Today’s Adelaide Advertiser has published a cracking opinion piece by Caleb Bond, laying out something so glaring that only a Labor minister could miss it. Bond’s column spells out a simple economic fact. When governments hike taxes beyond reason, they don’t magically create virtue. They drive ordinary people straight into black markets. High taxes kill economies. High taxes breed corruption. Every economist worth their salt knows it, One Nation has said it for years, and now the evidence is quite literally burning down tobacconists across the country.
Yet, according to Bond’s view, Environment Minister Murray Watt still can’t see the connection. Or worse, refuses to.
Bond recounted an exchange at this week’s Senate Estimates discussing illicit tobacco. One Nation’s Senator Malcolm Roberts asked the minister the most basic economic question imaginable: isn’t the government’s sky-high tobacco tax the reason law-abiding Aussies are pushed toward illegal cigarettes that cost a third of the legal price?
Senator Roberts asked a fair, obvious question. Minister Watt, with a straight face, said “No.”
Not only “No,” but he said “there’s absolutely no evidence” for it.
This, despite the Australian Border Force and industry data showing the illicit tobacco market already accounts for around 50 percent of cigarette sales, with projections hitting 80 percent next year. If that doesn’t scream cause and effect, nothing will.
Our streets are now dotted with dodgy tobacconists. Crime gangs are firebombing shops. Innocent people have been killed. Insurance premiums are exploding for shops and homes near tobacconists. All while Labor insists none of this has anything to do with the punishing taxes they keep piling onto smokers.
Bond put it plainly. The idea that ordinary Australians buying ten or fifteen-dollar illegal smokes instead of fifty-dollar legal packs has nothing to do with tax is so ridiculous that, as he joked, even a seven-year-old wouldn’t fall for it.
Labor’s position isn’t just wrong. It’s silly. It’s wilfully blind. And it’s dangerous.
One Nation is the only party in that room telling the truth. Excessive taxation flips an economy on its head. It drives markets underground. It rewards criminals, punishes honest people and destroys small business. It’s basic economics, and the Adelaide Advertiser has now spelled it out for everyone.
The real question is why the Albanese Government keeps pretending not to understand what the rest of the country can see so clearly.
As Caleb Bond writes, if Minister Watt has an explanation for this explosion in illegal tobacco that doesn’t involve tax, we’d all love to hear it. Because right now, the only thing more dangerous than Australia’s illicit tobacco market is a government too stubborn to admit it created the problem in the first place.