Tragically, tobacco tax opened the door to organised crime
The rising tobacco taxes in Australia have inadvertently fueled the illegal tobacco trade, leading to a significant increase in black market sales. Estimates suggest that 65% of tobacco sales are now illegal, a sharp rise from 16% in 2020. This shift has resulted in billions of dollars flowing to organized crime, while smoking rates are also on the rise again.
- ▪The Senate inquiry revealed that rising cigarette duties and lax law enforcement have contributed to a multibillion dollar illegal tobacco market.
- ▪Illegal cigarettes now account for approximately 65% of tobacco sales in Australia, significantly up from 16% in 2020.
- ▪The price of legal cigarettes has soared to nearly $50 per pack, while illegal versions can be purchased for less than $20.
Sydney Morning Herald publishes from Australia and files mainly under world. We currently carry 3,705 of its stories.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Sydney Morning Herald |
| Canonical URL | https://www.smh.com.au/national/tragically-tobacco-tax-opened-the-door-to-organised-crime-20260527-p6016g.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed |
| Publication time | Fri, 29 May 2026 14:39:30 +1000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-29T04:44:41.843Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-29T04:44:41.843Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | VDaRxXpG62-d |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","dateModified":"2026-05-29T04:39:30Z","datePublished":"2026-05-29T04:39:30Z","description":"Governments have let the illegal tobacco trade run wild.","headline":"Tragically, tobacco tax opened the door to organised crime","keywords":"Tobacco, For subscribers, Editorial, Opinion","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"The Herald's…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Sydney Morning Herald.