Tobacco Asia

22 tobaccoasia Issue 6, 2026 November / December 9,000 8,000 7,000 6,000 5,000 4,000 3,000 2,000 1,000 0 Dec-16 Dec-17 Dec-18 Dec-19 Dec-20 Dec-21 Dec-22 Dec-23 Dec-24 Dec-25 Total Legal tobacco Illicit cigarettes E-cigarettes Other nicotine By Thomas Schmid Across the Tasman Sea, Australia and New Zealand have spent three decades working from nearly the same tobacco control script. Both ban advertising, hide cigarettes behind shop counters, sell them in plain packs, and tax them heavily. A 20-pack in New Zealand costs NZ$35-NZ$55, of which about 80% is tax, according to the New Zealand Association of Convenience Stores (NZACS). Meanwhile, Australia's excise alone now stands at A$1.55 per stick. Yet at the recent Global Tobacco and Nicotine Forum (GTNF) in Lisbon, Portugal, retail industry leaders from the two countries told delegates strikingly different stories. Theo Foukkare, c.e.o. of the Australasian Association of Convenience Stores (AACS), titled his talk "It's Not Great, But There is Progress." His colleague, NZACS executive director David Hooker spoke of access to decision-makers and policy that, on balance, held together. Although some of the data cited by the two speakers was industry-funded and deserves scrutiny, the contrast is real and instructive. The trailblazer years Australia was, for a long time, the world's laboratory for tobacco con- trol. Its milestones read like a global checklist: a print advertising ban in 1990, the Tobacco Advertising Prohibition Act in 1992, national text warnings in 1995, smoke-free pubs and restaurants, graphic pack warnings in 2006, display bans starting from 2010, and in December 2012 the world's first plain packaging law. A Tale of Two Neighbors: Tobacco Control in Australia and New Zealand Where one grapples with a severe black market crisis, the other enjoys a narrow lead – for now. Daily smoking among adults fell from 24.3% in 1991 to 5.6% in 2025, according to national household surveys. New Zealand followed much the same road, from its 1990 Smoke-free Envi- ronments Act through advertising limits, pictorial warnings, display bans, and plain packs. Its daily smoking rate dropped from about 26% in 1995 to 6.8% in 2024/25, and in 2011 Wellington set the ambitious Smokefree 2025 goal of below 5%. Looking at those figures, neither country was an underperformer. The divergence came later. Where Australia lost its footing The turning point was price. Australia raised excise by 25% in 2010, followed by eight consecutive an- nual rises of 12.5% each from 2013 to 2020, lifting the per-stick duty from A$0.33 to A$1.10. Further 5% annual increases pushed it to A$1.55 per stick. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) reports that legal tobacco prices have almost tripled since December 2016 while illicit prices stayed roughly flat. The bureau's experimental estimates put the illicit share of cigarette consumption at 80% in 2025, up from 12% in 2017 — though the gov- ernment's own illicit tobacco commissioner had estimated 50%-60%. Excise receipts have since collapsed from A$16.3 billion in FY2020 to a forecast A$4.1 bil- lion in FY2026, heading toward roughly A$2 billion by 2030. The human cost is darker: AACS counted more than 300 fire-bombings and three murders in a spreading gangland war fueled by illicit market shares. And "Australia Post is our largest courier of illegal nicotine in the country," Foukkare told the forum, a reminder that the trade has moved from corner shops to doorstep delivery. The early signs that organized crime was beginning to hijack the market were there, but Australia chose to ignore them. Now illicit cigarettes account for about 80% and illicit vapes for 97.5% of all products consumed in their respective categories. Credit: AACS/Theo Foukkare Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Household consumption of illicit tobacco and nicotine products 3/06/2026 Kilograms of nicotine

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