Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

You had to listen very carefully and suspend judgement. He said that, if cigarettes became dearer, there would be more people buying cigarettes on the black market. In fact, all of the evidence internationally shows the exact opposite is true. The countries that have lower tax regimes and looser laws about smoking actually have more counterfeiting and more illegal tobacco sold in them. So the exact opposite is true, Member for Hughes.

I and the opposition support the Excise Tariff Amendment (Tobacco) Bill 2014 and the Customs Tariff Amendment (Tobacco) Bill 2014. This legislation reflects our longstanding position, as a Labor government in the past and Labor opposition now, on public health and on evidence based policymaking. We know that increasing tobacco excise is one of the most effective ways of reducing smoking rates in Australia, and it is most effective when you are talking about kids taking up smoking.

We are glad that the Liberal Party have decided to pursue this policy. It was very difficult before the election to tell what they were going to do. One could see the dollar signs in their eyes but they were not really thinking about the public health effects of this policy. In 2013, when the Labor government announced this tobacco excise, the now Treasurer said:

It is going to increase the cost of living for smokers, but smokers could be pensioners, low-income people, it could be smokes and beers might be the thing that is important to them.

He went on to say:

I want to know what the impact is on lower income people of just increasing their cost of living.

It is very important to think about the cost of living, particularly for people on pensions and fixed incomes. But what we know about increasing tobacco excise is that the people who are most price sensitive are also those people who are on the lowest incomes and those who smoke a great deal, and the more you smoke, the more likely you are to have your smoking behaviour affected by an increase in tobacco excise.

The member for Hughes quite rightly pointed out that people on low incomes are more likely to smoke and that people who have a mental health issue are more likely to smoke and he named a number of other groups as well. I would add to that Indigenous Australians, who are twice as likely as non-Indigenous Australians to smoke. So the people who are most likely to be smokers are also most likely to cut down their smoking or quit because of a tobacco excise increase.

The thing to also remember about this tobacco excise increase is that, because it is introduced over four years—and it was quite deliberately designed in this way—smokers have time to quit or reduce their consumption. If we were just interested in dollars, it would have in fact been much more effective to increase the tobacco excise in one go, at the beginning, and raise more money all the way through. We deliberately did not do that, and the reason was that, by staging increases over time, we were able to telegraph to people to say: 'There is a cost increase coming. We are going to help you give up. These are all the resources we have to help you give up, and here is an added encouragement—the price is going up in the future.'

Smoking rates have dropped, and we on this side of the chamber are very proud that we now have the best five-year cancer survival rates in the world and some of the lowest smoking rates in the world. Yes, there have been efforts on both sides over many years to gradually increase the prominence of graphic health warnings, for example, and to introduce advertising campaigns and so on. From 1991, when about 25 per cent of people smoked, we have seen a drop to just under 16 per cent in 2010. If you look further back to the period after the Second World War, almost half of Australians smoked at one stage. So our achievement as a nation is something to be proud of, but we need to do better.

We have a COAG agreement. All of the states and the territories and the Commonwealth have signed up to a target of lowering smoking rates to 10 per cent by 2018—and here we have one smoker, Mr Deputy Speaker Mitchell, that we are going to get to give up in the next few years. We do need to do more. A 16 per cent daily smoking rate means that there are still about 2.8 million Australians who smoke every day. The cost of that to the health of the smoker—and I hope I am not making you feel bad, Mr Deputy Speaker Mitchell—is a substantial one in terms of health lost as well as the money they spend on smoking. It costs us as a community about $31½ billion a year to look after people who are smoking, with lost productivity and hospitalisation. About 750,000 hospital bed days each year are attributed to tobacco related diseases. So both the personal impacts and the impacts on our whole community of smoking are very substantial.

But there is very good news as well. People who do give up see a very marked improvement in their health. The risk of a heart attack drops sharply after just one year; stroke risk falls to approximately the same as a non-smoker's after two to five years; risks for cancer of the mouth, throat, oesophagus and bladder are halved after five years; and the risk of dying from lung cancer drops by half after 10 years. So, putting it bluntly, you can have very dramatic health improvements by giving up smoking.

Increasing tobacco prices is one of the most effective ways of reducing the impact of smoking-related illnesses in Australia and the premature death and disability that comes from it. I mentioned earlier in response to the member for Hughes that people who are more likely to smoke—those in lower socioeconomic groups and the range of people he mentioned earlier—are also more likely to have their smoking behaviour affected by an increase in the tobacco excise price.

I want to speak for a moment about Indigenous Australians because I am very pleased that the government has maintained the commitment to closing the gap on life expectancy. One of the most important things we can do to close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people when it comes to life expectancy is reduce smoking rates in Indigenous communities. There has been some fantastic work done to reduce smoking rates in Indigenous communities that I will refer to in a little while.

I want to talk about kids for just one moment. There is no smoker, no matter how dedicated and how much they claim to enjoy smoking, who says, 'I want my kids to grow up to be a smoker.' I think that as policymakers we have to bear that in mind as well. We should be working towards a smoke-free generation. We should be working towards a generation where no young person takes up smoking, and price is a big factor in that. We know that kids are very price sensitive when it comes to testing out smoking, trying it on and seeing how they like it.

When you look at the impact of smoking around the world, there are about six million people who die every year from smoking-related illnesses, including around 600,000 deaths from second-hand smoke. According to our current projections, we will lose one billion people this century to smoking-related deaths. Cigarettes in Australia are the cause of about 15½ thousand deaths every year in this country. I literally cannot imagine another thing that, if it were causing 15½ thousand deaths every year, we would not as a community, as a government or as a country be saying, 'What can we do to get this tragic death toll down?' We do it with car accidents. When we see the road toll creeping up, we change what we are doing. We re-emphasise a reduction in speeding. We send out more random breath testing units. We are always calibrating and renewing our efforts to prevent death and disability from car accidents, and we must do the same with smoking as well.

We have seen the proof. The member for Hughes questioned whether there is any relationship between an increase in prices and a reduction of smoking rates. We saw a 25 per cent increase in the tobacco excise in April 2010, and even the tobacco companies admit it worked. There was a decrease of about a 10 per cent in consumption of tobacco demonstrated through the importation of tobacco products. In fact, in August 2011 in the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Health and Ageing, the head of British American Tobacco, David Crow, stated:

One of the big statements that comes from this government and many governments is that pricing is one of the best means to stop access for children.

     …      …      …

We understand that the price going up when the excise goes up reduces consumption.

     …      …      …

There was a 25 per cent increase in the excise and we saw the volumes go down by about 10.2 per cent; there was about a 10.2 per cent reduction in the industry last year in Australia.

So from the words of British American Tobacco themselves, they admit that this is a way of reducing tobacco consumption that works.

I want to take a minute to acknowledge the work that the former health minister, Nicola Roxon, did in developing Australia's approach to plain packaging of tobacco products. Increasing prices is one part of it and advertising is another part of it, but our move towards plain packaging of tobacco products really was acknowledged around the world as world leading. In fact, during the time that I was implementing the plain packaging, we had an extraordinary amount of interest from around the world in the implementation of plain packaging.

The initial results from Cancer Council Victoria indicate that plain packaging is meeting its legislated objectives. The early results show that, when compared with branded pack smokers, those who are smoking from plain packs perceived their cigarettes to be lower in quality, tended to perceive their cigarettes as less satisfying than a year ago, were more likely to have thought about quitting at least once a day in the past week and rated quitting as a higher priority in their lives. When I was health minister I knew that because I kept getting phone calls after we introduced plain packaging from people who were really angry that I had changed the taste of their tobacco. Of course we did nothing to reformulate tobacco products, but the psychological impact of seeing that really ugly packaging was actually having an effect on people's desire to smoke.

We also invested more than $135 million in anti-smoking social marketing programs, which particularly targeted the high risk and hard to reach groups we were talking about like pregnant women and people with a mental illness. We had terrific phone apps, 'Quit for you—Quit for two' and My QuitBuddy—that were developed and released, and anyone can use them for free. As everybody knows, we updated and expanded the graphic health warnings. We introduced comprehensive advertising restrictions, including a ban on internet advertising from 6 September 2012. We put nicotine replacement therapies on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and extended the listings for smoking cessation support drugs like Zyban and Chantix.

We focused a great deal on Indigenous Australians and their smoking rates with $15 million for the Indigenous Tobacco Control Initiative, which funded innovative tobacco control projects in 18 Indigenous communities. There were also $100 million for the tackling smoking and $35 million for the healthy lifestyle measures under Closing the Gap. We did not do one thing; we did a suite of things. We need to, as I said, think again in the future about how we will keep our measures up to date. People become immune to one set of warnings, they become immune to one set of advertising, so it is important that we continue to recalibrate our efforts to reduce smoking so that the effect is new with each change.

It is terrific that the Liberal Party have finally been convinced to stop taking tobacco donations. I hope that the National Party will soon do the same. It is impossible to imagine that a government that is profiting from this industry will be as assiduous in its measures to reduce tobacco consumption as it should be for the benefit of the health of all Australians.

I have to say this is one of the things that I am proudest of in my time as health minister. This is a measure that will lead to fewer Australians smoking, and when we consider the toll, those 15½ thousand lives lost every year, 15½ thousand families who lose a loved one because of smoking-related illnesses, I cannot imagine a single other thing that was having this toll on the community, that had this death toll, being allowed to run unchecked in the way that some argue that, since tobacco is a legal product, it should be allowed to run unchecked.

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