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MIKE LORIGAN, REPORTER: After smoking for more than half a century, Glenn Cooper has found it impossible to quit.
MIKE LORIGAN: The national adult smoking rate is sitting between 10-11 per cent. It’s been in decline since strict plain packaging laws and steep tax increases were imposed on tobacco products almost 15 years ago. Which had meant effectively that the tobacco industry had started to find ways around the regulations that were put in place particularly plain packaging regulations put in place a little more than a decade ago.
JAMES MARTIN: So there's a $5 billion hole in the federal budget. Now that's not due, again, primarily to people quitting smoking, but rather taking that money instead of paying tax on it, paying for illegal product that is going straight into the hands of organized crime.All tobacco retailers over the last 12 months have reported significant losses and as of July, almost a third of the legal tobacco market has dropped off.
And that's around the same time that we've started to see a really exponential jump in the level of illicit tobacco being trafficked into the country.The Australian Border Force says the record amount of illicit tobacco seized in the last financial year was worth almost $3 billion in lost tax. There is universal acknowledgement that the black market poses a serious threat to reducing smoking rates, but the strategy to address it has divided people.JAMES MARTIN: Yes, yeah, I would argue. I recognize, there are a lot of political obstacles to making something like that available, but I think we're well past the point of utility where our tobacco taxes are currently calibrated.JAMES MARTIN: Well, it depends.
MIKE LORIGAN: Public health researcher Ed Jegasothy has been researching the decline in smoking over the last 20 years. He says tax increases didn’t accelerate the decline in smoking in lower socio-economic areas. While smoking prevalence is coming down below 40 per cent in towns and cities, it hasn't really changed in remote areas.
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