‘Bucket bongs’ - Barnaby Joyce explains new policy 💨

0:00You're listening to the Ben Fordham Podcast and now Ben Fordham comments. Well, there is a war in Canberra over smokes and it really comes down to two numbers, $50 and $20. A legal packet of cigarettes can cost you $50, illegal smokes around $20. One nation in the coalition want to blow that gap apart. The Liberal leader Angus Taylor is proposing an 80% cut to the tobacco excise. On a packet of 20 cigarettes, that takes the federal tax from about $30 down to six. That would drag legal cigarette prices much closer to the black market, but Tanya Plybosik says it'll lead to higher rates of smoking. It will kill people. If we drop the excise in the way that has been suggested by the coalition, we will see smoking and vaping rates in this country increase. That will lead to deaths. It'll kill people according to Tanya Plybosik. Her argument is obvious. We made cigarettes

1:01expensive to stop people smoking and she's concerned that if we make cigarettes cheaper, that will have the opposite effect. But Tanya Plybosik overlooks the obvious point. They're already cheaper and smoking rates have already climbed higher. So the outcome she's warning about, it's already happening. A decade ago, illicit sources made up 12% of all nicotine consumed in Australia, 12% a decade ago. Now it's 80%. And over that period of time, nicotine consumption has gone up by almost 40%. So the tax has gone up, smoking rates have gone up. The value of the black market has gone up too. One of our listeners, Tony, has told James Willis on money news. He has a mate with 10 smoke shops and there's millions of dollars being made on the black market. Stop, make sure everyone heard that once and for all. Say there's numbers again. 250 sometimes about the 300,000 dollars in cash. A week. Albin EV? Yes, it's

2:072.5 million. Albin EV needs to put it out of the window. And when there's so much money to be made, the bad guys will do anything to claim their share. We've had kidnappings, fire bombings and shootings in broad daylight. So in Tanya, Plubus Excess, she's worried that people may die. News flash. It's already happening, Tanya. They're not all dying a slow death. Thanks to lung cancer. We've got people being killed with a bullet on September 1. The tobacco tax went up another 1.6%. Then again, in March next year, there'll be another rise. Another one in September of 2027, followed by another one in March of 2028, then in September 2028, etc. And they're not collecting more revenue, despite the tax going up and up and up. They're collecting less because nobody's buying the legal product. Federal Labor may not get it, but in New South Wales, the Labor Premier Chris Means saw the light long ago. This is the only tax in the history of Australia, where they've effectively doubled

3:07it. And yet the federal government is expecting revenue to decline by one third. So the federal government knows that they're going to be collecting less money as a result of doubling the tax. And I can promise you, Ben, it's not people quitting smoking. They're just moving into the illegal sector. So who's actually winning under the current system? The smoker can still get a cheap packet of cigarettes. The government misses out on the revenue. An organized crime gets a booming business. The tax was supposed to make cigarettes too expensive to smoke. But if the black market is selling them anyway, you haven't stopped the smoker. You've just handed the sale to the blocus breaking the law. And that's why the coalition and one nation say it's time to change course. Barnaby Joyce has been asked on the ABC. Why doesn't he want to regulate cocaine and cannabis too? Because if I'm going down the road, what would you rather me doing? Having a butter in my mouth and smoking it or taking a big long line and sticking it up a nose or maybe just pulling

4:11the whole heap of cones? Which one are you going to feel safer with? No one's been caught over the limit on cigarettes. But by gosh, if you're pulling bucket bongs and then decided to go for a drive down to the shops, it's probably going to be a bit more dangerous, isn't it? That's Barnaby Joyce, explaining policy like only Barnaby can. And back to the central issue of making cigarettes cheaper, it's now Pauline Hanson, Angus Taylor and Chris Minnes in one camp. An elbow is all on his own.