“action group”<\/a> of Customs, police, and health officials has been announced, with improved planning and joint operations to fight the illegal trade.<\/p>\nCustoms Minister Casey Costello said the government did not want to face the same black market issues as Australia.<\/p>\n
Deakin University associate criminology professor Dr James Martin told RNZ the Australian approach had relied on enforcement to suppress the black market.<\/p>\n
“This has been really ineffective,” he said. “We’ve got between 50-60 percent of all tobacco and nearly all vaping products in Australia now come from criminal suppliers, and it’s generated an absolutely black market.<\/p>\n
Roughly AU$7 billion {NZ$8.5b) was spent on illicit nicotine products a year, Martin said.<\/p>\n
“That’s around 40 percent of entire illicit drug economy, more than cannabis, cocaine, ecstasy and heroin combined.”<\/p>\n
The Australian government was far too slow to try reduce the illicit market, he said.<\/p>\n
“At the same time, it’s also made some major mistakes in restricting the availability of legal nicotine products, particularly through taxation of tobacco and a ban on vaping products,” Martin said.<\/p>\n
He thought New Zealand’s action group was a good move.<\/p>\n
“The big difference between the Australian and New Zealand markets, for tobacco at least, is scale,” he said. “Enforcement has a much greater record of effectiveness in effectively suppressing smaller illicit markets and emerging illicit markets.”<\/p>\n
Once markets became high volume, with many customers and suppliers, enforcement became ineffective, Martin said.<\/p>\n
“I think moves to try and move decisively and quickly on this now is a good idea.”<\/p>\n
Costello said the public had a role to play and urged them not to engage in the illegal market.<\/p>\n
“Buying cheap cigarettes isn’t a harmless crime,” she said. “Money from the sale of these cigarettes funds gangs and overseas cartels, and leads to violent crime, intimidation, and extortion in our communities.”<\/p>\n
Martin warned against relying on strategies like educating consumers.<\/p>\n
“Most consumers of illicit tobacco would be aware that purchasing illicit products, that feeds into organised crime, but there’s a lot of antipathy here in Australia amongst smokers towards the government, because they’ve been taxed and disregarded in the policymaking process for so long,” he said.<\/p>\n
Sign up for Ng\u0101 Pitopito K\u014drero<\/a>, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An “action group” of Customs, police and health officials has been announced, with improved planning and joint operations…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":420451,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[48,47,42,43,49,46,44,45,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-420480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-audio","tag-current-affairs","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-podcasts","tag-public-radio","tag-radio-new-zealand","tag-rnz","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=420480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420480\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/420451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=420480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=420480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=420480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"In](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/4JRNZGJ_tobacco_jpg.jpeg\")
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