Sasha Barber-Gatt

speaker

323 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 11 Jun

Sasha Barber-Gatt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 3.

Appearances

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The Briefing · Ciggie boss gives secret evidence + Inside Melbourne’s firebombing spree · 5 May 2026 podcast

Yeah, so illegal tobacco sales account for between 50% and 60% of the Aussie market.

That's worth as much as $6.9 billion.

And we have talked about this before, Chris, in terms of how much money is actually being wiped from the government's coffers because they're not making the tax on the cigarette sales anymore because people are buying them illegally.

tobacco execs are pushing the federal government to lower the excise to undercut black market operators, something the health minister, Mark Butler, has also talked about before, and he said, we will not be beholden to organised crime, basically.

Our health policy doesn't change because a couple of criminals want it to.

Now, anti-smoking campaigners, the Greens and Labor,

have all criticised the coalition for allowing the company to give evidence at the inquiry in the first place.

Now, this is because it's ended a more than 15-year precedent that was set by the WHO, which was designed to stop big tobacco from interfering with public health policy.

Basically, they created this framework that is designed to, you know, not allow...

these companies to give evidence or to have any sort of say in policy around cigarettes and tobacco because of how much they have to gain from it.

So really interesting story there.

But it does create jobs and it helps our economy, which is why that's why they're warning the government.

They're saying, do you want to lose that?

Because we'll go.

So it is a fair point for them to make to the federal government.

However, the way that it's been done in this public inquiry behind closed doors, though, a little bit dodgy.

The best place to do it is in England where it's just double basically.

So I just double the price.

Look, lead sponsors Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez Bezos reportedly donated 10 million US of that total, which is just wild.

Some individual guests meantime wrote checks for up to $1 million to make the Anna Wintour approved final cut on the guest list.

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