Radio interview with Minister Butler, 3AW – 12 March 2025

TOM ELLIOTT, HOST: Okay, so late in 2023, the Federal Health Minister, who joins us in a moment, said he, you know, vaping was the great health issue of our time, which it probably is, along with junk food and various other things, and he wanted to stamp it out. We've also, in the last few years, seen this enormous rise in illegal cigarettes as the excise on legal tobacco has gone up and up, criminal gangs smuggling, you know, container loads of illegal cigarettes. And I can tell you I don't smoke, but it is not difficult to go and find illegal cigarettes that costs, say, $20 bucks a packet or even less, versus the legal variety, which can cost $70 a packet. I interviewed Mark Butler a few weeks ago and said, what was he going to do about it? We think he now has a plan. He is the Federal Health Minister, Mr. Butler, good morning.
 
MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGED CARE, MARK BUTLER: Good morning, Tom.
 
ELLIOTT: So what are you going to do about illegal cigarettes?
 
BUTLER: You're right to say that we are making inroads on vapes. The research shows that even over the last year, vaping has turned down quite markedly, particularly among young Australians, which is really pleasing. We've got a long way to go, but we're not making inroads on illegal cigarettes. Today I'm announcing further resources around enforcement. We already put a lot more money into enforcement, particularly for Border Force and they've been seizing really jaw dropping numbers of cigarettes at the border. I've got to say, over the last six months, they've seized 1.3 billion cigarettes, that's not million, billion cigarettes in just six months. That's sort of about 650 cigarettes for every one of the 2 million Australian smokers. That's a big increase on what they were seizing the year before. We're just not making a dent or sufficient dent on the retail market in the country. Here in Melbourne, you've experienced the worst of it with the war being fought between different criminal gangs seeking to control the market.
 
Today we're announcing a lot of additional money, about $160 million in additional money to track down these gangs in the market and to seize their profits. We're going to track them down, we're going to put them in the dock and prosecute them, and we're going to seize their profits. There's money for Commonwealth prosecutions. There's money for state governments to support their enforcement operations. And again, to bolster their prosecution efforts as well. And we're doing more work partnering with other countries in the region where  they're dealing with this criminal activity as well.
 
ELLIOTT: What about the actual shops? I mean, if you sent a police officer into a shop that's clearly selling illegal cigarettes, I mean, could they, you know, walk out with the cash register, perhaps, and say, well, that's you're nicked. That's the fine for selling illegal fags.
 
BUTLER: We want to support more work at state level on this enforcement. There's been really good cooperation on vaping and that's starting to work. All of the vape shops in my electorate, for example, have been shut down. It's a bit patchy across the country. But again, in my state in South Australia, some shops that have been selling illicit cigarettes have been shut down by the state government over the last couple of weeks. There is work there but I want to see more. Frankly, there are hundreds of shops across the country. I think they think that this is a relatively innocuous thing for them to do a harmless trade for them. But not only is it damaging our public health efforts to stamp out smoking, it's bankrolling these pretty awful criminal gangs, their activities like drug trafficking, sex trafficking.
 
ELLIOTT: But just on the criminal gangs, like, it's well known that one of the kingpins you mentioned how, you know, Melbourne's had all these fire bombings of tobacco shops and so forth. The leader of one the gangs involved is living, we think, in Iraq and has a tonne of money stashed overseas. Now it's going to be pretty difficult to go after him, isn't it?

BUTLER: It is difficult. And these gangs are pretty relentless and they're pretty clever. They employ lawyers, they try and stash their money, which is why we're putting money into our cleverest Commonwealth agencies. We've got a pretty good infrastructure aimed at tracking down illegal profits or criminal profits. We're bolstering the Federal Police, the Criminal Intelligence Commission, AUSTRAC a number of other agencies federally that do this work in other criminal markets and wanting them to do it in this market, because this increasingly is a really, important source of revenue for these criminal gangs. It's really coming to the attention of the highest and most serious law enforcement agencies we have.
 
ELLIOTT: Just quickly, we were seeing some photos from an outdoor market in Laverton here in Melbourne the other day. At one particular stall, there were vapes, every flavour, every colour you could imagine. There were large knives and there were graffiti spray cans all available, all at cheap prices, all quite open to the public. I mean, you could start with going to markets like that, surely?
 
BUTLER: Yeah. It must be driving your listeners mad. I really do want to reassure, particularly parents, we're making some inroads on vapes. A 50 per cent reduction last year in the last 12 months on school suspensions because of vapes recorded. 30 per cent reduction in vaping by the youngest people, a 50 per cent reduction in vaping among people over the age of 30. But these illegal cigarettes are just proving very, very hard to stamp out.
 
ELLIOTT: All right, well, good luck with it. We'll watch it with interest. Mark Butler there, Federal Health Minister. I mean, look, it is hard. And the problem is that when there is so much money involved, even if they've seized how many billion cigarettes it was at the border, billions more are getting through. And the profit margin is so massive that the gangs can afford to lose a big chunk of the cigarettes they try and smuggle and still make money.