Australians are funding organised crime by the billion, every year, because government policy made the criminal the cheapest seller in the street. Sovereign Australia removes the illicit market — halve the price of a legal packet to destroy the criminal margin, then finish the trade off through licensing and the supply chain. Regulate vapes properly, publish every chemical used in growing and manufacture, fund real education, and open new crops and new industries to Australian farmers and manufacturers.
Australia set out to tax smoking out of existence. What it produced instead is one of the largest criminal enterprises in the country's history — billions of dollars a year, firebombings and shootings in four states including this one, and a tax base that has collapsed while the number of Australians using nicotine went up.
Sovereign Australia ends the illegal trade. Not with another enforcement announcement — with the only thing that has ever worked against a black market. We cut the price of a legal packet roughly in half, so there is no criminal margin left to fight over. We put real money into education, funded from the revenue the system starts collecting again. We set an Australian-grown, additive-free standard so the product people do choose to use is a cleaner one. We legalise and properly regulate vapes with enforceable standards on what goes in them. And we open the crops — tobacco, hemp, and cannabis — to Australian farmers.
Tobacco excise collected $16.3 billion at its peak in 2019–20. It is now around $7 billion and still falling. Treasury has written billions out of the forward estimates, and its four-year projection has been roughly halved in the space of two budgets. Government estimates put the excise evaded in a single recent year at close to the amount actually collected. The tax did not stop working because Australians stopped smoking. It stopped working because they stopped buying legally.
This is the fact that ends the argument. Across the period in which legal sales halved, the amount of nicotine consumed in this country went up. Not down. Fifty-dollar packets did not make Australians quit. They made Australians change supplier — from a newsagent who pays tax and checks ID, to a criminal who does neither.
When the gap between the legal and illegal price is tens of dollars a packet, the margin is so large that every network shut down is replaced within weeks. That margin has funded a turf war — firebombings, shootings, extortion — across Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia. Governments have answered with more raids and more penalties while the arbitrage that creates the whole industry has been left untouched and, every year, made larger.
The retailer who follows the law is the one who loses. A licensed newsagent or corner store carrying legal stock at $50 cannot compete with the shop down the road selling at $15 and remitting nothing. Legitimate small businesses are losing trade, losing foot traffic, and in some cases losing the premises to arson. They did everything right and the policy punished them for it.
Australia effectively banned retail vaping and moved legal access behind a prescription and a pharmacy counter. The illegal market answered by importing product on an industrial scale. There is now a vape available to any teenager who wants one, in a shop that never asks for ID, made offshore with no ingredient list, no batch testing and no accountability.
The compounds found in black-market product are not hypothetical concerns. Diacetyl, linked to serious lung disease. Diethylene glycol, the compound used in antifreeze. Heavy metals. Nicotine concentrations well above what the label claims, in devices marketed with flavours that appeal to children.
The ban did not protect young Australians. It removed the one mechanism capable of protecting them — a regulated legal counter with a licence to lose and an obligation to check identification.
Tobacco excise is reset so that a legal packet costs roughly half what it costs today, with the rate set in legislation as a percentage of retail and frozen for ten years. No automatic indexation. No formula increases nobody votes on. Parliament changes the rate or it stays where it is.
The arithmetic is the whole policy. At today's prices the criminal makes tens of dollars a packet, which is why enforcement cannot keep up. Take that margin away and the illegal trade stops being worth the risk — and enforcement, for the first time in a decade, starts working. This is not a concession to smokers. It is how you bankrupt an industry that arson and prosecution have failed to touch.
Revenue rises, not falls. A moderate rate collected on a legal market is worth more than a punitive rate collected on half a market — and the half that has gone criminal currently pays nothing at all.
Cutting the price is what makes enforcement possible. It is not the whole job. Once the margin is gone, the remaining trade is small enough to be finished off rather than endlessly managed, and the effort goes where it belongs:
At the supply chain, not the customer. Importers, manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors — the people moving container loads. No Australian should be prosecuted for what they consume; the offence sits with the people supplying an unregulated product for profit.
Through the retail licence. Every outlet selling tobacco or vaping products holds a licence with real conditions and a real consequence. Sell illicit stock and the licence is gone, along with the ability to trade in these products at that site. A licence that can be lost quickly is a faster and more effective deterrent than a prosecution that takes two years.
At the premises. Closure powers for shops repeatedly caught trading illicit product, and accountability for landlords who knowingly lease to them. The shopfronts are the visible end of the syndicate and the easiest part of it to shut.
With the agencies actually joined up. Border Force, the police, the tax office and state licensing regulators sharing data on the same operators instead of each seeing a fragment. The syndicates are national. The response should be too.
This is the part Australians are not told. The billions leaving the tax system every year do not stay in tobacco. Enforcement intelligence is consistent that the syndicates running the illicit trade are diversified criminal businesses, and the profits fund the rest of what they do. Tobacco is simply the easiest and safest earner they have ever been handed — high margin, high volume, low penalty, and a customer base that includes people who would never knowingly fund a criminal enterprise.
Every packet bought outside the legal system is a payment to organised crime. Not a metaphor — a payment. The reason it happens is not that Australians want to fund criminals. It is that government policy made the criminal the cheapest option in the street and then acted surprised.
The excise rate is set federally, and Sovereign Australia will argue for the change at that level. But the tools that shut the shops are held by the states: retail licensing and its conditions, inspection and compliance resourcing, closure powers, penalties, and the local enforcement that actually walks through the door. A state member can push all of it without waiting for Canberra, and Western Australia should not be waiting.
The money the system starts collecting again funds what actually reduces smoking: sustained public education, school programs, and quit support that is free and easy to reach. Australia's smoking decline was driven by education and cultural change long before excise was used as a blunt instrument. Sovereign Australia funds the thing that worked, from revenue the current settings are no longer collecting.
A commercially manufactured cigarette is not simply tobacco. The leaf is grown with synthetic pesticides and treated after harvest, then processed with hundreds of additives — humectants, burn accelerants, flavour compounds, and agents that increase nicotine absorption.
Sovereign Australia establishes an Australian Tobacco Growers Standard, developed with CSIRO, growers and independent researchers: certified organic soil management, no synthetic pesticides or herbicides, no post-harvest chemical treatment, no processing additives outside an approved natural list, and full ingredient disclosure on the pack. One ingredient — tobacco — and a label that says so.
This does not make smoking safe, and Sovereign Australia will not pretend otherwise. Combustion produces carcinogens however the leaf was grown, and nicotine is addictive however it was processed. If you smoke, you are accepting a health risk, and that is an adult's decision to make. What no adult should have to accept is a risk compounded by a chemical load added without their knowledge by a company optimising their addiction. Removing that load is a genuine improvement. It is not a clean bill of health and it is not offered as one.
A cleaner Australian standard is worth little if the products beside it on the shelf still keep their contents secret. So the disclosure obligation applies to every tobacco product sold in this country, domestic or imported, from every manufacturer, with no exemption for commercial confidentiality.
Disclosure covers the whole chain, not just what is added at the end:
Grown: the agricultural chemicals applied to the crop — pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, growth regulators — and any post-harvest chemical treatment. Processed: every additive used in manufacture, named and quantified — humectants, casings and flavour compounds, burn accelerants, and any pH or ammonia agent that alters how nicotine is absorbed. Published: not in unreadable fine print, but in a public register any Australian, researcher or journalist can search, with the pack carrying the list and a link to the full entry.
The obligation is a condition of sale. A product whose contents are not disclosed cannot be imported and cannot be sold. No company gets to treat what it puts in an Australian's lungs as a trade secret.
This is not a special rule invented for tobacco. It is the same principle Sovereign Australia applies to the food supply, set out in the platform and in the Farmers 1st and Environment policies: real-time residue monitoring on Australian produce with the results published so people can see what is actually in their food, an independent review of every approved agricultural chemical against international evidence, and country-of-origin and ingredient labelling that means something.
One consistent rule across the whole chain: if it is applied to a crop or added to a product, it is recorded, and the record is public. That serves three purposes at once — a health interest, because people can see what they are consuming; an environmental interest, because chemical use on Australian land becomes visible and measurable rather than assumed; and a market interest, because the grower who does it cleanly can finally prove it and be paid for it.
Disclosure is information, not endorsement. Knowing precisely what is in a cigarette does not make it safe. It does mean the decision belongs to the person making it, taken with the facts in front of them — which is more than any Australian smoker has ever been given.
Sale to adults 18 and over through licensed retailers, with physical identification verified at the counter as a condition of the licence — not a tick box on a website.
Every product sold must meet an Australian standard covering what goes into it: maximum nicotine concentration by product type, a prohibited-substances list including diacetyl, diethylene glycol and heavy metal compounds, mandatory full ingredient disclosure, child-resistant closures on liquids, and batch testing by an accredited Australian laboratory before the product reaches a shelf.
The standard is a licence condition, not an aspiration. A non-compliant product cannot be sold, and a retailer who sells one loses the licence. Enforcement runs through the licence and the supply chain — the importers, the distributors, the shops — not through the criminal law chasing individual users.
Price is what opens the door. The standard is what closes the sale.
Nobody actually wants an unlabelled vape out of a shipping container, or tobacco of unknown origin from a shop that will not say where it came from. People buy those things because the legal alternative was priced out of reach, not because they preferred them. Offered a product at a fair price that also tells them exactly what is in it, Australians will take the legal one — the same way they do with every other product they put in their body.
What the legal product carries that the illegal one never will:
An ingredient list that is true. Full disclosure on the pack, and for tobacco grown to the Australian Growers Standard, a list with one item on it. A nicotine concentration that matches the label, instead of black-market product frequently testing far above what it claims. Prohibited compounds actually prohibited — diacetyl, diethylene glycol, heavy metals — with the products checked rather than the promise taken on trust. Batch testing by an accredited Australian laboratory before anything reaches a shelf, and child-resistant packaging on liquids.
And one thing nobody mentions: traceability. A legal batch can be traced and recalled. If a product turns out to be contaminated, it can be pulled from every shelf in the country and the people who bought it can be told. Buy from a criminal and there is no batch, no record, no recall, and no recourse — you simply find out the hard way.
That is the whole case for regulation over prohibition. A ban hands the product to people with no obligation to anyone. A standard puts an Australian regulator, an accredited laboratory and a licensed retailer between the manufacturer and the customer. One of those systems protects Australians. The other has been protecting the syndicates.
This is the part of the policy Sovereign Australia cares about most. Everything above is about stopping money going to criminals. This is about where it goes instead: to Australian farmers, Australian factories, and Australian workers.
Farmers are the backbone of this country, and they have been treated as a lobby to be managed rather than the foundation the nation stands on. Opening a crop is not a favour to them. It is the removal of a restriction that should never have been theirs to carry. See the Farmers 1st policy for the rest of it.
Australian farmers have been locked out of crops their soil and climate are ideal for by regulation rather than agronomy. A farm business is only as resilient as the number of things it can sell. Every crop removed from the list is a season a family cannot diversify into, a rotation they cannot use, and an income stream that goes to a grower in another country instead.
Tobacco was an Australian industry. The Ovens Valley grew leaf regarded internationally as high quality — mild, clean, and worth paying for — until offshore sourcing killed the contracts and the district moved on. Licensed cultivation returns under the Australian Growers Standard, and the farm income, the processing and the tax stay in this country.
Hemp comes off the restricted list entirely. It is one of the most versatile crops on earth and one of the easiest to grow — fast, low-input, and it builds soil rather than stripping it. It was banned for no reason beyond a resemblance to a relative. Australian farmers should be free to grow it at any scale they choose.
Cannabis is covered in full in the Cannabis & Hemp policy. The principle across all three is identical: the crop is legal, the standard is high, the market is open, and what to plant is the farmer's decision.
Australia's standing habit is to grow or dig something, ship it out raw, and buy it back finished at ten times the price. Sovereign Australia does not repeat that mistake with a new industry. The leaf and the fibre are the beginning of the value chain, not the end of it.
From the leaf: cigarettes, but also cigars, cigarillos, pipe blends, rolling tobacco and heated-tobacco products. Each is a separate market with a separate customer. The craft end of it — hand-rolled cigars, small-batch regional blends, single-district leaf — carries the same provenance premium Australian wine, beef and coffee already command overseas. Nicotine extraction for legal e-liquids runs off the same farms, so the vaping industry is supplied from an Australian paddock instead of a container from Shenzhen.
From the fibre: textiles, rope and canvas, paper, hempcrete and building panels, composites and moulded components, stockfeed, and seed oil for food and cosmetics. That is manufacturing work — in regional towns, using a crop grown down the road, with no psychoactive dimension to argue about at all.
Every one of those products is a factory that does not currently exist, in towns that need one.
That is what Sovereign Australia is. Not a party that manages decline and argues about how to divide what is left — a party that opens markets, removes the restrictions holding Australians back from building things, and backs the farmer, the manufacturer and the small business owner to get on with it.
Tobacco, hemp and cannabis are three crops and a supply chain of industries built on them. The same principle runs through every Sovereign Australia policy: Australians should be free to grow it, make it, sell it, and keep the value here. Opportunity is created by removing the things standing in its way — and then getting out of the road.
Australia has almost no commercial tobacco growing left. Sovereign Australia's long-term position is a sovereign industry supplied by Australian farms and Australian manufacturing, protected by tariff on imported leaf and finished product. That tariff is phased in as domestic supply comes online — not imposed on day one against a supply base that does not yet exist, which would only hand the criminal market another windfall while the gap is filled. Cut the excise first. Licence the growers. Close the border as the crop comes in.
It is not encouragement to smoke or vape. Sovereign Australia's position on nicotine is unchanged: it is harmful, it is addictive, and fewer Australians using it is a good outcome.
It is not a softening on minors. Sale to anyone under 18 remains prohibited, with identification checked at every counter and the retailer's licence on the line — which is more protection than a black market shop has ever offered.
It is not a favour to multinational tobacco. The standard is Australian, the leaf is Australian, and companies that will not source and manufacture here can leave the market.
It is a policy about who collects the money and who controls the product: an Australian regulator, an Australian farmer and a licensed Australian shopkeeper — or a criminal syndicate. That is the actual choice, and for the last decade this country has been choosing the syndicate by accident.
| Current — Taxed Into The Black Market | Sovereign Australia — Legal, Cheaper, Collected |
|---|---|
| About half of all cigarettes sold are criminal supply, paying no tax. | Legal price cut roughly in half. The criminal margin disappears and enforcement starts working. |
| Excise collections down from $16.3B to around $7B and still falling. | A moderate rate on a restored legal market collects more than a punitive rate on half a market. |
| Rate rises automatically by formula, never voted on. | Rate legislated as a share of retail and frozen for ten years. Parliament changes it or it stays. |
| Firebombings, shootings and extortion across four states. | Remove the arbitrage and the trade stops being worth the risk. |
| Enforcement chases networks that are replaced within weeks, because the margin survives. | Margin removed first, then licensing, closure powers and supply-chain enforcement finish it. |
| Billions a year in untaxed profit funding diversified criminal syndicates. | That money returns to the tax system and to legitimate Australian retailers and farmers. |
| Vapes sold by shops that never check ID, with no ingredient list. | 18+, licensed retail, ID at the counter, enforceable chemical standard, accredited batch testing. |
| Illegal product frequently tests well above its labelled nicotine strength. | Accurate labelling, accredited batch testing before sale, prohibited compounds actually prohibited. |
| No batch, no record, no recall, no recourse if something goes wrong. | Traceable batches. A contaminated product can be pulled nationally and buyers told. |
| What is sprayed on the crop and added in the factory is commercial-in-confidence. | Full disclosure — growing chemicals, post-harvest treatment and every additive — in a public searchable register. No disclosure, no sale. |
| Hundreds of undisclosed additives in a manufactured cigarette. | Australian Growers Standard — organic soil, no additives outside an approved list, full disclosure. |
| Farmers locked out of tobacco and hemp by regulation, not agronomy. | Crops opened. Hemp off the restricted list. Farm income, processing and tax stay in Australia. |
| Value shipped out raw, finished product bought back at a premium. | Manufacturing here — cigars, blends, e-liquid from Australian leaf, hempcrete, textiles, composites. |
| The legitimate corner shop loses trade to the illegal one next door. | Legal retail competitive on price again. The shop that follows the law stops being punished for it. |
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No memos pinned to this policy yet. When a Sovereign Australia memo on this topic is published, it will appear here with a short summary. The full memo index is at sovereignaustraliaparty.com.au/memos.html.