"Labor has not only lost the revenue, it has lost control of the black market in illegal tobacco," Hanson said in her announcement on Tuesday.

Conveniently forgetting that the LNP Coalition was in power for what... 17 of the last 26 years, last as recently as 2022?

And that One Nation typically voted with them and gave their electoral preferences to them..

They will use whatever gets the vote, it is irrelevant whether it makes sense, or is good for the country. Australian voters have a long history of being easily bought/conned.

The horse has well and truly bolted in this case. To get people back to buying legal cigarettes again they're going to have to both lower the price and find a way to crack down hard on the illegal market. It takes a pretty principled person to decide to pay two or three times the price to get legal cigarettes when you can walk down the road and every man and his dog will apparently sell you cheap illegal ones.

One Nation aren't the answer but the government isn't too smart with the way they are handling the tobacco black market. They have enormous power between legal enforcement and setting the rate of taxation to cyclically fuck over the black market in a huge way.

Anti-advertising laws and high taxes on cigarettes crushed smoking rates. Cigarettes use to be everywhere. People would be smoking on every street corner; cigarette butts on every footpath; a pervasive stench of smoke in basically every public building.

The anti-smoking campaign worked. Unfortunately, law-makers were slow to react to the rise of vapes, and now smoking got its foot back in the door with their highly addictive product.

I don't know what the right play now is, but I'd be highly reluctant to roll back a system that worked. Many of the people calling for reduction in cigarette tax have essentially zero credibility. Obviously there are businesses that want to sell more cigarettes and are willing to lobby to that effect, and people like Pauline Hanson love to take those sweet lobbying perks. So I'd be inclined to take the view of neutral experts, and the evidence of my lived history.

It can work, it has worked. We had a big illegal cig trade going on, then Chretien lowered the tax and soon the people selling illegal smokes went on to something else, then the taxes were slowly reintroduced til they exceeded where they were before, there still are illegal smokes but not as prevalent as before and I don't think they are brand names these days. Supposedly the taxes on smokes here goes towards our health care

The thumbnail's colour-palette has all the hallmarks of a ron weasley scene in a later harry potter film.

It would be nice if one of the 5 pharmacies in my area would sell me the legal vapes, but they all refuse to do it so I buy the illegal vapes and I have no intention of stopping. Same for 90% of the 'smokers' at work. The rest are smoking manchester and buy the occasional pack of winfield as a treat.