The data that destroys the idea that Australians are quitting smoking
New data reveals that up to 80% of cigarettes consumed in Australia are illegal, challenging the notion that smoking rates are declining. The Australian Bureau of Statistics has highlighted a significant rise in the illicit tobacco market, which has grown from 12% in 2017 to 80% in 2025. This increase coincides with a rise in nicotine consumption and a drop in legal tobacco spending, indicating a shift towards cheaper illegal options.
- ▪Illicit nicotine products comprised 80% of consumption in Australia in 2025, up from 12% in 2017.
- ▪Nicotine consumption grew by 40% during the same period, with most of the increase occurring in the last four years.
- ▪The federal government is spending over $300 million to combat the illicit tobacco trade, which has led to a collapse in tax revenues.
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
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Record
| Original publisher | The Sydney Morning Herald |
| Canonical URL | https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/the-data-that-destroys-the-idea-that-australians-are-quitting-smoking-20260603-p603ll.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed |
| Publication time | Wed, 03 Jun 2026 18:17:23 +1000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-03T08:21:59.236Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-03T08:21:59.236Z |
| 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 | XfWvWoIT2wuL |
| 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":"2026-06-03T08:17:23Z","datePublished":"2026-06-03T08:17:23Z","description":"New evidence pulled from the nation’s sewers reveals just how dominant the illegal tobacco market is – with up to four in five cigarettes now of the illicit variety.","headline":"The data that destroys the idea that Australians are quitting smoking","keywords":"Tobacco, ABS, Just in","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Brittany Busch","jobTitle":"Federal Politics Reporter","url":"/by/brittany-busch-p537jy"},{"@type":"Person","name":"Shane Wright","jobTitle":"Senior economics…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Sydney Morning Herald.