Brushes with fame

30 Tuesday Dec 2025

Tags

famous-people, life, short-story, writing

My wifeTrish, with George Clooney in Bellagio, 2014

[updated 3 Jun 2026]

If someone’s had a brush with fame, they tend to want to tell everyone about it. I’ve had a few. So OK, let’s get them out there.

Peter Cook and Sir Alec Guinness

I lived in London in 1973, working in the library at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington (see short story here at p 24). One day I went to browse in a record bar in Mayfair. Behind the counter was an ex-Bathurst boy, Peter Dixon (I’d grown up there). As we chatted, he was full of stories about who came into the shop and their musical tastes. One who did so often, was Barry Humphries.

Humphries had been on the wagon for many months with his alcoholism and was soon to perform in an invitation-only comeback show in the small, intimate theatre of the May Fair Hotel. Peter had been given a ticket. I had long had a passion for Humphries’ Sandy Stone character and still own both of the very rare 7 inch 33rpm Wildlife in Suburbia records from 1958-59, that I bought as a boy (pictured below). I can recite lengthy monologues of two of them (Days of the week, Sandy’s Christmas). [both for sale if you’re interested]

I told Peter all this and he said he’d ask Barry if I could have a couple of tickets (one for my first wife, Annie). I went in next week and was handed the tickets and an autographed copy of his recent LP The Barry Humphries Record of Innocent Austral Verse.

On the big night, we shuffled into our numbered seats. I was right next to Sir Alec Guinness (1914-2000) and Peter Cook (1937-1995) (of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore) was in the seat in front of me. I had to squeeze past Dianna Rigg (1938-2020), star of The Avengers.

What a night.

Mel Gibson

In the 1970s and 80s, I was a regular at the Roma café in Sydney’s Haymarket, just down from the Capitol Theatre. I worked for a time in the McKell Building just behind the Capitol. I’d always have a cappuccino and one of their legendary almond twists. Mad Max had been released in April 1979, starring Mel Gibson. It was huge for him. So one morning I was alone at a table in the Roma, and there he was, on his own, standing and asking me would it be OK if he shared my table. No problem, Mel. No small talk. Just a quiet coffee.

The Rev Fred Nile

I was flying from Amsterdam to Sydney, and in business class in the upper deck of a 747 where you are next to another passenger. It was before the days of the pull up screen that shielded you from the person in the next seat. I had boarded earlier than whoever it was who would be sitting next to me. Then along he came. It was Fred Nile, Australia’s dour morals crusader. The Sodom and Gomorrah cataloguer, stepping out of the Amsterdam cesspool. Oh Jesus. I nodded at him as he took his seat but that was our only interaction on that very long, silent flight.

John Brass, dual-code rugby international

On a flight from Sydney to London, I had the third seat in an economy row with John Brass and his wife. Brass was an Australian dual rugby and rugby league international, playing 12 matches for Australia in rugby (1966-68) and 6 in league (1970, 1975). League match commentator Frank Hyde used to say he had the best pair of hands in rugby league. I’d been a huge Eastern Suburbs Roosters fan in the 1970s and so had lots to talk about. We got through quite a few beers and he loosened up about all his old team mates. The nicest of guys.

Tina Turner

Many years ago, I’d seen Tina Turner perform at St George Leagues Club in Sydney’s suburbs. I went along with some Aboriginal health students who were down from the bush. She was without doubt the most high energy performer I ever saw. The students were hugely excited. I think it must have been around the same time, I was on a flight to Melbourne. She was on board, it was her birthday and she came down the aisle with a trolley with a giant birthday cake, serving every passenger a slice. People loved it!

Luc Longley

On July 20, 1995 I found myself at a table at a black tie dinner at Sydney’s Darling Harbour for the 2000 Sydney Olympics. I’d received an invitation to attend and had no idea why. I’m far from loaded and while we have always donated to various charities over the years, forking out for the Olympics couldn’t have been a lower priority. This was what I imagined was the purpose. But no.

I was seated in a pre-arranged seat around a circular table along with about 10 others. Opposite me was a towering figure who was vaguely familiar. I sheepishly asked the man on my right who he was. He didn’t know either, but it was Luc Longley (2.18m) who played for the Chicago Bulls basketball team. So who was my other ignorant informer? Only Allan Moss, the CEO of Macquarie Bank. When he retired in 2008, he walked away with an estimated $100m package.

Oh boy. What could I talk about to him over the next couple of hours? It was well before the time when your bank sent those infernal messages “after your experience with his today, how likely are you to recommend us to your friends and family”, but even back then, talking about banking was still about the least interesting topic I could imagine. I knew nothing about investment banking. At the time Macquarie did not have a consumer division with actual customers to allow me to ask all the scintilating questions I didn’t have.

I knew his wife was Irene Moss, former head of the NSW Anti Discrimination Board, but figured he would feel my asking about his wife’s important job rather than his was sub-par. I don’t recall him asking me anything about my work or life. So it was a long night. We both had little conversation for each other.

I found out later that the dinner was all about bringing the top end of town on board the Olympics, with hopes of corporate splashes. Each table was assigned two “interesting” people to embellish the event: Longley and me, apparently. I was a fizzer. Moss might have got his $100m but, hey, I still have the souvenir wine glass.

Slim Dusty

In the 1970s, worked with a woman for while whose boyfriend played violin in Slim Dusty’s band. She called me one Saturday morning and said Slim was playing Cronulla League’s Club that night and they were short of a road crew dog’s body. Did I want a night’s work? I jumped at it and went down in the afternoon to help unload the sound gear from a truck. They then asked if I would stay around till the end of the gig that evening and act as door marshal to the band’s backstage room, and then help pack up.

The brief was that after every gig there would be small queue of people who would want to meet up with Slim. My job was to explain nicely that he was very tired after a long day and, sorry, he couldn’t see fans. I hope they understood etc.

About 15 or so came toward the backstage entrance and most were OK with being turned away. But there were a few who were ready with stories to see them past my imposing presence. One pulled out a photo of a small child and said to show it to Slim because he’d been to her christening as a baby in some Queensland backblocks town years ago. “He’ll remember me, for sure”. He stood his ground, so I went in and summarised the situation to Slim. “Oh well, I guess I’d better be Slim Dusty for a while” he said putting in his hat and stepping outside to greet the beaming bloke.

Pat Cummins

In November 2023, I was with my wife and very young grandson at Clovelly beach about 9am. Its sheltered bay is perfect for toddlers to paddle in the water. There were four or so mothers with similarly young kids and a bunch of schoolboys doing some sort of drills on the sand and in the water with a teacher.

Suddenly Trish said “wow, do you see who that is coming out of the water? It’s Pat Cummins!” Nah, couldn’t be I said. He’s in India at the cricket World Cup. They just beat India in the final.

But hang on. He might have just flown home. The final was the day before. He could have flown home overnight. And I’d read somewhere he lived in Clovelly. Maybe went straight to the beach to have a swim and freshen up.

But the more I looked, I thought no. He seemed tall enough, but he didn’t seem to be as tanned on the arms and face as you’d expect after weeks in the Indian sun. He was apparently with his wife and child. Trish googled the wife and yes it was her.

But no one, including us, went near them. Just another family having a morning swim. Pat came along to the outdoor shower with his child when we were there with ours. Some light chat about what a great day it was but again, il silencio about the cricket.

Is there any other country where a national sporting hero, one day after winning the World Cup, could be with his family on a beach and be left alone?

Marlon Williams

We have close friends on the NSW north coast and have often done the drive up to the East Coast Blues and Roots Festival just north of Byron Bay. When these got ridiculously huge so that to see an act from a decent seat you needed to watch three or four previous acts before in the same tent who you didn’t much want to see , we decided to give gave it a miss.

Our friends felt the same and suggested we instead came up for the Mullumbimby Music Festival 15km or so north. Over the years we saw the unforgettable Canadians Jenn Grant and Frazey Ford and Dustyesky, the fake genuine Russian men’s choir.

So one year we were in the local RSL having a beer before Marlon Williams, the New Zealand folk crooner, was due on. The bar was pretty empty and then in he walked. Like a pathetic creepy autograph hunter, over I went and explained that Trish was a huge fan and would he ever so mind …? He was totally friendly and that was the last I ever saw of her.

Peter Garrett

When Australia’s Health Minister and later Attorney General, Nicola Roxon, led Australia to introduce plain tobacco packaging, Trish was at that time doing back-up vocals and keys in our cover band The Original Faux Pas. In 2011 She rewrote the lyrics to the Shangrila’s Leader of the Pack as a tribute to Nicola, Queen of Plain Tobacco Packs. Four in the band were having dinner one night, and sang it to an iPad camera, with Trish and Suzanne our other vocalist in cheap $15 wigs. We put it up on YouTube and over the next months it had 1500 hits.

Some months later I was with a friend, Melanie Wakefield, in a Canberra restaurant near Parliament House and in walked Nicola, soon to be joined by her parliamentary colleagues Jenny Macklin, Peter Garrett, Greg Combet, Kevin Rudd and Craig Emerson. We chatted with her before the others arrived and then continued our dinner. As we were leaving, I heard a voice behind me call my name. I turned and it was Peter Garrett who had followed us out. I’d never met him before. The next words of the world famous rock star turned politician were “I hear you are a world famous rock star!”

He said Nicola had sent the YouTube link to many of her colleagues, and thought it was wonderful fun. The three of us stood on the footpath swapping early bad gig stories. Later that year, he sent me a birthday note for my 60th birthday, referencing the famous Spinal Tap scene about “turning it up to 11” and insisting we continue to book a Bowral pub where I’d told him only four had turned up for a gig we’d played. “That ever happen to the Oils?” I asked. Plenty of times in the early days. It’s the Rule of 10: after 10 gigs in a pub, word gets around and it fills up.”

I told this story to Trish and she looked very sceptical.

A few years later, we were in Canberra staying with old friends, one of whom was the sister of Ian Moss, incendiary guitarist in Cold Chisel. She had comp tickets for us all in the VIP area for a Chisel/Paul Kelly gig. Tragically, Penny died suddenly in 2025.

Trish and I went over to the National Portrait Gallery in the afternoon before the concert. The first painting displayed near the entrance was a huge portrait of Midnight Oil. We moved close to it and as we did, two others who had been close to it turned to move on. The guy immediately said “Well, hello Simon!” It was Peter Garrett with his wife Doris. Trish’s scepticism died that afternoon.

Tell me about yours

Australia takes off the gloves on illegal tobacco while ‘lower the tax’ fantasists plumb new absurdities

09 Tuesday Dec 2025

Posted by Simon Chapman AO in Blog

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Tags

news, smoking, vaping, wastewater

Australia’s epidemic of illicit (untaxed) cheap cigarette shops is entering a new phase as Australian Border Force reports record seizures and three states (South Australia, Queensland and New South Wales) have taken off the kid gloves and are now hammering illegal tobacco retailers.

Australian Border force data show “From 1 July 2024 to 30 June 2025, the ABF made 23,097 illicit tobacco detections, seizing 2.53 billion cigarette sticks and 435.46 tonnes of loose-leaf tobacco. This equates to a total of over 2,091 tonnes of illicit tobacco products seized and prevented an estimated $4.36 billion in duty evaded across the financial year.” In the first quarter of the 2025/2026 financial year, a further “586 million cigarettes and over 3 million vapes have already been seized at the Australian border in the first quarter of this financial year (1 July – 30 September)”.

Queensland has recently introduced fines of up to $161,300 or one year jail for a commercial landlord who knowingly allows a tenant to sell illegal cigarettes and vapes. Its store closure powers are now 3 months, up from a mere 72 hours, once commonly referred to as “the tobacconists’ long weekend”. The Health and Ambulance Services Minister Tim Nicholls describes the new laws as “an absolute game changer“.

South Australia has now closed 100 shops for 28 days, with two closed for much longer with another eight before the courts facing long term closure and massive fines; seized 41 million cigarettes (2.05 million packs); and 140,000 vapes.

NSW Health began getting serious when legislation enabling on the spot 90 day closures, stock seizures, landlord fines and serious maximum on-the-spot fines ($1.54m) came into effect from the first week in November. The Department updates its register of busts each Friday, with the current list now at 40 closures.

In early December raids on homes and storage facilities saw arrests and seizures of 10 tonnes of illegal tobacco.

Western Australia and Victoria which have historically been on the national podium for their early adoption of most tobacco control laws and regulations but look certain to get the booby prize on this issue, both still playing catch-up with other states .

For as long as governments have taxed tobacco, tobacco companies have lobbied for the taxes to be frozen or reduced. For over 40 years they have had day-by-day, shop-by-shop, brand-by brand data on the sales impact of every variable know to reduce or increase cigarette sales. Significantly here, tax increases have always been in the industry’s crosshairs because they depress sales.

Sweet spot tax fantasies

It’s been standard for several years now for those in lockstep with Big Tobacco’s calls for lowering tobacco tax to call for a halt to rises and to make allusions to tobacco excise tax actually falling. Deakin University criminologist James Martin has been in the forefront of these calls for Australia’s tobacco tax to be lowered but until quite recently had been too shy to give us all his expert figure on a new “sweet spot” for a tax reduction. This would be the point where many smokers would abandon buying cheap illicits and go back to paying for legal taxed cigarettes.

Today, if you buy a carton illegal cigarettes, you can get them for as low as $7 a pack of 20. A common range for a single pack is $10-$15. Martin and Alex Wodak dodged naming a tax rate in July 2025 in a Crikey piece when vaguely urging “reducing tobacco excise to undercut the illicit trade”. Something called “Harm Reduction Australia” published an unsigned Tobacco Harm Reduction Policy Brief , presumably covered with the fingerprints of its tobacco harm reduction advisors, Wodak and Martin. They suggested that the tax be reduced to the level it was in 2020. In this August 2025 blog, I did the maths, and generously took the hypothetical cuts even further back to 2019 tax levels to see how things tasted.

If this occurred today, the retail price of a reduced tax pack would fall to some $22, still $7 or 47% more than a pack of $15 illegals or $15 more than the $7 a pack when buying by the carton price.

So on what planet would anyone be living on who seriously thought such a tax reduction would see droves of smokers rush back to the newly reduced tax legal cigarettes?

Eliminate tobacco tax … to get more smokers buying taxed tobacco!

This ludicrous penny may well have finally dropped for Martin when in November he was publicly quoted in the Singapore Straits Times that “taxes would need to be significantly lowered and even eliminated to discourage criminals from operating a black market.” [my emphasis]. Eliminated. Now how would this work?

Let’s walk through his brilliance.

So … the government has a problem that it’s losing lots of tax revenue because many smokers are buying illegal untaxed cigarettes. To fix this, Martin suggests that the government should consider dropping all tobacco tax. If it did this, there would of course be no tobacco tax to collect, but, hey, these now (legal) untaxed cigarettes would be competitive with (illegal) untaxed cigarettes and the black market would be “discouraged”. All following this?

But wait… with the newly tax-free legal cigarettes, where would the government get the extra river of gold of tobacco tax revenue from that it desperately needs, since it would have just eliminated it all? Whoops!

Enter the Davidson

The latest player to step forward into this mess is Professor Sinclair Davidson from Victoria’s RMIT. Davidson, an adjunct ‘fellow’ at regulation-scything Institute of Public Affairs has been an anti tobacco control warrior for sometime via his now defunct Catallaxy Files blog and his four time participation in Big Tobacco’s annual invitation-only global shindig, the Global Tobacco and Nicotine Forum.

In a paper for the Centre for Independent Studies, Davidson is also shy of telling us what his tobacco tax cut/illegal tobacco ending magic number is. All he’s willing to say is that it would be “stabilised within an economically defensible range”. And that would be?

Google Scholar shows Davidson has had 320 publications since 1991, 134 (42%) of which are uncited. Six of these are about tobacco, which have attracted all of 26 cites. That’s his form in all this. Still, a 42% never-cited rate is a lot better than the 82% rate reported across the humanities.

Those lobbying hard to get governments to do something sensible to wreck Australia’s illegal tobacco and vapes market are in an unlikley choir that has never sung from the same hymn sheet before. It includes Treasury, the convenience store, tobacco and vaping industries, and public health. All are very keen to see illicit tobacco trade fall dramatically. Treasury wants tobacco tax to grow, and the three industries want their tobacco sales revenue streams back. Public health and government want smoking to fall, and non-smokers (especially kids) to not buy vapes or tobacco, as they increasingly are failing to do.

Wastewater nicotine analysis: total nicotine is falling, not rising

Here, wastewater nicotine analysis offers a potential lever for the industry interests to pull in its lobbying for tax reduction. We have all seen illegal tobacco shops openly trading, and some think this must mean that more people are smoking to make this trade viable. But is it actually true that cheap illegal cigarettes are causing more people to take up smoking and less to quit? Or is it just moving lots of current smokers from legal sales outlets to much cheaper illegal ones?

Here, Davidson quotes from the National Wastewater Drug Monitoring Program’s (NWDMP) latest report for 2023-24 .They have been testing since 2016-17, publishing data on nicotine found in wastewater (sewage) in testing sites serving 57% of the Australian population (14.5m) with both regional and capital city sampling.

The summary below from its latest report shows that between April and August 2024, population weighted nicotine consumption fell in both regional and capital city Australia. In fact this fall has been going on since August 2023: page 16 of the report states that while illegal tobacco and vape retailing was booming “for nicotine, average consumption [across Australia] decreased between August 2023 and August 2024” Although page 87 notes that “average capital city nicotine consumption then increased from August to October 2024”.

Contrast those words with Davidson’s at p6 of his report “Wastewater analysis reinforces this picture: between August 2023 and August 2024, aggregate consumption of nicotine rose to above long-term averages”. The NWDMP reports on “average consumption decreased” (ie population weighted) while Davidson says “aggregate consumption … rose” (ie total consumption unweighted for population growth).

Sorting different sources of nicotine

The NWDMP’s testing to estimate consumption of nicotine is done by measuring two nicotine metabolites, cotinine and hydroxycotinine. Their report notes on page 32 that this method “cannot distinguish between nicotine from tobacco, e-cigarettes, or nicotine replacement therapies such as patches and gums” and that “consumption of nicotine has increased over the life of the Program” (p59)

This is hardly surprising. Vaping in Australia rose substantially between 2019-2023 and in 2022-23, 233,544 PBS prescriptions were issued for nicotine replacement therapy (NRT), some 43% of the estimated NRT market (a majority of which is over-the- counter sales in pharmacies and supermarkets). So together with nicotine from vapes, this NRT sourced nicotine represents a river of excreted nicotine in the sum of total nicotine in Australian sewage systems, a point acknowledged by Davidson.

Emerging science points to possibilities of testing wastewater to get separate estimates for total nicotine (cigarettes, vapes and NRT combined) including that only from cigarette use. Anabasine and anatabine are minor alkaloids found in tobacco but are absent in NRT. However anabasine is present not just in cigarettes but also in e-liquids and aerosols. So challenges remain to test for estimates of only tobacco use (leaving out NRT and vaping nicotine exposure).

This is an area of science very much in its infancy, with the take-home message being that we all need to remain sceptically alert to crude claims that “wastewater” analysis is showing changes one way or the other in tobacco smoking.

Those in Australia who have collectively decades of experience in monitoring and interpreting different data sets on tobacco use, repeatedly emphasise that longer term data from multiple sources including survey data are essential in getting a true picture of trends. Prof Coral Gartner from the University of Queensland said that “All data, including that from wastewater, has limitations and errors, including seasonal effects. What may look like an increase in one data collection can become just ‘noise’ when further data points are added.”

If you search “wastewater and nicotine” for Australia, stand by for reports on the latest NWDMP data that variously describe nicotine as being up or down. Those catastrophising the possibility that smoking will be certain to rise in the presence of cheap illegal cigarettes can take nothing definitive from the latest wastewater statistics. But with those who collect and interpret it saying that total nicotine is down across the country, those saying it is up need to explain themselves.

Egg on some faces: statisticians at 10 paces on the impact of New Zealand’s vape laws on youth smoking

28 Thursday Aug 2025

Posted by Simon Chapman AO in Blog

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Tags

confirmation-bias, health, new-zealand, smoking, vaping

Source: Sergey Vinagradov- Unsplash

Modern vaping theology venerates New Zealand’s “regulated vaping market model” as the way all nations should go if they want to reduce smoking. Its doctrinaire, excitable adherents feverishly point to unparalleled recent declines in smoking prevalence in all adults, in Māori adults (who smoke much more than the general population) and in youth. These declines are said to have followed the advent and rise in vaping and New Zealand’s Nov 2020 regulation of vapes which allowed them to be legally sold from dedicated vape stores and ‘dairies’(small, owner-operated convenience stores selling groceries, milk and other essentials, often outside of regular business hours).

As I noted in an earlier blog, the UK, USA and Canada also have highly liberal vape access policies (regulated market models) but comparable or higher smoking prevalence than Australia, which has far more restricted vape access legislation. Vaping advocates like to cherry pick New Zealand to provide a comparison with Australia compatible with their previous outspoken advocacy for regulated market models.

The evidence being used here is cross-sectional (ie: annual school surveys of around half of all New Zealand year 10 –14-15yo students) from 2014-2019.2015 was the first year that the survey asked questions about vaping frequency, enabling reporting on daily vaping. The graph below shows a 0.7% absolute decline and a 25% relative fall in daily smoking between 2014 and 2019, while daily vaping rose between 2015-2019 from 1.1% to 3.1% (2% absolute and 65% relative increases).

Source

Every first semester biostats student has it drilled into them that cross-sectional data cannot be used to draw causal conclusions. When I edited Tobacco Control across 17 years, this criticism was probably that most commonly made by reviewers of papers which used post hoc ergo propter hoc (after therefore because of) reasoning with cross-sectional data. The 2020 paper’s authors were therefore wise to use “suggests …might” when they concluded “…overall decline in smoking over the past 6 years in New Zealand youth suggests that e-cigarettes might be displacing smoking”.

But many vaping advocates aren’t typically bothered by the sublimation of associations into causal language conclusions when it suits their agenda. An analysis of submissions to the New Zealand Parliament’s Health Select Committee considering a 2020 Bill which regulated the sale and marketing of e-cigarettes, found that the 2020 paper was the most frequently cited evidence used to try and influence the Committee, including by British American Tobacco. Those fervidly embracing the paper who are determined to preserve, strengthen and evangelically promote New Zealand’s experience internationally would have hardly complained if associations morphed into causes when the rubber met the road of political, media treatment and public understanding tests.

But , whoa! Hold the horses!

Sensing there were problems with the paper, Sam Egger from Cancer Council NSW led a paper that took a deeper dive into an expanded data set from 1999-2023 noting that the 2020 paper had only looked at 2014-2019 data and that 2014 was “years after vaping had established a notable presence in New Zealand. Importantly, the analysis did not assess whether smoking trends changed before and after shifts in vaping prevalence, an essential requirement for evaluating the population-level impacts of vaping on smoking.”

In other words, the 2020 paper had not considered the question of whether the remarkable decline in youth smoking which started well before the appearance and proliferation of vaping in youth (see chart below), accelerated with the arrival of vapes in about 2010 and then their rapid uptake after 2019 (with the latter, it of course could not have done this, having 2019 data as its endpoint).

This was a very basic omission, and one that amounted to seriously narrowing the evidence goalposts in the exercise of assessing vaping’s possible role in influencing trends in smoking by 14 and 15 year olds. The question about ever vaping was added to the school survey in 2014, with daily vaping added a year later. This start of these questions would not have been a capricious choice but one that almost certainly would have reflected common observational ‘knowledge’ of youth vaping increasing, perhaps over several years prior to 2014 when it was first counted. ASH, which is responsible for the annual surveys since 1999 (see graph below), clearly knew youth smoking had been in freefall since at least 1999 so that factors other than vaping were in play.

Source:

In their no stone unturned paper using interrupted time series analysis they concluded “In stark contrast to the conclusion of the previous study, we found that among 14-15 year-olds, the emergence and rapid rise in vaping in New Zealand may have slowed the rates if decline in ever- and regular smoking, while having little or no impact on the rate of decline in daily smoking.”

In a commentary in The Conversation, they noted “the rates of decline in ‘ever smoking’ and ‘smoking regularly’ slowed significantly from 2010 onwards, coinciding with the emergence of vaping in New Zealand. The rate of decline in daily smoking did not change significantly from 2010 onwards.

In 2023, about 12.6% of 14 and 15-year-olds in New Zealand had ‘ever smoked’ (ranging from just a few puffs to smoking daily). However, if the ‘ever smoking’ rate had continued along its pre-2010 trajectory (before vaping emerged) this figure would have been 6.6%.”

So there was now plenty of heat in this particular data analytic kitchen. But then a blowtorch arrived with an apparently blistering critique of what the Egger authors had done. Four authors from the University of Queensland gave the Egger group both barrels with a three point shellacking that essentially went “here’s what you did, and here’s what you should have done … so your conclusions are unsound”. Read it all in the link.

But channelling Crocodile Dundee (“THAT’s not a knife … THIS is a knife”) the Egger group then rapidly returned serve, eviscerating the Queensland group’s critique point-by-point. Again, read it for yourself.

All this will have been read by a small number of people who closely follow these debates. And will have been understood by an even smaller number who are highly trained in analysis of trend data.

But one thing is absolutely certain, the veteran nag confirmation bias will yet again get a good run around the block. Those who like the conclusions of the 2020 paper will keep megaphoning them without mentioning the Egger group’s very contrasting findings. Criminologists have a term for this: the ‘woozle effect’ where studies with flawed conclusions that have been discredited continue to be referenced, as though those conclusions still offer credible evidence.

I published a paper in 2009 on citation bias, which is the selective citation of published results to support the findings, arguments or interests of authors and those funding their work. Our paper showed that a very old (1982) and small study (n=24) showing extremely high smoking prevalence in people with schizophrenia (88%), had been massively cited in preference to many more recent and larger studies which showed far lower smoking by those with schizophrenia. News media commonly referred to smoking rates in those with schizophrenia as “as high as 90%” when a meta-analysis of 42 studies found average smoking prevalence to be 62%, much higher than the general population but nowhere near 90%.

Lowering tobacco tax to make illegal tobacco sales “disappear overnight”: at last we have a proposed figure and it’s an absolute doozie

07 Thursday Aug 2025

Posted by Simon Chapman AO in Blog

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Tags

health, illicit-tobacco, politics, smoking, tobacco-tax, vaping

[updated 9 Aug 2025; 8 Nov 2025]

Australian smoking rates have never been lower in adults, school kids, low socio-economic groups, and First Nations people. That’s a good thing, right? These outcomes represent the results of decades of policy reform and government campaigns. But these bottom lines mean little to fringe critics of Australia’s approach to tobacco control, who are licking their wounds after failing badly to stop the government from regulating vapes to allow then to be sold in as many retail situations as possible.

Then there those who passionately believe that expensive, highly taxed cigarettes are a cruel impost on low income earners. For several years, in pitch perfect unison with Big Tobacco which has lobbied for decades to keep tobacco tax low to sell more cigarettes, they argue that the government should lower tobacco tax to make it easier for them to afford to smoke. Could there be any more truly perverse way to help the poor?

Illicit tobacco has been widely available in Australia for over 25 years, long before the significant rises in tobacco tax began in 2012.These critics also never mention the inconvenient truth that large black markets for tobacco exist in most countries, including those where tobacco tax is much lower than in Australia. So plainly, there is far more to understanding illicit tobacco markets than tax alone.

The widespread, blatant proliferation of duty-not-paid dirt cheap tobacco has excited these critics. Barely a week goes by when they are quoted on what the government needs to do, and “lowering” tobacco tax is always front and centre of the mantra.

But as I’ve noted before, it’s one thing to call for tax to be lowered, and quite another to draw on your expertise to help the Treasury know exactly where the magic sweet spot reduction should fall to make smokers who are now buying cheap illicits go back to duty-paid cigarettes. James Martin and Alex Wodak fudged naming a date or percent reduction in a Crikey piece when urging “reducing tobacco excise to undercut the illicit trade”. So OK gents, how much of a reduction are you talking about?

But all rejoice! The wait is now over!

In recent weeks, critics have put their hands up with several figures. In June, Harm Reduction Australia published an unsigned Tobacco Harm Reduction Policy Brief , presumably with the fingerprints of its tobacco harm reduction advisors, Alex Wodak and James Martin.

The short document recommended this:

So there’s the level: lower the tax rate back five years to that we had in 2020. That will fix things, right?

Or we could go back another year to 2019 when tobacco tax was still lower. In a very uncharacteristic slip, ABC economics expert Alan Kohler, snuck this final line into an otherwise very sensible commentary on the black market: “The other thing the federal government could do is reduce the tobacco excise back to what it was before 2019, which would lead to a huge increase in revenue.” An increase presumably explained by droves of smokers abandoning illegal cigarettes for the newly competitively reduced-tax legal ones.

Or according to Kingsley Wheaton, Chief Corporate Officer for British American Tobacco, who flew out to Australia in June to talk about the “basic economics” of tobacco tax, this should involve a “reversion to the 2018 (tobacco tax) rate“.

And then we come to the really heavy duty ordinance, this time from Australian economist Steven Hamilton, a professor at George Washington University. Quoted in The Saturday Paper, in April “So my suggestion would be that there is one solution and one solution only, and it is to radically reduce the rate of tax on cigarettes. Take the tax rate on cigarettes back to where it was 10 years ago, make legal channels competitive, and the black market will disappear.” Disappear! It’s that easy! Ten years ago – in 2015 – tobacco tax was $0.53096 and a packet of 20 budget cigarettes cost $24.28 (see table 13.3.3 here)

OK, so let’s take one of these named years – 2019 – and do the simple early high school arithmetic on how dropping tax back seven years would go in demolishing the black market.

In 2019, excise tax on cigarettes per stick was $0.81775 (in March) and $0.96653 (in September) —see Table 13.6.2 here. This means that the tax component in 2019 of a pack of 20 was either $16.335 or $19.3306. For retail price, we need to add GST and the manufacturers’ and retailers’ margins (see chart below for the current proportions) to see what a legal pack of 20 cigarettes would retail at under the new retro tax regime proposed by our disappearing black market pundits.

So let’s show this for a typical budget brand in the chart.

Excise 73.9% = $16.34

GST 9.1% = $2.01

Retail mark-up 8.1% = $1.79

Manufacturer mark-up 8.9% = $1.97

Total retail price: $22.11

Here’s a conversation between two smokers:

Bill: Hey, the government has dropped tobacco tax big time! You can get a pack of 20 now for Just over $22.

Bob: Really? I can buy my smokes at cheap smokes shop for as low as $10 a pack, sometimes as high as $20 in high income suburbs. So these new reduced tax smokes are still more than double the lowest price of the dodgy ones. Why would I be mad enough to pay out all that extra?

The common $10 smokers can now pay for illegal cigarettes is clearly still highly profitable for those selling them. It is anyone’s guess how much even lower their price could fall and still retain acceptable profitability. After first publishing this blog, I was told of $8 packs of 20 being sold in Muswellbrook in rural NSW, presumably still making a profit for all in the chain. So the above sums are likely conservative about how much tax would need be lowered to get prices on par or cheaper than illicit cigarettes.

So this heroic step would do absolutely nothing to solve the problem.

It is just gobsmacking that people positioning themselves as credible advisors on how to undercut the black market could not have asked this most basic and fundamental of all questions about their magic reductions. And equally, that so many journalists have let them blather on and never questioned it. A Sydney Morning Herald editorial in June stated without blinking “a tax rethink on tobacco excise is self-evident and common sense”.

The tax cut to 2015 levels proposed by Steven Hamilton goes closest to a nominal sweet spot. But If the Government were to put the tax down to 2015 levels then the prices of taxed products would only be competitive with the current illicit prices if Big Tobacco and all retailers also selflessly reverted to what they charged back in 2015. Yeah, that’s really going to happen. Pigs might fly too.

Enforcement of the weapons-grade penalties now in place across the country, together with turning attention to landlords who are knowingly allowing tobacconist tenants to use their rental premises to break the law are the obvious ways to go, as Alan Kohler also emphasised.

8 Nov 2025 BREAKING! Deakin University criminology academic James Martin publicly stated in the Straits Times that “taxes would need to be significantly lowered and even eliminated to discourage criminals from operating a black market.” [my emphasis]. Now how will this work? Martin suggests even eliminating all tobacco tax so that smokers who have been buying illicit untaxed cigarettes, will switch to legal cigarettes … which will be also untaxed. The government will then reap the tax benefit from these untaxed legal cigarettes. Are we all following this remarkable proposal?

Why I’m not quitting Spotify because its owner has hugely invested in weaponry

06 Wednesday Aug 2025

Posted by Simon Chapman AO in Blog

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Tags

ai, arms, artificial-intelligence, Music, spotify

I’m a daily user of Spotify. I have it on daily in the car, the house and at my desk. My tastes are very eclectic with extensive playlists across almost every genre of music with the exceptions of metal and all its variants, rap/hip hop, “musicals” and light orchestral. It has hugely expanded my discovery and appreciation of unimagined music.

The other day a close friend asked me whether I knew that Spotify’s owner Daniel Ek, had recently invested €600 million ($AUD1.074 billion) in military armaments in Hesling, a German based company which he chairs. I didn’t, but was concerned enough to find out more.

My friend sent a link to the best painless ways to move to other music streaming platforms and said he was planning to move in protest.

A Guardian report listed all of three bands, one Australian and two from the US, who were leading a so-called “exodus” from Spotiify. One stated “We just removed our music from the platform. Can we put pressure on these Dr. Evil tech bros to do better?” Another band was taking all its music off “garbage hole violent armageddon portal Spotify”.

Australian musician David Bridie also bought into all this with this Guardian article. He’s removed his work from Spotify, explaining “In recent years, we’ve witnessed the horror of AI drone wars in Ukraine and Gaza – children killed and hospitals destroyed with the press of the space bar. Ek is investing in technology that can cause suffering and death. Spotify used to seem like a necessary evil. By association, it now just seems evil.”

So what does Hesling’s website (Protecting our democracies) tell us? That it’s a military defence company providing “mass and autonomous capabilities to democracies so they can deter and protect”.

Among its products are:

An Electronic Warfare (EW) system using AI to classify radio signals
Underwater drone swarms for surveillance and signal detection
Software for command centers
Strike drones using AI for defeating jamming/spoofing

In February, the company announced it was producing 6,000 strike drones for use by Ukraine against Russian attacks, supplementing an early 4,000 already produced. Its website talks about ethical practices in supplying its products to nations.

Since Russia began pounding Ukraine, killing 46,000 civilians and 120,000 troops plus 180,000 injuries with 7 million having fled the country, the western world has held its breath hoping that NATO members and the US would adequately fund Ukrainian resistance. Nations bordering Russia are all vitally interested in anything that might give Russia pause to invade them.

So Spotify/Daniel Ek/Hesling are not so much as trying to cause suffering and death (except to Russian invading troops), but trying to prevent it as much as possible by shooting down incoming missiles, destroying Russian tanks and troop convoys.

Is all warfare weaponry inherently unethical?

Ethical investment funds typically refuse to invest in “fossil fuels, weapons, gambling, tobacco and other unethical industries”. Weapons are an interesting and challenging inclusion. Costa Rica, Iceland, Mauritius, Panama, and Vanuatu have no military forces. Other minnow nations, like Andorra, Kiribati, Liechtenstein, and the Marshall Islands, rely on other nations or agreements for their defence. But all large nations have military investments. So are they all unethical in investing in military defence?

Advanced technology useful in preventing enemy capability to wreak havoc on nations is morally neutral until we start dividing nations possessing this technology into bad and good actors. If Hesling is indeed only selling its drone and other AI driven defensive technology to nations fearful of Russian or other bad actor aggression, what’s not to like?

As one Reddit contributor put it succinctly “So I should boycott Spotify because their CEO is investing into one of the companies that is trying to beat the Russians in the drone race, support Ukraine, and protect Europe and western democracies and values against tyranny?

I’ll pass on that, thanks.

Boycott Spotify for ripping off musicians?

Then there’s the argument that Spotify is killing the music industry. I’ve friends who are musicians who are scathing about the derisory returns Spotify pays them per play. At the moment it is 0.00318 cents. They argue passionately that these music platforms are all parasitical, making huge profits from the creative talents of musicians while giving little back. Streaming has dramatically reduced musicians’ earnings from LP and CD sales, leaving live performance as the main income source. (I sometimes still buy CDs at gigs, but have long sold about 90% of the large number of CDs and LPs I owned, having rarely played them across many years).

Platform	Pay per Stream
Pandora	$0.00133
Spotify	$0.00318
Amazon Music	$0.00402
Deezer	$0.0011
YouTube Music	$0.002
Apple Music	$0.008
Tidal	$0.01284

Source

But this simple comparison of differences between platforms is confounded by the different subscriber and audience sizes of these platforms. In April 2025 Spotify had 276 million paying subscribers in their total user base of 696 million monthly active users. Spotify’s royalties are based on total plays, not just those by paying subscribers. In June 2023 Apple Music had over 93 million subscribers, an increase from its 88 million subscribers in 2022. I’ve not found later data.

So a smaller per stream payment on a platform with more users could earn more than a larger payment on a rival platform with far fewer users.

For 10,000 plays, Spotify will pay an artist all of $31.80. David Bridie’s most listened-to track on Spotify is his quite wonderful I’ve got a plan (from his 1994 My Friend the Chocolate Cake collaboration). As of today it’s had 517,792 plays. That’s royalties of $1,647.With 6 in the band, that’s $275 each.

I’m not an Apple music subscriber so don’t know how many plays that track has had over there. But as has been emphatically argued many times before, streaming royalties make only a tiny minority of performers rich, regardless of the platform. And that has always been the case: many musicians don’t make a living, while relatively few make fortunes.

This page on Spotify reports on royalties paid since 2017. $10 billion was paid out in 2024 Under the payouts you can look at growth in nine levels of royalty earnings from $5000 and over (110,500) to $10 million and over (70 acts).

Should we believe Fiona Patten on vapes? Here are just a few problems

25 Friday Jul 2025

Posted by Simon Chapman AO in Blog

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Tags

australia, e-cigarettes, health, smoking, vaping

Fiona Patten (left) shares the stage with Moira Gilchrist, Philip Morris International, (right) in 2023, Warsaw

The former Victorian state politician Fiona Patten who failed to be re-elected in 2022 and again in the 2024 federal election for a Senate seat, is a dedicated advocate for vaping. She’s been a regular attender at the Global Forum on Nicotine (GFN), held annually mostly in Warsaw. In 2025 she was awarded the top gong at what is typically a modestly attended conference of the vaping faithful including those from Big Tobacco.

In the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday, she wrote an opinion piece calmly titled Australia has become the global village idiot on quitting smoking.

I spent 17 years editing the world’s first dedicated research journal on Tobacco Control. I handled 1000s of research manuscripts across that time. I also spent over 20 years teaching and marking Master of Public Health student course assignments at the University of Sydney for a unit I taught, Tobacco Control in the 21^st Century.

So let’s imagine Fiona had submitted her piece for review and assessment. Here are my restrained comments on 13 issues. Read her piece in full here.

“When it comes to reducing harms from smoking, Australia finds itself cast as the global village idiot … we are now the cautionary tale.”

Comment: Smoking prevalence is the leading indicator of reducing the harms of smoking. This report shows the worst performing nations. Australia is not mentioned. In fact this map from the report shows Australia colour coded at the best level. So who’s really a village idiot?

2. “At present, 66 Australians die every day from the effects of smoking – not from an addiction to nicotine, but from the toxic delivery mechanism of cigarettes.”

Comment: If cigarettes did not contain nicotine, few if any people would smoke. Nicotine in itself is far from benign as these papers show, but it is the essential highly addictive cheese that baits the deadly mousetrap. Nicotine is the sina qua non of smoking. And we are steadily becoming aware of an increasing number of health problems from vaping (see reviews here).

3. “Legal cigarettes are taxed at rates so punitive that they have become virtually inaccessible to many, while vaping devices … are rendered unobtainable through deliberately restrictive access avenues.”

Comment: The corollary of the argument that cigarette tax is “punitive” is that making them less expensive would be somehow … compassionate? Tobacco companies engage in price discounting and have always fought tobacco tax rises because they are acutely aware that high price depresses demand. I’m aware of no government which has ever reduced tax on cigarettes to make them more affordable, a truly perverse step that would encourage uptake and depress quitting. It would be literally killing with kindness. And vapes being “unobtainable”? Any of Australia’s 5800+ pharmacies not already selling them can order them in.

4. In Australia only a “handful of well-intentioned but misguided health groups” support the government’s policies on vapes. “Nearly everyone else” opposes them.

Comment : Below are two columns. The one on the left shows the “handful” of “misguided health groups”. The other, “nearly everyone else”. Notice any pattern here, Ms Patten?

The graph below from the latest AIHW National Drug Household Survey shows support for action on vaping in the Australian community. There are few hot button issues in Australia that attract higher public support than vaping control (see here for comparisons and the lame efforts of vape lobbyists to demonstrate that night is actually day).

5. “Around the world, doctors, scientists and governments have embraced harm reduction and acknowledged that prohibition does not and cannot ever work”

Comment: Here is a VERY long list of doctors and scientists around the world who have major concerns about the safety and effectiveness of vapes. And here in great detail is information about the many nations which either ban vapes completely (33) or regulate them in ways that many vaping advocates oppose.

Predictably and very tediously, the boo-word “prohibition” makes an appearance. If vapes are “prohibited” but available in pharmacies, then by the same reasoning, Australia “prohibits” the 1000s of prescription drugs also only obtainable via pharmacies. Tell that to the millions of Australians who used some 335.8million scripts which were filled in a recent year in a population of 26 million people (and that’s not even counting the number who go to pharmacies for non-prescription items … including vapes with <20mg/mL nicotine which are OTC).

In any event, the idea that “prohibition” never works is contradicted by considerable evidence (see here). Most governments, including Australia, have prohibitions on goods and substances for a plethora of reasons including biosecurity, public safety (eg fireworks, laser pointers, flick knives, explosives, asbestos, DDT, leaded petrol and paint) and intellectual property. In 1996 Australia prohibited semi-automatic rifles and pump action shotguns and saw a sustained halt to mass shootings. The death of a friend’s son from adding caffeine powder to a drink, saw it banned. While “everyone knows” alcohol prohibition failed, Australian drug and alcohol expert, Wayne Hall, has documented in detail the considerable benefits that flowed from the US alcohol prohibition (1920-1933).

6. “And in countries where these products are promoted, smoking rates have plummeted.” Britain has seen smoking “drop steeply in the past five years, from 18 per cent to 11.6 per cent.”

Comment: In England, e-cigarette use rose sharply from 2021, but this increase was not accompanied by a faster decline in smoking rates between 2016 and 2023 among 18–24 and 25–44 year-olds. Even worse, among those aged 45 and over, the decline in smoking actually slowed._

Australia which has tighter regulation of vapes than Britain, the UK, Canada and New Zealand, has also seen smoking prevalence fall in recent years. Here are the most recent official statistics on smoking prevalence for several comparable countries.

Australia (2022-23 14+) 10.5% current and 8.3% daily — all combustible tobacco products

Canada (2022 15+) 10.9% current in last 30 days, 8.2% daily, cigarettes only

Europe (all EU members 2019 15+) 18.4% daily, cigarettes only

New Zealand (2022-23 15+) 8.3% current and 6.8% daily –all combustible tobacco products.

UK (2023 16+) 10.5% current cigarettes only

USA (2021 18+) 14.5% any combustible product, 11.5% cigarettes

Clearly, free-for-all vaping policy is not necessary in getting smoking down.

7. “in the short and medium term, vaping poses a small fraction of the risks of smoking”

Comment: In the “short and medium term” are very carefully chosen words here. Smoking, like asbestos, doesn’t typically kill or even manifest in symptoms in the short term — in days, weeks, month or years but in decades. As 15 presidents of the Society for Research into Nicotine and Tobacco wrote in 2021 “There are no data on long-term health effects, reflecting the relative novelty of vaping and the rapid evolution of vaping products. Determining even short-term health effects in adults is difficult because most adult vapers are former or current smokers.”

8. Because of the uptake of so-called harm reduced products “Japan, too, has reduced its smoking rate by more than 30 per cent in seven years”

Comment: For cultural reasons, there have long been huge differences in smoking between Japanese men, (currently 24.8%) and women (6.2%). Australia has not seen male smoking rates as high as 24.8% since 2001 – nearly a quarter of a century ago. Japan might well look to Australia to learn a thing or two about how to really get smoking down, not the other way round.

9. “New Zealand’s progressive policies on vaping and nicotine have it poised to join Sweden as a smoke-free nation.”

Comment: New Zealand has Patten-approved vaping policies (it also has the least affordable cigarettes in the world (see graph below) which almost certainly explains some of the country’s declining smoking rates). But New Zealand’s youth vaping rates are of great concern.

The only study to compare adolescent smoking trends before and after e-cigarettes became available in New Zealand found that progress in reducing adolescent smoking significantly slowed following the emergence and rise of vaping. The most recent data show that NZ had the first increase in a decade in daily smoking among adults (age 15+ in NZ health survey) from 6.8% in 2023 to 6.9% in 2024, despite daily vaping continuing to rise rapidly from 9.7% to 11.1% over the same period.

10. “The message is clear: when governments allow and encourage safer alternatives, lives are saved and deadly smoking rates decline. They are also not experiencing illicit tobacco wars.”

Comment:This is a sweeping generalisation. Where are the data on changing death rates (“lives are saved”) since vaping commenced? Why is it that smoking rates are also declining in Australia despite laws not being like Fiona wants them?

Sorry, it is patently untrue to say that there is no criminal involvement in illegal tobacco and vapes in nations like the UK and USA which have liberal vape access policies. See details here.

11. “Vaping, the most successful smoking cessation tool on record, is met with the harshest prohibitions.”

Comment: “Prohibitions” again ….zzzzz. Claims that vapes are the most successful way of quitting smoking disguise the fact that this “success” is pretty dismal. If any doctor tried to tell me any “successful” drug she was prescribing me had a 90% failure rate, I’d look for another doctor. But this is the language of success favoured by vaping advocates. Unequivocally, the most successful way of quitting, if your key criterion here is the sheer numbers of successes year in and year out, is unassisted quitting –cold turkey. But quitting has become dominated by commodified solutions pushed by vested interests. If you can’t sell it, don’t mention it.

12. “Australians are increasingly turning to black market tobacco and vapes; overall smoking rates are stagnating, even increasing in some disadvantaged communities and preventable deaths continue to mount.”

Comment: Smoking rates are not stagnating in Australia. The latest data point (2022-23) shows that compared with the previous survey data year (2019) the absolute falls in the prevalence of daily smoking (-2.7%), of current smoking (-3.5%) and the growth in quit proportions (+7.7%) were all at record levels. These are hard measures of smoking declining in the population and of quitting increasing.

12. “The mere possession of a vape in many states attracts thousands of dollars in fines, and even prison terms. In the ACT, the possession of a nicotine vape means you can be jailed for two years and fined $32,000.”

Comment: Correct, Both the ACT and Vic do not provide exemptions for possession of non-therapeutic vapes for personal use. Unless state legislation specifically says something else, these provisions just follow whatever arrangements were in place with regard to all S4 medicines in the jurisdiction.

In ACT, the penalty is 200 penalty units ($32k for an individual or $162k for a corporation), imprisonment for 2 years, or both.

In Victoria, the penalty is 10 penalty units ($2,035.10).

But significantly, what Patten doesn’t tell us here is that in order for these penalties to arise, the person would have to be charged by police and convicted by a court. Neither police in Victoria or the ACT are charging individuals for possession of non-therapeutic vapes. Searches of case law indicate that no jurisdictions appear to be charging for individual possession. So this is just bluster.

Why Australia’s illegal tobacco and vape trade continues to flourish and what should be done about it

22 Sunday Jun 2025

Posted by Simon Chapman AO in Blog

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Tags

politics, smoking, tobacco-tax, vaping

Addendum: One month ago to the day from when I published this blog, the NSW Minns’ has announced major weapons-grade increases in fines and jail terms for illegal tobacco traders. Importantly, it will allow landlords to evict those legally trading from their rented properties. Huge congratulations to the leadership at NSW Health and the Minns’ government.

*****

Several Australian states are experiencing a wholesale disregard for laws that outlaw the sale of tobacco products where excise duty has not been paid, and with vapes being sold in any circumstance other than through a registered pharmacy. It has been unambiguously illegal to sell duty-not-paid cigarettes since 1901 and to sell vapes outside a pharmacy since July 1, 2024. Major media attention is being focussed on

the extent of this brazen contempt
the involvement of criminals in its operation
the major fall in government revenue as droves of smokers unsurprisingly choose to pay $10-$15 a pack for smuggled cigarettes instead of north of $40 and past $60 for cigarettes which are currently taxed at $1.40 per stick
alleged objections from police about reluctance to get involved in “regulating a legal product”

High excise is not the cause nor lowering it the solution

The populist wisdom on why all this has happened is that Australia, with the world’s highest tobacco tax rate, has foolishly brought this on itself. This claim is manifestly ignorant because how do we then even begin to explain that nearly every nation – including all those with much lower tobacco tax than Australia (especially in low income nations) – have long had extensive black markets for tobacco too? Black markets are booming today in (to name just a few) Malaysia and South Africa (both with 65% of all tobacco sold being illicit) and Brazil (50%), all which have lower tobacco tax than Australia.

Tobacco industry estimates of the extent of black markets routinely exaggerate their size, as part of a decades-long global campaign to lobby governments to reduce tax, with cheaper retail prices known to increase demand.

The Australian Association of Convenience Stores which has a history of Big Tobacco links is cheer leading the claim on repeat that the excise should be “lowered”. But tellingly, those joining this choir never name how much of a reduction would be required to make the price of legal duty paid cigarettes competitive with cheaper illicit packs.

Basic arithmetic shows this: the current tax of $1.40 per cigarette means $28 excise is already in the mix before the lucrative cuts for both cigarette manufacturers and retailers combine to lift the cost of a pack of 20 at the very low budget brands end of the market to $40. Premium taxed brands can cost well over $50.

So let’s imagine the Commonwealth government introduced the radical and globally unprecedented step of slashing excise by a huge 50%, a truly la-la land proposition. This would mean the tax component would fall to 70c a stick, or $14 a pack of 20s. No one, just no one is arguing that manufacturers and retailers would then follow suit and reduce their margins by a comparable percentage in a selfless noble gesture to assist smashing the black market.

This means that our hypothetical 50% reduction in tobacco tax would still mean a tax-paid budget brand would still cost $14 in tax alone, already nudging the high end ($15) of what black market packs cost today. So adding the retailer+manufacturer’s combined margin of $12 to the $14 taxed price component, our fantasy “reduced tax” pack would retail at $26. This would still be blown right out the water by comparable budget black market offerings of $10-$12 a pack.

So even halving tobacco tax would do nothing to make legal taxed cigarettes competitive with cheap smuggled smokes. Freezing tobacco tax or cutting it by less than 50% would be equally inconsequential.

Just as every nation has illegal trade in illicit drugs (even in nations where death penalties are given by courts), no regulatory plan will eliminate the tobacco black market. But there is a world of difference between neon-lit, 7 days a week, 18 hours a day high street illegal tobacco trading and what would remain if it was driven totally underground.

Failure to enforce the law — the elephant in the room

There are many challenges being faced in prosecuting illegal tobacco and vape sellers. Here are a few. Staff in the shops are often instructed by their bosses to simply run out of the premises if visited by inspectors. Those who talk typically insist they have never met the owners and don’t know their names. They are instructed to take their cash wages from the till on each payday, so presumably all staff are on untaxed cash arrangements. All purchases are cash only, leaving no credit card trails, both facts that would be of considerable interest to the Australian Taxation Office.

With seizures being sometimes very substantial and so costly to the illegal sellers, many now limit their in-store tobacco and vape stock to only that required for a typical day’s sales, with any needed extra stock being kept off-site in car boots parked near the shops. Commercial storage companies are also suspected of being used to store large quantities. Section 233 of the Customs Act 1901 Smuggling and unlawful importation and exportation states that it is illegal for anyone to “unlawfully convey or have in his or her possession any smuggled goods or prohibited imports or prohibited exports.” So these storage facilities would be legally vulnerable if police were to tail deliveries picked up from them.

It’s common to find shops which have had stock seized and staff put on notice today, open again tomorrow with new stock delivered overnight.

The strategy of holding small quantities in-store limits the cost of losses to the shops through seizures, but this is irrelevant to establishing a prosecution as even having a single vape or illegal pack of cigarettes can trigger a prosecution with no court likely to find it credible that a store operated with just a handful of stock.

In country towns in particular, some police claim they face real challenges in storing seized goods because of no storage facilities in typically small police stations. Seized goods must be kept as exhibits until prosecutions are finalised through the courts, which can take many months. But we don’t hear the same lame concerns made about storage problems with recovered stolen vehicles, large scale hauls of goods recovered from break and enters, nor about illicit drug busts including whole fields or greenhouses of marihuana.

Police ‘don’t want to be regulators”

This reported police complaint points to a wider issue of some often anonymous police commentators feeling that illicit tobacco selling does not deserve the attention of serious police work. I’m old enough to remember police indifference and even hostility to getting involved in random breath testing, preventive domestic violence intervention, white collar and cyber crime, all of which today are part of the daily meat and potatoes of police work.

I’ve heard threats of police being taken off the beat chasing hardened criminals and of resultant understaffing to attend to domestic violence should policing illegal tobacco step up. But police attend outdoor music festivals in droves with 75% of attendees surveyed saying they had experienced police in relation to their drug use at such festivals.

The Australian Federal Police actively police counterfeit imported luxury good knock-offs on sale in Australia as part of their work investigating breaches of intellectual property. With the significant excise tax losses to the Commonwealth from black market tobacco, it is difficult to understand why sleuthing fake Channel perfume or Louis Vuitton handbag vendors could be of higher priority than systematically busting a trade costing the government billions of dollars a year.

One argument with its hand up is that tobacco is a “legal product”, with some police believing they should have no part in ensuring that its sale is within the law. Alcohol, firearms, gambling and motor vehicles are also legal products, yet police have long histories both of issuing defect notices on cars and doing firearm license and home safe storage compliance checks: two examples of legal goods and services being used under illegal circumstances. Just as with the present situation on illegal “legal” tobacco.

And not to mention illegal trade in alcohol. Here are all the offences and penalties that go with illegal of serving liquor in NSW. Police are active in investigating and enforcing the ban on selling alcohol to minors.

Food

State governments are well used to regulating businesses, with there being no better example of the way food safety laws are enforced. Food standards are enforced by Australian state and territory food regulatory agencies, the Australian Government’s Department of Agriculture and Fisheries and Forestry. In NSW, the government’s NSW Food Authority is responsible for monitoring and regulating food safety across the entire food industry supply chain from paddock to plate. Importantly, it maintains a public online “name and shame” register where there are currently 901 businesses listed which since December 2022 have been fined for breaches.

Again, food is a “legal product” with preparing this legal food in unhygienic and unsafe ways being illegal.

But police are being cooperative

Despite these media claims, I’m advised by public health colleagues that in fact, NSW police have been very cooperative when asked to join in inspections of known illegal tobacco retailers. There has been good cooperation between Health, Border Force, and the Commonwealth’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (when illegal vapes are of interest). All this suggests other agenda like industrial jostling for greater funding may be at work when “not our bailiwick” comments are reported.

Solutions – breaking the weakest link

With the evasive template described above, cooperative agency tactics could include ensuring inspections see all entrances to shops guarded prior to raids. Surveillance of deliveries, with tracing of vehicles after drop-offs to locate storage premises and those working in them and pro-active warning to commercial self-storage businesses that failure to ensure illicit tobacco and vapes are not being stored will have major consequences.

But the very weakest link in all of this is that all cheap tobacco premises are not owned by those trading in them. The shops are always rented. While the patsy shop assistants may well be ignorant of the identities of those above them, those owning the premises are legally obliged to have the names, contact details and typically banking details of the parties who are paying them rent. The Office of Fair Trading makes it clear that it is illegal for a landlord to knowingly allow a commercial premises to be used for illegal activities. All standard commercial tenancies across Australia include terms that consider illicit activities by the tenant a major breach and cause to terminate the tenancy agreement. If evidence is provided to these landlords that their renters are conducting illegal trade on their premises, this is grounds for termination of a lease and prosecution of landlord should the illegal trade continiue.

Voiding insurance

Huge publicity including via ABC Four Corners and a series of large pieces in the Sydney Morning Herald has been given to arson attacks and standover tactics by criminals intent on forcing legal tobacco retailers to stock illegal tobacco and vapes that they supply. The insurance industry has reacted to this by raising premiums to stratospheric levels making it almost impossible for tobacconists to buy insurance. Landlords run massive risks by renting to uninsurable illegally trading tobacco businesses. Should an arson fire spread to adjoining premises causing extensive property damage or death and injury to people, landlords’ liability would be immense.

But this scenario has been on-going and clearly increasing for many months. Enough landlords are presumably prepared to take these very substantial risks. So what actions and reforms could state governments make to quickly bring the legal and pecuniary interests of landlords to bear on illegal tobacco and vape retailers?

If all states were to adopt a public “name and shame” strategy modelled on that used with food safety breaches in concert with substantial on-the-spot fines, landlords and insurers could routinely search the database for the names applicants for tenancy or insurance. Such fines should immediately result in inclusion on the register. Establishing such a register could be implemented at virtually no cost in a matter of weeks.

Queensland and South Australia

Queensland and South Australia both offer examples of very encouraging progress.

Queensland has recently amended its legislation to empower significant on-the-spot fines in addition to subsequent prosecutions through the courts. For individuals, maximum fines can be issued up to $32,260 for the commercial supply of illicit tobacco and nicotine products. Corporations face penalties of up to $161,300. South Australia too, has stepped up firmly to the enforcement plate with an illicit tobacco taskforce within its Consumer and Business Services in partnership with Health and SAPOL’s [South Australian Police] running Operation Eclipse. The operation has seized millions of dollars’ worth of illicit cigarettes, vapes and loose tobacco. More than 500 inspections have been conducted around the state with 20% of these taking place in regional South Australia. representing $4 million worth of the illicit products seized.

The Minister has also issued 33 short-term closure orders and successfully had two long term closure orders approved by the Magistrates Court. The SA government has also recently passed legislation to increase fines to up to $6.6 million for the supply and possession of commercial quantities of illicit tobacco and vapes.

Between 1 July 2024 and 31 May 2025, 819 penalty infringement notices were issued in Queenland for supply and commercial possession of illicit products, with a value of more than $10.7 million.

Queensland Health can also issue an interim closure order for up to 72 hours and up to six months under a court order where there is evidence of either unlicensed or continued illicit tobacco or vape supply. More than 121 interim closure orders have been issued since September 2024 when the commencement of powers for closures began.

Legacy of the neglect

The loss of tobacco tax to the Treasury being caused by the current tobacco black market is a public finance issue, not primarily a health issue. When smokers buy cheaper cigarettes, the money they save does not somehow disappear from the economy. It is either saved or used to buy other goods and services, most of which are goods and services (GST) taxed and all of which have multiplier effects in the economy. Non-smokers are not unpatriotic tax-avoiders, for the very same reason.

But easy access to cheap tobacco is most definitely is a public health issue because of the huge body of evidence linking tobacco tax prices rises to reduced smoking through quitting and reducing the number of cigarettes smoked as well as powerfully dissuading uptake in non-smokers. Smoking rates in both adults and teenagers are now the lowest ever recorded in Australia. It would be a tragedy if that record was trashed by a continuing failure to enforce the law.

Criminals who have now for many months sold illegal tobacco with impunity might well think that they would experience a similar dream run if they opened up a river of shops where unlicensed, they brazenly sold cheap duty-not-paid alcohol to anyone who anyone who wanted it, or counterfeit prescription only drugs to walk-ins.

Philippines has major tobacco smuggling

Words I’ve seen, but didn’t know. Looked them up. Glad I did.

17 Tuesday Jun 2025

Posted by Simon Chapman AO in Blog

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vocabulary, writing

Reading and writing are two lifelong passions. I’ve long been in the habit of looking up the meaning of interesting looking words that I’ve never encountered or have seen but don’t feel confident in using. I had a dull English teacher at school who was scornful of anyone using words that needed to be looked up. Good writing to him meant never stepping out of the comfort zone of some vocabulary you decided was good enough at some time your life.

Some months ago the trolling author of a parody account on Twitter (see screenshot above) spent time going through my Twitter feed and finding the selection of “big words” which obviously marked me as a deplorable wanker who chose words to “cower readers in the shadow of my towering intellect”.

Apart from ‘agnotology’ which I only discovered this year (the study of deliberate, culturally induced ignorance or doubt, typically to sell a product, influence opinion, or win favour, particularly through the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data (disinformation), all the others are in widespread use. So no guessing about the literacy of the troll. Vignette, imbibing, relegated, denigration? Orwellian? Really? Needs to get out a bit more.

As above, I posted the troll’s tweet on my Facebook page and in the last six months got into the habit of adding to it any seen-but-don’t-know words I encountered when reading. The Facebook post has been popular with people chiming in with “neither did I know!”, thanks and suggestions I might add. That seldom worked, as clearly we all know many words that others might not. So this is a personal list. Feel free to add yours in the comments. I’ll update the alphabetical list regularly, adding new words including any from readers that I didn’t know either.

Here we go …
alacrity: brisk and cheerful readiness

doughty: determined, brave and unwilling to ever stop trying to achieve something. We can all think of people like that, and with those it fits for me, it’s always something very admirable that they are prosecuting. I can think of despicable people like that too, who are trying to achieve stupid or horrible things. But somehow, I think it’s meant to be more of a compliment. Dogged and doggedly, similarly.

effulgence– a radiance or a brilliant light shining forth (seen in an obit by Zane Banks) – NOT to be confused with effluence. Now how many people do you know where that word fits perfectly? I live with one! Here she is ..

Eyorish: pessimistic & gloomy, after Eyore the donkey in A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh. I have also heard someone use it about a mutual acquaintance who had a long nose & big ears who was a bit taciturn.

fealty : a feudal tenant’s or vassal’s sworn loyalty to a lord. “they owed fealty to the Earl rather than the Kin. As in a piece I just read about Australia’s attorney general flying to meet with the indicted war criminal Netanyahu

hock (when referring to wine): a British term for German white wine. It sometimes refers to white wine from the Rhine region (specifically Riesling) and sometimes to all German white wine. The word hock is short for the obsolete word hockamore, an alteration of “Hochheimer”, derived from the name of the town of Hochheim am Main in Germany.

inchoate: just begun and so not fully formed or developed, rudimentary

insuperable: (of a difficulty or obstacle) impossible to overcome. “insuperable financial problems”

irascible: easy to anger. Now, I knew that word but don’t believe I have ever used it Great word

kakistocracy: a state run by its least competent and least qualified citizens. Ring any bells?

lubricious: (1) inappropriately sexual: arousing or expressing sexual desire in an unpleasant, lewd or lascivious way (2) slippery: having a smooth, oily or slippery texture (3) sly or tricky: metaphorically ‘slippery’ or untrustworthy (eg: a lubricious politician.

manichean: to be manichean is to follow the philosophy of Manichaeism, which is an old religion that breaks everything down into good or evil. It also means “duality,” so if your thinking is manichean, you see things in black and white. I’ve know this one for a while, but underuse it — so many occasions where it’s perfect.

martinet: a person who demands strict obedience and discipline. But in looking for its synonyms I found a slew of older abusive names for women who are pushy, angry and uppity: termagent, harridan, virago, strumpet, shrew, scold, crone and harpy. I’ve heard all of those, but their usage brands their users as neanderthals so we seldom hear them. But wouldn’t it be great if lots of women proudly embraced these words, used almost exclusively by men to denigrate them, in the way the LBGTQI community often proudly embrace queer, poof, lezzo etc today?

panglossian: naively or unreasonably optimistic. Though he took a Panglossian view of the world in his youth, he became jaded as he grew older. (derogatory) Of or relating to the view that this is the best of all possible worlds.

picayune: A Canadian friend just used this is a message to me. I’ve seen it often enough in writing but never heard it in speech. It seems it’s a north American thing. It means petty, of little significance. Here’s how you say it

pinguid: of the nature of or resembling fat; oily or greasy.

prosaic: I always assumed it meant something that was nicely, or neatly, parsimoniously expressed. But looking it up, not at all! It means commonplace or dull; matter-of-fact or unimaginative: a prosaic mind. Synonyms: uninteresting, tiresome, tedious, humdrum, vapid, everyday, ordinary or having the character or form of prose, the ordinary form of spoken or written language, rather than of poetry.

pulsillanimous: showing a lack of courage or determination; timid

quotidian: of or occurring every day; daily. as in “the car sped noisily off through the quotidian traffic”

rebarbative: unattractive and objectionable, as in an ugly public building Never seen it before.

recumbent: lying down (aware of this one, but don’t recall ever using it.

risible: provoking laughter by being ridiculous. eg: Simon’s been making risible attempts to learn the saxophone. Another one that of course I’ve heard lots, but never used

simony: buying or selling church offices, sacred items or favours for money (heard in the movie Conclave.

stochastic: having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analysed statistically but may not be predicted precisely. Seen this word many times, but never used it or looked it up

sybarite: a person who is self-indulgent in their fondness for sensuous luxury

uxorious: Just came across this is a Le Carre novel I’m reading: “having or showing an excessive or submissive fondness for one’s wife.” Have seen it many times, but never bothered to look it up. Great word. And I’ll proudly put my hand up for that descriptor. I’ve got a good one (only submissive when that is required though)

vertiginous: very high or steep. Can be used literally or metaphorically

vulpine: pertaining to foxes or fox-like characteristics

Updated: 18 Jul, 2025; 25 Nov, 2025

South Australia is busting illegal tobacco traders big time. What’s stopping the rest of the country?

26 Monday May 2025

Posted by Simon Chapman AO in Blog

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health, illicit-trade, politics, public-health, smoking, vaping

Labor’s stunning election victory and the relegation of the conservative opposition to likely years of political eunuch status opens up many opportunities across all areas of government. With health minister Mark Butler playing a powerful wingman role to the Prime Minister, he is in the driver’s seat to finish the historic job he started back in 2022 with regulating vaping. In the three years, Australian streets have been deluged by blatant law-breaking cheap tobacco and convenience shops selling smuggled cigarettes and vapes, since 2024 permitted to be sold only in pharmacies.

Butler’s deeply impressive leadership on vaping and tobacco reforms saw him carry forward a Labor heritage which started in 1973 when Gough Whitlam took the first step to ban tobacco advertising. Butler was Minister for Ageing and Australia’s first Minister for Mental Health in the Gillard Government when Nicola Roxon was the senior health minister and introduced the world’s first plain tobacco packaging bill, now adopted by 25 nations and under active consideration in another 14.

Like plain packs, the regulation of access to vapes to pharmacy sales is another world first. But Butler must be understandably frustrated by what has become an epidemic of political duck-shoving where some states have talked the supportive talk, but not walked the implementation and enforcement walk.

As a result, illicit vapes remain readily available mostly via the plague of “cheap cigarette” shops which lead their trade with lucrative totally illegal duty-not-paid smuggled cigarettes which also break Australia’s plain packaging laws.

So how has this got to the in-your-face blatant law-breaking it has, and what should happen to fix it?

Enforcement of the law

All states and the Commonwealth government now have in place laws that make selling vapes anywhere but in a pharmacy unambiguously illegal. Importing, wholesaling and retailing tobacco products which have evaded excise tax are all illegal under Commonwealth law, attracting eye-watering major maximum fines for large scale offenders and routine confiscation and destruction of stock.

But illegal sales of both vapes and tobacco are rampant with the Sydney Morning Herald noting that there are currently 60 “cheap smokes” shops in Sydney for every one McDonalds outlet. 824 have opened in recent years in the Inner West council region alone. This situation is most pronounced in NSW and Victoria, the two states yet to implement mandatory tobacco retail licensing, despite calls for years from public health experts for this to happen. Licensing provides a database enabling authorities to routinely check whether licensees are compliant with the law and the threat of removal of a license and close-down orders for those not.

However clearly, many now selling illegally will reason from several years of experience that no authorities have ever raided their shops, so why would things be any different if they bothered to not get a tobacco retailing license?

And that has been the elephant in the room sized problem that few will talk about. Most state health authorities seem purposefully blind to what everyone else can see: that there is a burgeoning forest of “cheap smokes” and convenience stores selling illegally which open every day with zero consequence.

How have they justified this wholesale neglect?

I recently had dinner with the head of a NSW state public health unit. I asked him what his unit was doing about enforcement of the laws on selling illegal tobacco and vapes. He confirmed very little was being done with the major reason being concern about staff safety. His staff were well aware and concerned that violent criminals are involved in the tobacco and vape trade, and of the screaming headlines of multiple arson attacks on tobacco outlets by rival tobacco supply gangs, particularly in Victoria. All illegal tobacco outlets have CCTV cameras and staff were anxious they would be identified and threatened. Several public heath chiefs understandably took these concerns seriously and believed that police needed to be involved far more in enforcement of the laws.

Imagine if criminal syndicates decided that there were vast amounts of money to be made by selling prescribed drugs in high street shops and online to anyone who wanted them without a prescription. Or that the law on selling alcohol only through premises with liquor licences could just as easily be ignored with every town and suburb opening up multiple shops selling duty-not-paid booze. Public and licensed liquor outrage would be immense and police action swift.

Pharmacies are rarely prosecuted for supplying drugs to those without prescriptions, and pubs, clubs and bars known to routinely sell liquor to kids are jumped on fast, with their goldmine liquor licences under threat.

One mystery here is why the supermarket sector, which has always had an exemplary record of rarely selling tobacco to kids, has not used its massive power and united to demand strong action against illegal tobacco retailing. If this trade diminished in a major way, supermarkets would be major beneficiaries of returning smoking customers.

NSW

The Herald reported that some 2000 inspections of these dodgy retailers in metropolitan illegal trade had been undertaken by NSW health inspectors who had seized illegal stock worth $24m. These are far from trivial numbers, but there’s an obvious mystery here. Conspicuously absent in the Herald’s report was any mention of completed or in-process prosecutions of those from whom these products were seized.

Let’s assume that nearly all those inspected were selling. The customers who come and go into these premises each day know that. So why wasn’t stock seized from all of them, and why is there no apparent data on how many are facing prosecutions when since November 2024, NSW has had maximum penalties of $154,000 and up to $22,000 for selling to children, with higher for corporations?

Last Friday, one Sydney tobacco retailer with a business turnover of $3.3m was hit with a $5,560 fine plus $6,850 in costs. The cynical Herald commented “That’ll show him, or it would if the financial gains made from running tobacconists weren’t so generous … [the] fine and the prosecution’s costs put a 0.37 per cent dent in last year’s bottom line.”

NSW Health staff are known to be immensely frustrated by the Department’s legal branch refusing to proceed with cases. This must be a major focus of the current NSW parliamentary enquiry into illegal tobacco trade.

Police in some states seem reluctant to see illegal tobacco retailing as serious crime unless violence or arson is involved. The Sydney Morning Herald reported a senior officer as saying “Our involvement is primarily about the acts of violence that was used by these people to take the tobacco. I think our system and our response is adequate, and we’ll keep maintaining that.”

South Australia, and to a lesser extent Queensland seem to have sorted out any problems that NSW seems to have with lack of police interest In enforcing the law. There, the police apparently don’t pick and choose which law breaking they will investigate.

South Australia

Under A media release dated 6 May 2025 from South Australia’s Consumer and Business Services stated:

“More than $23 million in illicit tobacco and vapes have been seized across South Australia since the start of Consumer and Business Services’ crackdown.

Since 1 July, our illicit tobacco taskforce within CBS, in partnership with SAPOL’s [South Australian Police] Operation Eclipse and other agencies, has seized millions of dollars’ worth of illicit cigarettes, vapes and loose tobacco.

This includes:

17.2 million cigarettes valued at $13.7 million. (860,000 packs of 20)
105,100 vapes valued at $4.5 million.
6 tonnes of loose tobacco valued at $3.1 million.
2.3 million cigarette tubes valued at $1.4 million.
834 nicotine pouches valued at $25,000.

More than 500 inspections have been conducted around the state with 20 per cent of these taking place in regional South Australia representing $4 million of the illicit products seized.

The Minister has also issued 33 short-term closure orders and successfully had two long term closure orders approved by the Magistrates Court for illicit tobacco stores in Salisbury North and Hackham West.

The state government has been relentless in its fight against the illicit tobacco trade investing $16 million in a new taskforce within CBS from 1 July last year.

The state government has also introduced among the toughest penalties of any state or territory in the nation against the sale of illegal vapes and tobacco, with fines of up to $1.5 million for those caught selling.

The government has also recently passed legislation to increase fines to up to $6.6 million for the supply and possession of commercial quantities of illicit tobacco and vapes.”

South Australian Health Minister Chris Picton who is driving enforcement in the state. Picture ABC News

Queensland

In early May, Queensland conducted raids in 30 locations across the state in one week. Products worth $20.8m were seized including 76,000 vapes, 19m illicit cigarettes and3.6 tonnes of loose tobacco. This is a good start, but there are clearly far more than 30 locations across Queensland selling illegal vapes and tobacco. Why isn’t Queensland doing this regularly?

In the 2023/24 financial year, the Australian Border Force made over 51,600 detections of illicit tobacco, including over 1.8 billion cigarettes and more than 436 tonnes of loose leaf tobacco. The May budget allocated $157m to further enforcement of laws against illegal vape and tobacco importing and trade.

Lowering tobacco tax: a fools’ errand

Simplistic solutions calling for tobacco excise tax to be reduced to make illegal cigarettes less competitive instantly fail the most rudimentary question: how much would the tax need to be lowered to make legal (tax paid) cigarettes competitive with illegal cigarettes? I answered this in a recent blog. Spoiler, government would need to scrap all tobacco tax. Pigs flying in formation across Sydney Harbour is far more likely.

I wrote:

“It’s easy to call for ‘lower’ tobacco tax, but how much lower would it need to be to see budget-conscious smokers switch back to buying taxed cigarettes? A common price for the most popular illegal brand of cigarettes in Australia is $15. The current excise rate on cigarettes in Australia is $1.40313 per stick. So the tax alone on a pack of 20 cigarettes is now $28.06.

A common retail price for popular brands of legal duty paid cigarettes is around $40, with the extra component costs (after ~$12 tax is deducted) being those going to cigarette manufacturers and retailers. Given that tobacco manufacturing and retailing interests are not talking at all about radically dropping their margins to compete with $15 illegal pack prices, are the “cut the excise” voices then suggesting that the government should therefore “take one for the convenience stores” and give up perhaps all of its tobacco excise ($40-$28 = $12), a price that would certainly blow illegal retail trade out of the water?

We don’t know how low illegal cigarette retail pricing could fall to still remain very profitable to those running it. But by now, simplistic calls to “cut excess” lead us very quickly into this truly absurd territory, when the obvious solution is instead for governments to crack down hard on the illegal retailers. Small cuts would make no significant difference to the large gap between legal and illegal cigarettes. Only massive or even entire scrapping of tobacco excise would bridge that gap.”

Enforcement, enforcement, enforcement

Now fully equipped with legislation and weapons-grade penalties for illegal selling and advertising (now $6.6 million in South Australia), the Albanese government now needs to seriously address some states’ unwillingness to implement the law. If they are looking for a role model, South Australia is the clear front runner.

Every shop advertising “cheap smokes” effectively has a neon sign saying “Here I am, selling illegal tobacco and vapes. Step inside, bust me, seize all my stock, fine me heavily and close me down”. There’s no detective work involved here. It’s blatant, walk-in crime busting.

Similarly, every social media ad offering “fruit” has long been offering illegal flavoured disposable vapes. You text a number that regularly disappears, but the Achilles heel is when the illegal vapes are handed over to the buyer via a delivery courier. A suburban street corner is arranged. Police could easily order a delivery, interrogate the delivery riders or follow them back to where they pick up their stock to bust the suppliers.

Screenshot from Facebook Marketplace

The apparent police culture in some states that they are the ones who will decide which laws they will and won’t enforce needs to be called out by governments, which control police. Imagine where we would be if police decreed they would not investigate white collar or cyber crime, or domestic violence, three areas where in the past they were often reluctant to act.

“But you’ll never wipe it out”

I routinely am finger-jabbed on social media that it doesn’t matter how illegal you make any drug, including illicit tobacco and vapes: there will always be a market willing to buy and enrich the criminals keen to supply No nation has ever eliminated illicit drug use, just as no nation has ever eliminated all crime, tax avoidance or drink driving. From that, it obviously doesn’t follow that any constraints on any of these activities should be abandoned as “not working”. While crime elimination may well be an aspiration, crime reduction is plainly the year-on-year reality against which the success of police and border force efforts are assessed.

Drug decriminalisation is being wound back in Oregon as problems accelerate. No nation I’m aware of is seeking ways to liberalise access to tobacco or vapes. All news from around the world about regulation describes tightening access, raising tax, ending retail display, making packaging evermore gruesome and licensing retailers. Nations like Britain, New Zealand and Canada which have had sell anywhere policies on vapes are now back peddaling furiously especially with bans on disposables. Meanwhile, Big Tobacco — major donors to Trump — are likely to be running their hands together with the axing of the US FDA’s tobacco control section.

But the convenience store industry’s cracked record here is to call for vapes to be deregulated and sold by licensed law-abiding convenience store operators. You know, those very same law-abiding store owners who have been ignoring the law all these years and selling cigarettes and vapes to kids.

Smoking is now at record lows among adults and teenagers. The entire illegal trade issue is not seeing smoking prevalence rise: it is a story of mostly price-sensitive low income smokers buying smokes where they can save thousands of dollars a year. Treasury is losing big money from reduced tobacco excise. But, we all need to understand that people who don’t smoke do not somehow shirk their ‘duty’ as provident tax contributors – a point made by Professor Ken Warner from the University of Michigan, who summed all this up in a heavily cited paper in 2000.

“when resources are no longer devoted (at all or as much) to a given economic activity, they do not simply disappear into thin air—the implication of the industry’s argument. Rather, they are redirected to other economic functions. If a person ceases to smoke, for example, the money that individual would have spent on cigarettes does not evaporate. Rather, the person spends it on something else. The new spending will generate employment in other industries, just as the spending on cigarettes generated employment in the tobacco industry. Studies by non-industry economists in several countries have confirmed that reallocation of spending by consumers quitting smoking would not reduce employment or otherwise significantly damage the countries’ economies.”

Agnotology: the study of the willful production of ignorance

16 Friday May 2025

Posted by Simon Chapman AO in Blog

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commercial-determinants-of-health, tobacco

Robert Proctor is professor of the history of science at Stanford University. His Golden Holocaust (2011) on the origins of the tobacco epidemic and the disease it causes sits with Alan Brandt from Harvard’s The Cigarette Century (2007) as the two seminal doorstopper-length books chronicling and critically analysing the rise of smoking and its disease epidemics, the tobacco industry’s central role in this and the rise of tobacco control.

Proctor is a friend. We first met in 2008 when I visited him while in California. We got on like a house on fire, with shared instincts on everything we discussed. In 2003-4, I’d published two sets of 31 papers on the tobacco industry’s dissembling efforts to reassure its customers about smoking and health, addiction, passive smoking, pesticides and how it cultivated tame doctors and scientists in these efforts in Australia and Asia.

He loomed large in my list of scholarly mavens in my field whom I wanted to meet. His contributions to historical scholarship commenced in 1982 with a series of papers Nazi racial hygiene, the corruption of science and bioethics and a hugely-cited book The Nazi War on Cancer (1999), which examines how the Nazis advanced science to try and defeat cancer, often using utterly deplorable experimentation and shredding all relevant bioethics.

The Nazis were also very anti-smoking. Predictably, the opponents of tobacco control have often sought to cultivate that meme to paint those in public health as neo-Nazis. In 2008 when I edited the BMJ’s Tobacco Control journal, I commissioned Proctor to write an editorial, On playing the Nazi card, looking at the veracity of that claim. He wrote:

“The industry’s reductio ad Hitlerum is superficial, and ahistorical. The Nazis excelled at rocketry—does this mean that the Apollo mission was ballistic fascism? Many Nazis urged fitness and health through exercise: is jogging therefore athletic fascism? The fact that healthful or progressive policies were occasionally endorsed by the Nazis does not mean they are inherently fascist or oppressive.”

The tobacco industry have long been the sine qua non of industrial-scale efforts to lie and deceive their customers about tobacco use. Its global network conspired to reassure people and politicians that tobacco should not be subject to the controls it is today. It has become the index case in mass commercial deception, inspiring many other industries to use its copybook of strategies and tactics.

In 2008 with Londa Schiebinger he published Agnotology: The making and unmaking of ignorance which to date has been cited 2188 times, turbo-charged from 2016, when Trump elevated the production of fake news to a new apotheosis (see Google Scholar citations figure below).

He coined the word agnotology to denote efforts to deliberately produce and promote lying and deception to create ignorance. The word is from the neo-classical Greek agnosia, meaning “ignorance” or “not knowing”. A limited preview of the book is available here.

Proctor has now edited a second book with Schiebinger, Unmasked: Essays in the New Science of Agnotology (due September 2025).

This recently updated 80m podcast with Alie Ward interviewing Proctor is 80m very well spent by anyone concerned or enegaged in exposing and countering commercially-driven efforts to lie to the public, as is this summary conversation between two voice robots resulting from Proctor and his co-editor feeding the entire text of their new book into Chat-GPT4.

With MAGA and Trump in turbo-overdrive to keep the public ignorant of inconvenient science and to gut scientific institutions in the service of their mission, the emergence of the science of agnotology could not be more timely.

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Simon Chapman AO

~ Public health, memoirs, music

Category Archives: Blog

Brushes with fame

Australia takes off the gloves on illegal tobacco while ‘lower the tax’ fantasists plumb new absurdities

Egg on some faces: statisticians at 10 paces on the impact of New Zealand’s vape laws on youth smoking

Lowering tobacco tax to make illegal tobacco sales “disappear overnight”: at last we have a proposed figure and it’s an absolute doozie

Why I’m not quitting Spotify because its owner has hugely invested in weaponry

Should we believe Fiona Patten on vapes? Here are just a few problems

Why Australia’s illegal tobacco and vape trade continues to flourish and what should be done about it

Words I’ve seen, but didn’t know. Looked them up. Glad I did.

South Australia is busting illegal tobacco traders big time. What’s stopping the rest of the country?

Agnotology: the study of the willful production of ignorance