Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Primary Healthcare) Share this | Hansard source

In rising to speak on the amendments to the Tobacco Plain Packaging Bill 2011, I would like to thank the minister for acknowledging the support of the opposition for the principal plain packaging bill. We did support that bill in the House of Representatives and we supported it in the Senate. I also want to indicate that the opposition will be supporting the government's amendments to their own bill.

The most important of the three amendments deals with the time lines. I would like to spend some time addressing, specifically, the time lines. It was in June 2009 that the Preventative Health Taskforce, in a draft report, first recommended moving to the plain packaging of tobacco. And that was reconfirmed in their final report of September 2009. In April 2010, the government announced that they would implement plan packaging from 1 July 2012. The draft plan packaging legislation was released for consultation on 7 April 2011, and the House first saw the final bill when it was introduced into the House of Representatives on 6 July 2011. That bill was passed by the House on 24 August 2011. It was brought on for debate in the Senate for the first time on 11 October 2011, and that debate was adjourned by the government. It was finally passed and the debate concluded in the Senate on 10 November 2011.

At all times in this process, the opposition has been in the hands of the government. The government have set the time of the release of their draft legislation and the timing of the introduction of the bill: the timing of when it was brought on in the House and the timing of when it was brought on in the Senate. I notice that the minister, in October and November, blamed the opposition for delaying the passage of the bill. A press release of 12 October 2011 from the minister's office states:

… delaying tactics by the Opposition have ensured that the legislation won’t pass this week and again call into question their commitment to this landmark public health reform.

In the same press release, the minister herself said:

Given the delays in passing the Bill caused by the Opposition, the Government now has no choice but to reconsider the impact on implementation timeframes.

Subsequently, the minister made an announcement that the time frame for implementation of the bill would be delayed by five months.

The House and the Senate have spent a matter of hours debating this legislation, so there has been no delay. There has certainly been no delay caused by the opposition, because, at every point in time in the scheduling of this bill, the opposition has been in the hands of the government. It is clear that the original time frames were not realistic at the time that the plain packaging bills were introduced. If we consider the introduction of the GST—the A New Tax System—we realise that that legislation was in place more than 12 months before its implementation, and, although that was a much bigger reform, it is clear that a reasonable time for small businesses to comply with new legislation is something in the order of 12 months. The problem with this bill is that in April 2010 the government made the announcement that plain packaging would come in more than two years later, but there was a 12-month delay before anyone saw the draft bill. That is where the principal delay has occurred. The minister has repeatedly said that the delay in implementation of the bill was caused by the coalition's stalling tactics in the Senate. On behalf of the opposition, I reject and repudiate that.

I take the opportunity now to remind the minister of some comments she made on 24 August about the implementation of a neutral track-and-trace regime. The opposition now offers the implementation of such a regime as a suggestion—as just one element in combating illicit tobacco—in the context of tobacco control. It is done in a number of jurisdictions such as California, Massachusetts and Canada, all of which, like Australia, have excellent reputations in the area of tobacco control.

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