A $22 packet of cigarettes: One Nation’s radical new tobacco policy revealed

The Coalition has left the door open to One Nation’s call to cut cigarette prices in half in a bid to take on organised crime and shatter the black market for tobacco.

Pauline Hanson announced her proposal to cut the tobacco excise by 75 per cent and pause indexation for three years on Tuesday.

If passed in full, it would drop the price of a $46.50 pack of legal cigarettes to an estimated $21 or $22.

“This is not about encouraging smoking. It is about restoring the rule of law and breaking the black market,” Hanson said.

Hanson would also match the cut with stronger border enforcement, faster shop closures, tougher penalties for traffickers and arsonists, and aggressive seizure of criminal assets and unexplained wealth.

“People are sick of the firebombing, shootings, extortion and killings. They are sick of watching tobacco shops burn, while organised crime takes control of the market,” she said.

“This is not a victimless crime.”

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Recent federal budgets have shown multi-billion-dollar falls in tobacco excise takings, attributable not just to decreasing numbers of smokers but to the influx of illegal product on the market.

Hanson claimed the government has lost revenue and control of the black market.

“Labor’s policy is failing,” she said.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers ruled out reducing the tobacco excise rate, telling reporters the government was focused on enforcement and compliance.

“It is still a very substantial challenge, and we’re addressing it the best we can,” he said.

Chalmers then blamed the current high excise rate on previous governments.

“If you look at the big increase in excise over the last, I think, a dozen years or so, the bulk of that was done before we came to office,” he said.

Shadow treasurer Tim Wilson said the Coalition would review the tobacco excise policy.

“In principle, we want to cut out the black market and the organised crime that the Albanese government has let fester,” he told reporters.

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“It’s time the Albanese government got past its pride, acknowledged, just like in their budget, that adding more taxes definitely doesn’t deliver better outcomes for the Australian people.”

Greens Leader Larissa Waters told Today that Hanson was doing “precisely what big tobacco have been lobbying her to do”.

“We see them haunting the halls of parliament here trying to boost their profits,” she said.

“I mean, if you want to fight crime, fight crime. But don’t dress up fighting crime as just a premise to boost the profits of big tobacco.”