Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the Excise Tariff Amendment (Tobacco) Bill 2014 and the Customs Tariff Amendment (Tobacco) Bill 2014. The bills are unashamedly all about increasing the cost of tobacco products. The customs tariff bill amends the Customs Tariff Act 1995 to enact two tobacco excise equivalent customs duty measures. The object in reducing the use of tobacco is to reduce the disease and premature death due to smoking. We have just heard the previous speaker talk about the 15½ thousand lives that are lost each year through smoking-related illnesses. It is not just that smokers are putting their own health at risk; those who have to work in an environment where there is secondary smoke inhalation also face problems with disease. It is simply not fair that something like this particular product consumption can be such an added burden to the costs of health in Australia when it is a product that has well-known cancerous and other poor health outcomes.

The bill imposes the same measures on imported goods, known as excise equivalent goods, as the Excise Tariff Amendment (Tobacco) Bill 2014 imposes on local goods. This ensures that the imported tobacco products are treated the same as local tobacco products, which is only right. The bill also changes the basis of indexation of excise equivalent customs duty on tobacco and tobacco products by moving from the consumer price index, the CPI, to the average weekly ordinary time earnings. The last CPI indexation occurred on 1 August 2013 and the first use of the average weekly ordinary time earnings has occurred in March 2014.

Australia, like most developed countries and now most developing countries, has had serious problems with addiction to tobacco products for probably the last 150 or more years. It has taken a long time for various government policies to really impact on the numbers of people smoking, and I really want to commend all those who went down the path of considering different measures, including the cost of the tobacco products themselves, and this bill is to do with the costs, and also the access. Children under the age of 18 are not allowed to buy tobacco products. Also, governments have looked very hard at how tobacco was advertised, where it could be advertised and when, and the packaging itself. Australia has led the world in introducing what we have colloquially called plain tobacco packaging. Of course it is not all that plain—there are the most gruesome pictures of diseased gums and ulcerated eyeballs. In fact, if you see a cigarette packet lying around somewhere it is the most shocking series of photos you can imagine. When you think it is a voluntary act to smoke, you can imagine that part of the reduction in smoking must be attributed to that plain packaging.

The thing that concerns me very much, though, is that while we have done such a great job with reducing the consumption of tobacco products there is still a growing number of young girls and younger people who smoke, and also there is a very high rate of smoking amongst Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. I was meeting just today with NACCHO—the National Aboriginal Controlled Community Health Organisation—and they were expressing concern about the continuing use of tobacco products in Indigenous communities. We need to focus on strategies which will work, because those settlements are often remote and those communities are culturally different, and focus on how we can help our Indigenous communities to reduce their tobacco consumption, particularly when we remember that there is also the impact on others who live in the same buildings or drive in the same cars as those who smoke. That secondary inhalation of tobacco smoke is dangerous to the health as well.

There has been a lot of work done on calculating what the costs are to the Australian health budget when it comes to diseases associated with cigarette, cigar or pipe smoking. There is a study that has used a measure known as the disability adjusted life year, reported in Tobacco in Australia: Facts and issues, an Australian government organisation study. It is estimated that in 2003 more than 2.63 million disability adjusted life years were lost due to disease and injury in Australia, though this was not just attributed to tobacco smoking. The 14 risk factors that they looked at included six lifestyle behaviours. They were tobacco smoking, physical inactivity, alcohol consumption, low fruit and vegetable consumption, use of illicit drugs, and unsafe sex. When these were further analysed as part of the 14 risk factors, they accounted for 32.2 per cent of the total burden of disease and injury in Australia. They found tobacco was responsible for the greatest disease burden, 7.8 per cent of the total, and it was the cause of 15,551 deaths, as we have already heard mentioned by other speakers, and the loss of 204,778 life years. Tobacco smoking was responsible for 20.1 per cent of the disease burden due to cancer and 9.7 per cent of the disease burden due to cardiovascular disease.

Alcohol is also responsible for a significant disease burden in our country, but also for other life-destroying and life-threatening behaviours like the increase in accidents and domestic violence. Alcohol consumption also causes absenteeism from work. Many are now concerned as to why it is that in Australia we have been world-first in our addressing of tobacco labelling via the plain package labelling and so effective in making sure that children are not exposed to tobacco advertising on their children's television programs, and we have significantly curtailed tobacco advertising in sport. Once, a common feature of sporting events was the robust-looking Marlboro man sitting on his horse smoking away at his cigarette on a big billboard overlooking the footy grounds. We have this incredible hypocrisy where, while we have been so good, so world-beating, in our addressing of the harms due to tobacco, we have not been as rigorous in addressing the harms due to consumption of alcohol, especially high risk levels.

So, I repeat, while we have been world-beating in terms of our tobacco advertising policies and our plain packaging, as a developed country we are one of the few left which still does not mandate alcohol labels on the containers which refer to the risk if you drink to excess or more than a standard number of drinks. We do not have labelling which warns pregnant women of the risks of consuming alcohol while they are pregnant. This is quite extraordinary, given that our wine producers and our brewers, but particularly our wine producers, who export to other countries often have to change their labelling so that they can conform with that other country's regulations in relation to the labelling of alcohol containers to reflect the risks associated with overconsumption. So I am battling to see how we can be as successful in our highlighting of the risks of consumption of too much alcohol. How can we use the lessons learnt in managing to bring down tobacco consumption in Australia? We have to look very carefully at the strategies that have worked for tobacco to see what can be used to reduce dangerous levels of alcohol consumption.

In Australia now we have an enormous focus on advertising alcohol in our sporting television features and programs, and many of these are live broadcasts occurring in children's viewing times. We still have a lot of alcohol sponsorship on uniforms and on sporting equipment around the country, and very often, in telecasts of major sporting events, the uniforms, the caps, the bats, the cars covered in their Jack Daniels signs—those are what are featured and flashed into the sitting rooms and kitchens of Australian homes so that children are fed that constant diet: that alcohol is associated with excellence, sportsmanship and winning, with being sophisticated and having fun times.

We have believed for quite a while in Australia that a code of voluntary labelling on alcohol containers would be sufficient to have compliance. The previous government in fact set deadlines for when the voluntary code should be adopted and when we should evaluate that voluntary period to see if in fact we needed to mandate labelling. That time was roughly October last year. We have passed the deadline. Nothing happened under the previous government to mandated labelling in this country, and that is long overdue.

I am also very concerned that the total cost to society of alcohol related problems in 2010 was estimated to be $14.352 billion, and those costs obviously cannot be borne by a country without significant erosion of other spending on things like health and education, or in supporting those who need a safety net. Of that $14.352 billion, $2.958 billion, or 20.6 per cent, represented costs to the criminal justice system—in other words, processing people found to be guilty of crimes associated with drinking over the limit, or drinking in an inappropriate way which led to, for example, violence. Also, of that $14.352 billion, $1.686 billion, or 11.7 per cent, was the cost to the health system of alcohol consumption in Australia; $6.046 billion, or 42.1 per cent, was devolved costs to Australian productivity; and $3.662 billion, or 25.5 per cent, were costs associated with traffic accidents—these were traffic accidents right throughout Australia, but in particular we know that Indigenous communities have more traffic accidents with more horrific consequences for individuals in terms of loss of life and permanent disability.

The estimate of total costs, however, does not incorporate the negative impacts on others, estimated in 2010 to be some $6.807 billion, and these are the costs associated with someone else drinking—someone living with you or someone who you encounter in a public place. These impacts comprised only perceived costs, of course; they have to be calculated, and it is an estimation. But many have been appalled by the random acts of violence that have been occurring outside some public places in New South Wales and Victoria, and want to know how you put a price on the loss of a life or on someone being traumatised or perhaps disabled. Clearly, we have productivity losses with a huge cost to our health system. We have reduced workforce and household labour due to premature mortality, reduced household labour due to sickness and reduced workforce participation due to absenteeism, and so it goes on—and this is in relation to alcohol consumption.

In talking about this bill, which is focusing on tobacco consumption in Australia, I want to congratulate previous governments and this government for understanding the huge cost of having an addiction to nicotine when smoking tobacco or tobacco products and the secondary impacts for those who might be living with others who use tobacco products. We are doing well in Australia, I think, in bringing down the consumption of tobacco, but there are still sectors in our community who need more help. Those include the Indigenous populations, newly arrived migrants and also our younger Australians. More women are smoking than they did before.

But I am asking in this debate that we now turn our spotlight on the consumption at high-risk levels of alcohol, because a lot of the tobacco reduction strategies can be applied to reducing the consumption of alcohol—in particular, the labelling and advertising regulations and the messages about the costs to the Australian health system and the loss of enjoyment of life for people who have been disabled or who have to live with someone who is addicted to alcohol.

I commend this bill to the House. I think it is a very sensible way to go. We know that the costs of tobacco products do have an impact on their levels of consumption, just as they do with alcohol consumption, so I commend this bill to the House.

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