British American Tobacco Australia (BATA) has blamed the Albanese government’s enormous excise for the unprecedented surge in black market business and multi-billion-dollar revenue losses.
Last week, astonishing new figures revealed the sheer scale of Australia’s tobacco underbelly, which is set to dwarf the legal market after doubling in volume in just three years.
Tobacco stores across the country have been firebombed and ram-raided as a result of competing organised crime groups vying to fill the high demand for nicotine products.
The latest tobacco store to go up in flames occurred on Friday night, when a car drove into a shopfront in Mentone, in Melbourne’s south-east, with a flammable liquid being ignited causing the two-storey building to become engulfed.
The NSW government launched its war on the illicit tobacco trade last week, closing two stores in Sydney on Tuesday, but the new figures showed the sale of illegal cigarettes doubled since 2022, from 3.1 billion to a whopping 6.6 billion by the end of 2025.
In 2026, it is predicted there will be 8 billion illegal cigarettes sold – a 158 per cent jump from 2022.
A BAT Australia spokesperson told SkyNews.com.au the kind of “acceleration” in illicit tobacco in Australia was “simply not being observed in other countries” and has correlated with the “highest excise setting in the world”.
“Premier (Chris) Minns seems to be the only senior politician in Australia willing to call this out for what it is, which is a complete breakdown in tobacco control,” BAT Australia said.
“The Albanese Government has a decision to make and that is, would it rather have tobacco in Australia run my criminals or a legal market who follows the law?
“Without a significant reduction in the excise, the decision will simply be made for them and the illicit tobacco market will take over Australia even more than it already has.”
In August, the ATO declared from September 1 the federal excise on tobacco would rise a further five per cent on top of regular indexing.
This rise approximated a rate of approximately $1.5 per cigarette, or $2,397 per kilogram of tobacco.
While the average price of a packet of 20-25 cigarettes has leapfrogged the $50-mark, under-the-counter cigarettes sell for about $25 a pack, or less.
British American Tobacco Australia (BATA) has blamed the Albanese government’s enormous excise for the unprecedented surge in black market business. Picture: iStock/Getty Images
The Canberra Health bureaucrats and politicians only have themselves to blame. There’s been a conga line of halfwits since Nicola Roxon, who went way over the top. These “Doctors” wouldn’t have a clue what the real figures were. No accurate records are kept.
A complete mess.
The illegal tobacco is all produced industrially by the various multi-national tobacco companies provided through supply chains they control. In volume it hugely exceeds all other smuggling into Australia put together.
‘It’s the excise’. Sure.