Taxpayers, not Big Tobacco, are paying for our illegal smoke habit
Australia's tobacco market is increasingly dominated by organized crime, with illegal sales rising sharply. A recent Senate inquiry revealed that 65% of tobacco sales are now on the black market, a significant increase from 16% in 2020. This shift has resulted in billions of dollars being diverted from government revenue to criminal enterprises, raising concerns about public health and law enforcement effectiveness.
- ▪Organized crime could control Australia's tobacco market by 2030 without intervention.
- ▪The excise on tobacco has nearly tripled in the past decade, leading to higher taxes on cigarettes.
- ▪The Illicit Tobacco and E-Cigarette Commissioner estimates illegal sales accounted for 60% of the market last year.
Sydney Morning Herald publishes from Australia and files mainly under world. We currently carry 3,705 of its stories.
Story provenance
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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/business/companies/taxpayers-not-big-tobacco-are-paying-for-our-illegal-smoke-habit-20260521-p5zzek.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed |
| Publication time | Sat, 30 May 2026 12:46:18 +1000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-30T02:51:55.315Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-30T02:51:55.315Z |
| 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 | V7imrG-QV6NC |
| 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":"2026-05-30T02:46:18Z","datePublished":"2026-05-30T02:46:18Z","description":"Big Tobacco is still making a fortune in Australia, even as government revenue plunges – but organised crime will soon snuff this out.","headline":"Taxpayers, not Big Tobacco, are paying for our illegal smoke habit","keywords":"Tobacco, Just in, Drugs","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Colin Kruger","jobTitle":"Senior business…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Sydney Morning Herald.