There's a website called Tobacco in Australia: Facts and Issues which is written by a few anti-smoking activist-academics. It provides lots of tobacco-related statistics and a bit of editorialising.
As has occurred in New Zealand1 and the UK2,the major tobacco companies operating in Australia have commissioned the production of many reports over the past 15 years claiming alarmingly high estimates of the extent of illicit trade in tobacco in Australia.3-6
Industry estimates suggest that illicit tobacco consumption as a percentage of total consumption increased from 11.8% in 2012 to 23.5% of the total tobacco market in 2022. This contrasts to the 2022 estimate from the Australian Taxation Office of 14.3%.
People most likely to buy packs originating from overseas—being travellers, recent migrants and international students or special visa workers—are much less likely to be motorists and much more likely to be walking and using public transport. The packs they use are therefore much more likely to enter the litter stream in public places than are packs used by cigarette consumers who do not travel frequently overseas.
Between 2015 and 2022, estimates of the extent of illicit tobacco used in Australia prepared by the Australian Taxation Office were consistently substantially lower than those included in the reports produced for tobacco companies by KPMG LLP.
This year, the ATO has performed its traditional analysis on the total tobacco gap using the existing channel-based bottom-up method. However, preliminary data from a University of Queensland research project that is looking at the biomarkers of tobacco leaf consumption in samples of waste water throughout Australia suggests that the total tobacco market and therefore the total illicit market is significantly higher than what we have previously estimated.
With this information, we now assess this tobacco tax gap estimate as unreliable and are undertaking a review of the methodology. We caution using this information as it is no longer a sufficiently credible or meaningful estimate of the illicit tobacco market in Australia.
A number of academic papers, reports produced by US government research agencies, statements by political parties and research services and newspaper articles, allege that powerful and dangerous criminal gangs and terrorist groups are involved in counterfeiting activities on a massive scale..... Such reports have been embraced enthusiastically by think-tanks with a political agenda of keeping taxes very low. The tone of these reports is often highly emotive and alarmist, and are consistent with in the interests of tobacco companies to ‘talk up’ the problem of illicit trade in general and counterfeit cigarettes in particular.
In Australia, Hamad’s crew were busy waging a relentless turf war for control of Australia’s multibillion-dollar illicit tobacco trade, a battle involving dozens of firebombings and the gunning down of business and personal rivals.
