NSW Parliament’s Illegal Tobacco Hearing: An Echo Chamber and a Case Study in How Australia Broke Its Nicotine Policy

Alan Gor 19 December 2025

On 17 December 2025, NSW Parliament’s Portfolio Committee No. 5 held a public hearing into the illegal tobacco trade. The framing suggests urgency: organised crime, violence, arson, and billions in lost revenue.

However, when you examine both the hearing schedule and the submissions that shape it, the process appears less like an inquiry and more like a policy self-affirmation exercise. Not only are the same voices being invited to speak, but they are advancing the same conclusions that have already failed, repeatedly, across tobacco, vaping, and illicit markets.

A Carefully Curated Agreement

The hearing is dominated by:

• NSW Health leadership

• senior police

• public health NGOs

• long-standing tobacco control advocates

Many of these voices have:

• supported repeated tobacco excise hikes

• advocated a prohibition-style nicotine policy

• dismissed harm reduction

• and publicly endorsed Australia’s vaping ban

In other words, the people being asked to explain the crisis are overwhelmingly the people who designed the policy architecture that produced it.

Absent are economists, criminologists specialising in prohibition markets, harm-reduction experts, affected retailers, and consumers displaced into illegality. That absence is not accidental. It ensures the core assumptions are never tested.

This is how echo chambers form: agreement by design.

The Tobacco Excise Time Bomb No One Is Allowed to Name

Australia now has some of the highest tobacco prices in the world, driven almost entirely by excise. This is still treated as an unquestioned public health success even as legal sales collapse and illicit trade surges.

The inquiry shows little appetite to examine whether excise has crossed from deterrence into market distortion, or whether enforcement can ever suppress a market this profitable. Failure is framed as insufficient control, not flawed design.

That framing is reinforced explicitly in the submissions.

The Cancer Council Submission: Same Script, Same Failure

Here we go again, the same script, the same voices, the same conclusions.

Cancer Council NSW’s submission exemplifies the echo chamber at work. Rather than confronting policy failure, it repeats the prohibitionist playbook: deny structural causes, dismiss lived experience, and double down on enforcement, taxation, and punishment.

The contradiction is glaring. The submission acknowledges the illegal tobacco market is exploding, yet insists higher prices and tighter controls are the solution, even as legal sales collapse and illicit trade consumes a growing share of the market.

When a majority of consumption shifts outside the law, that is not a compliance problem. It is a policy failure signal. Responding with escalation rather than reassessment is not evidence-based public health; it is ideological stubbornness.

Ignoring the Questions That Matter

Like the hearing itself, the Cancer Council submission avoids the central questions:

• Why are smokers abandoning the legal market at scale?

• Why does enforcement repeatedly fail despite escalating penalties?

• Why are organised crime groups thriving under “tough” regulation?

• Why do outcomes diverge so dramatically from intentions?

Responsibility is displaced outward onto criminals, retailers, and consumers while policy settings are treated as untouchable.

This pattern is familiar.

It is exactly the pattern Australia saw with vaping.

Vaping Prohibition: The Same Failure, Just Faster

Australia’s vaping ban did not eliminate vaping. It eliminated legal vaping.

Demand did not disappear. Consumers were pushed directly into an unregulated black market now dominated by the same criminal networks profiting from illegal tobacco.

The parallels are unmistakable:

• High tobacco excise → illegal cigarettes

• Vape prohibition → illegal vapes

• More enforcement → higher criminal profits

• Policy failure → denial and escalation

Yet the inquiry treats illegal tobacco as an isolated problem rather than part of a broader prohibitionist nicotine framework failing in real time.

That framework is defended explicitly by its most influential advocates.

Simon Chapman’s Submission: Prohibition by Denial

If the Cancer Council submission reflects institutional inertia, Simon Chapman’s submission reveals the ideology sustaining it.

It is the same tired prohibitionist script Australia has heard for decades: deny policy failure, double down on enforcement, and pretend observable reality does not exist.

Chapman refuses to acknowledge what Australians can see with their own eyes — that extreme excise, product bans, and pharmacy-only vaping access have pushed demand into illegal channels, not reduced it. His assertion that “black markets exist everywhere” is not an argument. It is an evasion.

Black markets are not a justification for creating perfect conditions for them to dominate.

Denial in the Face of Outcomes

There is no serious engagement with the facts that:

• Legal tobacco sales have collapsed

• Illicit supply now dominates large parts of the market

• Enforcement has failed despite escalation

• Violence is increasing

• Smokers are not quitting as promised

Instead, blame is shifted onto criminals, retailers, landlords, and communities while the policy settings that created the mess remain sacrosanct.

When half the market is illegal, revenue has collapsed, and violence is escalating, insisting “tax isn’t the problem” is not evidence-based policy.

It is denial.

Professor Becky Freeman’s Submission: Same Playbook, Narrower Lens

If Chapman represents prohibition by denial, Professor Becky Freeman’s submission shows how deeply that denial has become normalised within Australia’s public-health establishment.

The script is instantly familiar: enforce stricter rules, restrict more, license tighter, reduce outlets, and never question the tax levels or policy settings that created the problem in the first place.

Like the Cancer Council and Chapman, Freeman treats the illegal tobacco crisis as an enforcement failure rather than a market signal. The idea that policy design itself might be driving illicit trade is dismissed.

Excise Denial Disguised as Expertise

Freeman flatly dismisses the role of tobacco excise in driving illicit trade, despite overwhelming real-world evidence that price differentials are the primary driver of black markets.

Her claim that reducing taxes would “only make illicit tobacco cheaper” ignores basic economics and the reality on the ground. The illegal market is already setting the price. Enforcement cannot compete with a 60–70% price gap.

Pretending otherwise is not public health.

It is a policy denial.

At this point, excess is no longer suppressing consumption. It is underwriting criminal profitability.

Harm Reduction Rejected on Principle

Like the other submissions, Freeman’s treats all nicotine use as equally unacceptable.

There is:

• no serious engagement with tobacco harm reduction

• no recognition of safer nicotine alternatives for adults who smoke

• no acknowledgement that prohibition-style controls have pushed demand into criminal hands

Smokers are framed solely as victims needing supply restriction, not adults responding rationally to price, availability, and risk.

This framing mirrors the logic behind Australia’s vaping prohibition. The result then was not abstinence, but criminalisation.

Outlet Reduction: A Gift to Criminal Markets

Freeman’s proposal to drastically cut the number of legal retailers and make tobacco “exceptional” would further entrench illicit distribution.

Reducing legal access while demand remains stable:

• concentrates supply

• increases margins

• reduces visibility

• and makes enforcement harder

Markets do not vanish when legal channels are strangled. They migrate.

Australia is already living with that result.

A Closed Ecosystem Talking to Itself

Perhaps the most striking feature of Freeman’s submission is where it comes from.

It is written entirely within the same closed public-health ecosystem, comprising Cancer Council, NSW Health, and WHO advisory circles, which designed the current settings.

There is:

• no reflection on policy failure

• no accountability for outcomes

• no curiosity about alternatives that have worked elsewhere

The assumption is that the framework is correct, and reality must be forced to comply.

That is the essence of an echo chamber.

Experts Out of Time

Taken together, the hearing schedule and the submissions from the Cancer Council, Chapman, and Freeman reveal a deeper problem: policy stagnation.

The same experts offer the same answers: higher taxes, tighter controls, harsher enforcement, despite overwhelming evidence that the context has fundamentally changed.

Markets adapt.

Consumers adapt.

Criminal networks adapt.

Policy does not. What makes this inquiry most concerning is that these are not isolated examples. There are many more submissions to this process, and they follow the same pattern almost without exception. Different organisations, different authors, different credentials, but the same assumptions, the same framing, and the same prescriptions. High excise remains unquestionable. Harm reduction remains taboo. Policy outcomes are explained away rather than confronted. When an inquiry hears the same answer no matter who is speaking, it is no longer testing ideas; it is rehearsing them. That is not scrutiny. It is consensus maintenance, and it guarantees that the failures we are witnessing will continue, uninterrupted.

An Echo That Keeps Getting Louder

The illegal tobacco trade is not an anomaly.

The vaping black market is not an accident.

There are warnings that Australia’s nicotine policy has crossed from regulation into dysfunction.

By constructing an inquiry that excludes dissent, ignores harm reduction, and treats policy failure as heresy, NSW Parliament is not investigating the problem.

It is reinforcing it.

Echo chambers do not correct course.

They amplify error.

And Australians are paying the price in crime, lost revenue, preventable harm, and policies increasingly detached from reality.