Australia's cigarette tax is one of the lower in the Western world. Too low. And why exactly is slugging smokers even more a bad thing? It's one of the worst drugs around. Tax the shit out of the mother fucker, maybe get some people to quit, and possibly even make a little government revenue on the side.
The prevalence of smoking tobacco in Australia is lower than in most other countries, developed and not, so it's not like it shows it to have any notable effect. Instead, Australia's no smoking campaign is amongst the most effective in the world. That's how to combat smoking, not through some populist measure which you can point at and say "Look, I'm doing something" without really putting any effort into it. We're winning the war on cigarette smoking in this country (I don't know the exact current figure, but less than 25% of Australians smoke), it's becoming a less socially acceptable thing to do, punishing smokers financially is not the way to solve the problem.
I don't buy Spiny's lame excuse that "only poor people smoke so it hits poor people". Well maybe this way it'd be too expensive for them to smoke. Yay.
I didn't say only the poor smoke, but smoking is a habit that the lower classes disproportionately partake in. If you don't buy that, then I recommend asking any year 8 PDHPE student. Likewise they're more likely to do heroin (an even worse drug than tobacco, "one of the worst around") - if every heroin dealer hiked their prices by 15% it wouldn't lead to heroin addicts quitting. Likewise smoking. Its problem is that it's addictive, most people recognise that addiction is an illness; how you can claim that the ill should be subjected to a tax hike is beyond me.