The Public Health (Tobacco and Other Products) Bill 2023 and related bill are effectively housekeeping about the tobacco control frameworks in this country that have been widely supported for a number of decades and quite successful in lowering smoking rates across Australia. I certainly recognise how terrible smoking is to your health and how it’s something that should not be encouraged. We should seek to minimise the numbers of people taking it up. I do agree, though, with the sentiment of the previous speaker that there’s no way that we can really prohibit it. It’s just a matter of minimising the harm.
I would say, though, that this bill, while it is housekeeping, is incomplete housekeeping. It’s the sort of housekeeping you do when you take all the mess from around your house and chuck it in a few cupboards so that the guests don’t notice it but you haven’t really cleaned the house. It’s going to become very dirty, very quickly with all your cupboards jammed full with your junk. This bill ignores the real issues that are occurring in the real world around the use of tobacco and related products, particularly e-cigarettes. Anybody who walks down the street can see the explosion of vape shops and vaping across the country, but this bill basically does nothing about that, and the government’s related measures on vaping will simply double down on failure. I’ll come to those in a second.
The other aspect of the bill is that it does nothing, really, to tackle the illicit tobacco trade that has ballooned in recent years—absolutely ballooned. I’ve seen estimates that a quarter to a third of tobacco smoked in this country is coming through illegal channels, helping to fund criminal gangs, and we are ignoring that effect. I warned about this a few years ago. I opposed the increase in excise on smoking. It’s now $50 a pack for people with this habit. Admittedly only a minority of Australians, 11 or 12 per cent, smoke now, but they face an enormous cost with all of the taxes that are imposed on them. It’s often poorer Australians who continue to smoke. Australians in Aboriginal communities are smoking. How do they afford this? What is increasingly happening, of course, is that people are buying illegal tobacco—so-called chop-chop—and that is funding criminal gangs through our country. That’s because we’ve set the price of tobacco far too high now; it’s not really acting as a deterrent anymore. Our smoking rates have, effectively, flatlined at the base of the population that just can’t get off smokes. So we’ve forced them into this.
There is another way of smoking which is much better for your health and which is also cheaper, and that’s to use e-cigarettes. It’s much, much cheaper, and it’s much, much better for your health. It doesn’t have all the chemicals that are in tobacco, and that’s why we’ve seen a ballooning of the use of e-cigarettes. Most estimates say that a lot of the approximately 1.3 million adult Australians who vape—who use e-cigarettes—were previously smokers who decided to use this product as a cleaner, healthier and cheaper way of dealing with their habit of addiction to nicotine. So the 1.3 million Australians who vape do so in an environment where, notionally, it’s illegal to possess liquid nicotine. It’s illegal to possess it in this country; it’s illegal to carry it. You can import it, but it’s very, very restricted. State and federal governments have been trying for years to prohibit, ban or suppress the use of liquid nicotine in e-cigarettes, and they have fundamentally and totally failed.
A few years ago when I first started looking at this issue, there were only a few hundred thousand Australians who were vaping, and that has grown by almost three times in the past few years alone. The government cannot, and will not be able to, get rid of vaping in this country. All the government is doing by continuing to prohibit vaping is funding criminal gangs, who are making an absolute fortune from this trade—something that almost every other country in the world has realised should be legalised and regulated. The government’s plan formally announced last week by the Minister for Health and Ageing is to, on 1 January, ban the importation of vapes even under the previously restricted regime of needing a prescription to do so. It will completely ban the importation of vapes, and it will double-down on the state laws. He’s been doing this in cooperation with state ministers. It will double-down on the laws that prohibit vaping and liquid nicotine and seek to make 1.3 million adult Australians criminals just after Christmas this year. That’s the government’s plan. Their plan is to, effectively, make over a million Australians criminals if they want to continue to avoid the dangerous habit of smoking. When he announced those changes at a press conference on Tuesday last week, the minister for health told the nation:
These are not measures targeting users. These are not measures that impose any penalty whatsoever on people that are using vapes. There is no penalty for people who use vapes …
That’s what the minister told Australians last week.
Last Friday, in Western Australia, an individual was charged in the WA Magistrates Court with possession of liquid nicotine. Under WA laws, he faces a maximum penalty of a $2,000 fine and/or two years in jail. That’s the law. The minister misled the Australian people last week by saying that no-one would be prosecuted. He said: ‘We’re not going to go after the users.’ Three days later, a 50-year-old man charged in Western Australia is facing two years jail for simply having a vape. This is ridiculous. This is absurd. This should change, and the government should realise how hopeless this particular solution is, when the rest of the world has realised that this is ridiculous. If you can legally smoke in this country—you can pretty much legally smoke marijuana now; in the ACT, you can take hard drugs with very little penalty there—why can’t we allow adult Australians to decide to use liquid nicotine if they so choose but have appropriate regulations to make sure that the use is done in such a way that it doesn’t encourage especially young Australians to take it up?
The government should see the error of its ways. The government is not to be able to prohibit it, and it has no plan to deal with the lack of alternatives for those who use vapes, come 1 January, when 1.3 million Australians will be made criminals. What is the plan that the Australian government has for these 1.3 million Australians, most of whom are addicted to nicotine? It’s a terrible thing. I’ve not regularly smoked, and I think I have vaped once in my life. I’m not addicted, but I do feel a high degree of sympathy for those Australians who find themselves in this position. What does the government say to those 1.3 Australians who are in this position and who find themselves facing a very difficult choice this Christmas? There are only a few options available to these 1.3 million Australians. First, they can try and track down a vape at a pharmacy. Good luck with that. The government is allowing pharmacists to stock a certain level of vapes, but I heard reports that someone scoured Brisbane last week and found that most pharmacies didn’t even stock vapes and that the ones who did have these hopeless vapes that no-one likes and no-one wants to buy. Pharmacists don’t want to sell e-cigarettes. They don’t want to sell liquid nicotine. That’s perfectly understandable. They’re in the practice of health and providing pharmaceutical products. They don’t want to do this, and they’re not doing this. This market has been available to them for years now and hasn’t been taken up, so it’s not a viable option for the 1.3 million Australians to go to a pharmacy. And they’ve got to get a prescription before they go to the pharmacy. That’s also difficult because a lot of doctors don’t want to give prescriptions for it. It’s just a dead-end road, that option.
The second option is that they go back to smoking. They could do that. That is legal. As I say, it will cost about $50 a day. The average Australian smoker now spends over $200 a week—I don’t know how they afford it—on smokes. In comparison, vapes will cost $40 or $50. So it’s almost an increase of $200 to your cost of living to go back to smoking come 1 January. The government doesn’t seem to realise that Australians are struggling. Australians are being punished by the home-grown inflation they have presided over. They don’t seem to understand there’s a cost-of-living crisis out there right now. The Prime Minister certainly doesn’t seem to understand how much pain Australians are feeling right now. All Australians, not just those in this category, are feeling that pain, including those 1.3 million Australians who are vaping. As I say, they are generally on lower incomes than those in the rest of our country. They are doing it the most tough in our country, and the government, this Christmas, is going to potentially impose and say, ‘If you want to stay a law-abiding citizen, you now have to pay an extra $200 a week.’ What’s their answer for them? Why are they doing this to poorer people in Australia?
The final option—which, sadly, I’m sure a lot of Australians will take up—is that they stick with vaping but they go to the black market. They can’t import them from legalised, regulated shops in New Zealand—it’s mainly New Zealand shops that currently use the personal importation scheme. Vaping has been legal there for years. Jacinda Ardern, the Labour Prime Minister there, made it a big part of her agenda to legalise vaping, have a regulated market and encourage smokers to take up vaping because it’s much better. Mainly it has been New Zealand shops. That is closed to them, so they’ll have to buy from the Chinese triads and the bikie gangs, who are selling these products on the black market. Great job, government!
The Minister for Health and Aged Care, Mark Butler, is Santa Claus for the criminal gangs in this country this Christmas. Their Christmases are all coming at once because they’ve now got a whole bunch of new customers who will be forced into going to the black market and funding this terrible trade. This will fund the violence that then occurs. There’s a lot of crime in North Queensland at the moment where I live. I hear from police that a lot of it is due to vaping. There are turf wars between bikies and triads about who gets to sell products in different locations. Businesses have been blown up and people have been killed because this black market is out of control. This will just make it worse. It will put this criminal trade on steroids. We will have a worse problem next year because of the government’s decisions.
There is another way here. We don’t need to criminalise 1.3 million Australians. We don’t need to help the criminal gangs with this trade. We can do what every other developed country in the world now does and create a legal, regulated e-cigarette vaping market. I will move amendments in the committee stage of this bill to do that very thing. It’s very simple. All we need to do is remove liquid nicotine from schedule 4 of the Poisons Standard. My amendments will do that. That would mean that this 50-year-old man in WA wouldn’t have been charged, because the state laws refer to the national Poisons Standard. The reason this 50-year-old individual has been charged and is facing, potentially, two years in jail right now over this weekend is that the WA laws says that anything in schedule 4 of the Poisons Standard is a crime with these penalties. We in this parliament can remove liquid nicotine from the Poisons Standard. It shouldn’t be classified with other hard drugs; it’s ridiculous. Remove that, and my amendment’s do that, and we won’t charge everyday Australians with these ridiculous crimes.
The second part of my amendment to this bill will give the minister powers to set up a regulated market for vaping products. It will allow the minister to set rules on how vaping products are labelled, how they’re packaged, the appearance of them, the descriptions of them and the flavourings of them. It will make sure we outlaw all of these ridiculous flavours that the black market Chinese gangs are selling, with candy cane and fairy floss flavours, so they’re not marketed to our children. Restrict all those; change all those. Effectively, allow e-cigarettes to be sold in Australia in the same way cigarettes are: behind cabinets with plain packaging and no advertising—the bill does ban advertising already. Make sure that we regulate the market so we keep them away from our children.
Finally, my amendments would set up an industry funded collection scheme. The retailers who engage in the trade would have to fund a collection scheme for disposable e-cigarettes. It’s becoming a big waste issue in this country because all of these disposables coming in, largely through the black market, are just tossed out. They’ve got some stuff in them that shouldn’t go in general waste, so my amendment would introduce a collection scheme that collects and deals with that recycling issue.
I’ll be making all of these amendments. I don’t know why the government has been sitting on its heels, ignoring the evidence from around the world, letting this trade grow and infect our schoolkids and our children in a way that has got to be stopped. We can’t continue allowing these criminal gangs to market this product to our children. We should take our enforcement efforts and focus on keeping them out of our schools.
If adult Australians want to have a vape, have an e-cigarette, it should be a free country in this regard. They can smoke and do much worse than e-cigarettes. Allow them to take out an e-cigarette at the shop. I don’t encourage it, and I don’t want people to do it, but, if they want to do it, they’re adults.
Then we should go after those gangs that are supplying our children. We should go in and make sure to keep them out of our schools. That should be the effort. But what’s going to happen is that the government are going to spread themselves too thin. They’re not going to have the resources to take on the gangs. They’re not going to beat them, just as they haven’t in the last few years, and this problem is going to get worse.
Finally, I just want to finish on the evidence. Some people will claim that vaping has health issues or health problems that are worse or as bad as smoking. That is fundamentally wrong, and it’s inconsistent with the science. Just last November a new Cochrane review came out. Cochrane reviews are effectively reviews of all the scientific reviews that have been done on issues. They are the gold standard of peer review in the scientific field. This Cochrane review stated:
Because they do not burn tobacco, e-cigarettes do not expose users to the same levels of chemicals that can cause diseases in people who smoke conventional cigarettes.
E-cigarettes are not risk free, and they shouldn’t be used by people who don’t smoke or who aren’t at risk of smoking. However, evidence shows that nicotine e-cigarettes carry only a small fraction of the risk of smoking. That is the scientific conclusion. If we are to make laws here that are based on real evidence, that are based on trying to minimise hurt and pain for people in Australia, we should listen to that science. We would join the rest of the world and have an adult conversation about creating a legal, regulated market for e-cigarettes in this country. Instead we are being led by a minister leading with slogans, who is misleading the Australian people about the effect of his crackdown and who will only benefit criminal gangs in this country, at the cost and pain of average Australians who, unfortunately, find themselves addicted to the terrible substance of nicotine.
