about instances of “violence and arson taking place as rival gangs try to take control of what is a very high-revenue market for them.”
The prohibitive nature of the tobacco excise in Australia has created a state of affairs uncannily similar to the banning of liquor for sale and distribution between 1920 and 1933 in the United States. Initiated by the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act, Prohibition was the fruit of frightful earnestness and fanaticism, progressive hope and aspirational absurdity. “The American people have said that they do not want any liquor sold, and they have said it emphatically by passing almost unanimously the constitutional amendment,” declared House of Representatives Judiciary Chairman Andrew Volstead. Instead of discouraging the consumption of liquor, it created an industry of illicit, often dangerous consumption, producing such criminally enterprising types as Al Capone, encouraging the bootlegging antics of Joseph Kennedy Sr, father of the 35th President of the United States, and gave birth to The Great Gatsby, Scott Fitzgerald’s near perfect, sublime novel of debauched sensibilities and ruined dreams. From then on, America became a nation of habitual lawbreakers.
The effect of Prohibition was inimitably captured by the Republic’s most acerbic critic on the subject. “None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass,” thundered H. L. Mencken in 1925. “There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished.”
The Australian model of prohibitive sale of tobacco, accompanied by a zealous public health campaign, initially diminished consumption. The tide has turned. Government greed and monomania set in. The continuing increase of the tobacco excise has encouraged a tobacco black market run by savvy syndicates waging turf wars over distribution. In response, both the bureaucracy of ineffective law enforcement and the number of smokers has increased. Even the generally dull New South Wales Premier Chris Minns had to grimly muse that “this would be the only tax in the world where it’s doubled but the rate of revenue collection has halved. Something is obviously happening here.” The obvious trend, however, is often the least observed in Canberra.
Keep Independent Journalism Alive – Support The AIMN
Dear Reader,
Since 2013, The Australian Independent Media Network has been a fearless voice for truth, giving public interest journalists a platform to hold power to account. From expert analysis on national and global events to uncovering issues that matter to you, we’re here because of your support.
Running an independent site isn’t cheap, and rising costs mean we need you now more than ever. Your donation – big or small – keeps our servers humming, our writers digging, and our stories free for all.
Join our community of truth-seekers. Please consider donating now via:
PayPal or credit card – just click on the Donate button below
Direct bank transfer: BSB: 062500; A/c no: 10495969
We’ve also set up a GoFundMe as a dedicated reserve fund to help secure the future of our site.
Your support will go directly toward covering essential costs like web hosting renewals and helping us bring new features to life. Every contribution, no matter the size, helps us keep improving and growing.
Thank you for standing with us – we truly couldn’t do this without you.
With gratitude, The AIMN Team
An interesting essay that may provide a discussion point for morally weak opportunistic politicians to say “its all too hard”, thus acceding to the tobacco industry lobbyists demands to reduce the advertising, monetary and availability restrictions on tobacco products.
By the way, I believe both the Marlboro Man and Yul Bryner died of lung cancer!
Mediocrates, around 7 to 8.7 million deaths globally per annum due to smoking [Google AI]. As for advertising the joy of sucking smoke into the lungs, there were four Marlboro Men, three died of lung diseases, the youngest at 51, the oldest at 72. Yul Brynner died at 65. All of them a mere drop in the toxic nicotine ocean.
Other notables who pegged out early due to the consequences of smoking include Humphrey Bogart, David Lynch, Walt Disney, Nat King Cole, Lucille Ball, George Harrison, Dean Martin, John Wayne, Sammy Davis Jr., and King George VI…. a small list among many.
As for the addictive aspects of smoking, I first tried a fag around the age of ~15, and hated it… headache, nauseous etc. I left home a few months before my 17th birthday – kicked out by my father a more accurate term – and took up smoking immediately, a behaviour that persisted into my late 60s, including a ~48 year addiction to cannabis (more psychological than physical), now ~4 years smoke-free. Consequences? Mild emphysema, shortness of breath under physical labour conditions. Whether I dodge the lung cancer bullet or not is entirely moot at this point.
The basis for nicotine addiction is the structural homology of nicotine with the neurotransmitter acetyl choline, the later being responsible for transferring energy pulses over the synapses between nerve cells.
Many persons have naturally low acetyl choline levels, often expressed as mild depression. Nicotine has a sufficiently similar physical atomic structure to acetyl choline, so may replace the function of acetyl choline at the synapses between nerve cells.
For a low acetyl choline person, inhaling smoke deposits nicotine in the blood stream that is expressed as a ”lift out of a depressed state into a happy state”. However, the effect is short-lived, about 20 minutes, meaning that another nicotine shot is required. Hence addiction becomes established by this method of self-medication.
Included with this nicotine inhaling is about 4,000 known carcinogens that take a cumulative effect resulting in lung cancer and/or emphysema and impacting negatively on general body health. Smoking is not advised as a relief from depression. Rather a run around the block to boost endorphins will provide longer lasting success and fewer health problems.
I should disclose that I have never smoked, having grown up in a household where my mother smoked up to 100 cigarettes a day from age 15 years, gave up cold turkey on medical advice aged 68 and died of emphysema and lung cancer 18 years later.
We seem to be missing the point.
The illicit tobacco products on which no duty is being paid are coming in from China, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and other Asian sources.
The duty they are supposed to pay is an ‘excise’ and as such is a federal tax (i.e. not a state tax)
The state police in Australian regional cities and towns do not consider that it is their job to follow up collecting federal taxes or shutting down illegal tobacco shops – after all, they are not breaking any state laws so the responsibility correctly falls at a federal level and for the AFP or Australian Border Force to enforce what are federal laws.
We have two retail outlets in my local regional town, in the main street and across the road from the police station but the state cops do nothing because it is not their job!
To even consider reducing the excise and giving in to the bikies and other crooks is ridiculous – do we reduce income tax rates because some people don’t pay ? of course not.