Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is something I do not think I have ever done before, but I commend the member for Riverina for his contribution, and I pass on my kind thoughts to him for his family. In rising to support this motion put forward by the member of the Blair, I think there is a lot of bipartisan support for the motion and the idea that the government needs to recognise that tobacco is still Australia's single most preventative cause of death. At least three million Australians still smoke regularly. Unlike the member for Riverina, I cannot say I have never had a smoke. Thankfully, I did give up back in the seventies when I was still a kid. But, sadly, not before I hooked my older sister, Kerry Shearer, and she still hounds me over that. Out of the nine children who are alive in my family, three of them still smoke. So we are certainly a smoking family. Sadly, smoking kills more than 19,000 Australians every year, and I was horrified to see, when researching this, that it went up from 16,000 in 2003.

Smoking costs society more than $31 billion a year. If all those Australians who smoke were to stop smoking, that would actually create enough money to almost half-fill the opposition's budget black hole, so it is obviously something that there should be bipartisan support for. We must do more to discourage people from smoking and I appeal to all those that have spoken or will speak—members, senators, candidates and political parties—to stop accepting donations from tobacco companies. I was horrified to hear some of those figures from the member from Blair of the amount of money that has rolled into the coffers of those opposite over the last few years from tobacco companies. Obviously, the Labor Government today, in 2013, is no friend of tobacco. Already we have increased the excise by 25 per cent to make smoking less affordable.

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