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

I rise to speak on the very important issue of tobacco control in Australia. Currently, smoking is a leading cause of preventable death and disease in Australia. There are approximately 3.3 million Australians who still smoke. Half of all long-term smokers will die prematurely because they smoked. The cost of smoking to the community was $31.5 billion in 2004-05, and it would be of a similar order of magnitude today.

In 2010, 15.1 per cent of people over 14 years old were smoking daily but that has come down considerably from 24.3 per cent 20 years earlier. Australia has much to be proud of in the efforts to reduce the incidence of smoking. We have some of the lowest rates of smoking in the world. However, there is still much more to be done. When you look at what has happened to smoking rates over the last 30 years you find that Australia has seen the largest declines in the rates of smoking. And it is not something that has been occurring all around the world. We have seen drops in smoking rates amongst women in the order of 40 per cent, and that has been matched by some of the Scandinavian countries. But if you look at Europe you find that they have seen increases in female smoking rates over the same time period: five or six per cent in countries like France and Germany, and an incredible 44 per cent in Greece.

Australia has been particularly successful in reducing the smoking rates through a multi-pronged strategy which involves state governments, local governments and the federal government, and addressing all aspects of tobacco control. But there are still significant disparities in the incidence of smoking within certain social demographics. We still see much higher smoking rates amongst lower socio-economic groups. The unemployed, the homeless, the imprisoned, those suffering mental illness and those with drug or alcohol dependencies are much more likely to smoke. Those living in remote areas are more likely to smoke—28.9 per cent compared with 16.8 per cent in the major cities. In 2008 more than 45 per cent of Indigenous Australians over 15 smoked daily.

The coalition has always had a strong track record when it comes to tobacco control, and we will continue to do so. The coalition presided over the biggest decline in smoking rates whilst we were in government. Under the last coalition government the prevalence of smoking declined from 21.8 per cent in 1998 to 16.6 per cent of Australians over the age of 14 by 2007.

It was Robert Menzies who first introduced a voluntary tobacco advertising code for television in 1966. Malcolm Fraser banned tobacco advertising on TV. Dr Michael Wooldridge, in June 1997, announced what at the time was the biggest ever national advertising campaign against smoking. It was the Howard government, and Tony Abbott as health minister, who introduced the graphic health warnings on tobacco products in 2006—something which I think will be very significant in reducing smoking rates. And it was the coalition who first proposed, in opposition, an increase in the tobacco excise in 2009—a measure which was later adopted by the government.

There is bipartisan support to reduce the incidence of smoking to under 10 per cent—and it can be done. Jurisdictions like California already have a smoking rate below that level. The COAG agreement details how to get to a smoking rate of below 10 per cent and also how to reduce, specifically, the Indigenous smoking rate.

In January this year, the government released the updated National Tobacco Strategy 2012 to 2018. It sets out the framework to help achieve the goal of 10 per cent. The first National Tobacco Strategy was implemented in 2004 under the Howard government. The renewed strategy has nine priority areas, which include increasing mass advertising, reducing the affordability of tobacco and particularly focusing on those populations with a high prevalence of smoking. I think the approach of focusing on all of those nine areas will be the way to get to below 10 per cent.

Reaching the bipartisan target of 10 per cent will require a comprehensive and sustained approach to tobacco control. There is no one solution and we need to continue to look at all of the approaches outlined in the National Tobacco Strategy to reach those 2018 targets.

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