Renaissance Tours celebrated 30 years in 2025 - How $40-a-Pack Cigarettes Pushed Australians to the Black Market

 “When they say no one is coming to save you, they don’t mean nobody will help you with the challenges you face. They mean no one can save you from yourself.”

LOUIS XIV’S FINANCE minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, famously declared that “the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.” When it comes to taxing companies, a modern finance minister might rephrase this as “the largest possible amount of revenue with the smallest possible amount of economic and political damage.”

 Extractive taxes were indeed a major force behind the French Revolution

How $40-a-Pack Cigarettes Pushed Australians to the Black Market

Tax hikes made cigarettes in Australia the most expensive in the world. They have also helped fuel a multibillion-dollar criminal enterprise in bootleg tobacco.

A retired math teacher descended into an underground parking lot in search of her dealer, cash in hand.

Headlights flashed from the far end of the garage in a beachside, middle-class neighborhood in suburban Melbourne, Australia. She walked up to an unmarked van and soon was back above ground with the illicit goods.

A carton of cigarettes.

Australia has the most expensive cigarettes in the world, a pack of midmarket cigarettes costing on average about 55 Australian dollars, or almost $40, nearly double what it will set you back in New York City. A series of steep tax hikes — eight in 10 years — were put in place to reduce the rate of smoking, which has steadily declined. But the high prices have also given rise to a thriving black market now estimated to be a multibillion-dollar industry that accounts for as much as half of all tobacco sales in the country…

Renaissance Tours celebrates 30 years

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