Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Well, the pronunciation depends on where you come from, and I'm well aware of Vida Goldstein and her reputation as a wonderful woman. With respect to the member, the issue of vaporised nicotine substitutions for smoking is certainly not as clear as he would say. There is absolutely no evidence that vaporised nicotine solutions (1) reduce the harm and (2) reduce the cost and the social cost of nicotine addiction.

It's important to note that the tobacco industry continues to promote the use of so-called vaping solutions as an alternative to smoking with absolutely no research into its long-term effects. We know that nicotine is a highly addictive drug. We really don't have the evidence and the research that suggest that vaporised solutions are any solution to cigarette smoking in terms of long-term effects.

We recently had a parliamentary House of Representatives committee inquiry into this, and all the experts—including the AMA, the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, the association of respiratory physicians and the Public Health Association—say that we should not be allowing free access to vaporised nicotine solutions. So, as with many things to do with science, it's important that the government really respects the experts and acts on their advice. The member for Goldstein is not doing that and I'm unsure as to his motives for his broad lack of restraint in supporting vaporised nicotine solutions.

Worldwide there are about 1.2 billion smokers. I was one of them until about 10 years ago. Eighty per cent of smokers are men. There are, indeed, smokers in this chamber. According to the World Health Organization, smoking accounts for around six million avoidable deaths every year. About 70 per cent of those deaths are in developing countries. In Australia, about 19,000 or 20,000 people still die every year from avoidable deaths due to smoking. The cost to our community is around $30 billion. The annual cost worldwide is in the trillions of dollars. It's important to note that, worldwide, the major tobacco companies are still promoting their products and it's only when their products are restricted that they resort to promoting alternatives like vaporised nicotine solutions.

Smoking rates throughout much of the OECD are continuing to decline, but rates of smoking in less developed countries are as high as ever and there is some evidence in some countries that they may be increasing. In most developed countries like Australia, the rate of smoking amongst men is in decline and amongst women it is flat or falling slowly. From the early 1980s, Australia has progressively tightened laws covering the advertising, sale and distribution of cigarettes and tobacco. There have been numerous antismoking health campaigns, government assistance for those wanting to quit for life has increased and excise duties have been substantially increased.

I'm proud to be a member of the Labor Party, which has promoted cessation of smoking activities and support for people to try to stop smoking. Laws have been enacted to prohibit smoking in the workplace and in public places, mostly promoted by the Labor Party. Each of those reforms was resisted by vested interests, but each now seems a sensible and totally uncontentious proposition. It's the same for laws requiring the plain or standardised packaging of cigarettes. I support any bill that strengthens this.

The unambiguously good news is that smoking rates are in decline across the board. Less encouraging is the more limited impact on some demographics—principally older established smokers and those living in the poorest neighbourhoods and in regional and remote Australia. Indigenous Australians have fairly static smoking rates and unfortunately are at increased risk of the harm that smoking causes. Those with mental health issues also have smoking rates that are very static.

Fifty-seven per cent of daily smokers are now aged over 40. Fifteen years ago, the majority of smokers were between the ages of 14 and 39. Fifty years ago, about two in every five adults were smokers. Now it's one in eight. The National Drug Strategy Household Survey showed that smoking rates halved between 1991 and 2016, from 24 per cent to 12 per cent, mostly because of government initiatives. There's been significant success in the last three to five years in reducing the take-up of smoking amongst the young, and the proportion of teenagers who are current smokers declined from five per cent in 2013 to 2.1 per cent in 2016. There have been similar significant declines in the number of people exposed in the home to cigarette smoke, down from about 31 per cent in 1995 to 3.7 per cent in 2013 and down again to 2.8 per cent in 2016.

These are significant changes. Whilst our smoking rates have only slowly declined, people exposed to smoking in the workplace and in the home has decreased significantly, which will lead to much less risk of harm for my patients, children and particularly young children. They are much less frequently exposed to environmental cigarette smoking than they were previously. This will lead to much lower rates of respiratory illness and much less long-term harm.

The messages in all these policies, for policymakers and legislators, are that change is possible, that governments have to lead, that governments must persist and that governments must persist against very strong, very financially able vested interests. Australia was the first country to enact laws to insist on the plain packaging of cigarettes. I remember this time very well. It's important to note the courage, persistence and intelligence of people like Julia Gillard and Nicola Roxon, the then health minister, who first introduced plain tobacco packaging. There was so much effort put in by those with vested interests against the Labor Party's policies for plain packaging, including from those on the other side. Yet Nicola Roxon and Julia Gillard persisted and were able to get these changes, which now seem to all of us to be completely sensible and the right thing to do.

In November 2011, the legislation was first introduced and, by December 2012, the laws had survived a High Court challenge by those with vested interests, including Big Tobacco. By 1 December 2012 plain packaging was introduced and has stayed the norm in Australia. This legislation will strengthen the ability to monitor this. Years later, it is impossible to imagine why it took us so long to get there.

The previous speaker mentioned underground smoking as a consequence of the plain tobacco packaging. There is no evidence for this whatsoever. It's a claim without basis and without evidence. There may well be underground tobacco available, but this is a financial issue that has no relation to plain tobacco packaging.

Australia's lead on mandatory plain and standardised packaging is now being emulated and followed to varying degrees in many other countries, including the United Kingdom, France, New Zealand, Norway, Hungary and Ireland. As is usual, it's Big Tobacco who are fighting this battle, and we can only hope they continue to lose. As of February this year another 16 countries plan to take action on plain tobacco packaging. The European Union has issued a directive allowing member states the option of implementing plain packaging that survived a concerted legal challenge from Big Tobacco.

I imagine that the only people left in Australia opposed to plain packaging are those with a financial stake in the tobacco industry, or, I'm ashamed to say, politicians who take money from Big Tobacco. Nicotine addiction is not a matter of choice. I like to think that even a majority of those pathologically opposed to any form of government regulation and intervention recognise that nicotine is a special case. It's a drug of addiction and it's one of the most potent. There are only two commonly available illegal drugs that are more addictive than nicotine and that's heroin and cocaine.

Nicotine is a poison and there's no such thing as a safe cigarette. Cigarettes, of course, come with other dangers from the smoke inhalation, but it's important to note that nicotine is primarily a drug of addiction and not without major side effects. One cigarette, unfortunately, can be enough to kill you. It kills indiscriminately and it kills even those who don't smoke, and we've seen increasing evidence of this, particularly in the workplace. There's no such thing as safe smoking in the way that there can perhaps be low levels of safe drinking if done in moderation and in a safe environment—the same is not true for smoking.

There is not much weight in the argument still advanced by some ultra-libertarians that smoking is legal and that we should therefore not try to control or restrict it. Lots of things are legal that we don't encourage or want to condone. Many activities, products, services and substances are regulated. There is nothing odd or peculiar in regulating things that may be misused, that may poorly understood or which are inherently dangerous. There is no question that cigarette smoking is inherently dangerous. It's just common sense that some goods and services are subject to advertising controls and point of sale restrictions. There are lots of legal drugs less lethal than nicotine that we rightly do not let people access at will or use without a doctor's prescription or accompanying health warnings. Smoking only continues to be legal because it's nigh on impossible to prohibit its use outright, while millions of Australians can't give it up, even though as many as three in 10 try to every year.

If this bill, one that makes very minor administrative changes to the law enacted by the Gillard government in 2011, is significant, it's because it marks something of a new dawn for the coalition. At long last the coalition, while in office, seems unambiguously to be saying that it is not for turning in the fight to rid our country of its leading cause of preventable death and disease. I do congratulate the health minister, particularly for his comments about the use of nicotine solutions.

What would make this an even better day would be if the Nationals and other smaller political parties joined Labor, the Greens and the Liberals in refusing to accept donations from big tobacco. The Hawke government enacted laws in the 1980s to provide public funding for election campaigns to reduce the influence of private and corporate donors. That funding is not just a taxpayer funded freebie; it's there to allow all parties and all candidates to exercise a freer hand in accepting and rejecting political donations. Labor stopped taking blood money from the tobacco industry 14 years ago. The Liberals followed 10 years after that, thank God. However, the Nationals and Senator Leyonhjelm's Liberal Democrats have in the last five years continued to accept direct donations in the tens of thousands of dollars annually from one tobacco company, Philip Morris. More shame to them. The level of indirect support they have taken is, of course, unknown.

In accepting such donations, the Nationals and the Liberal Democrats are the most conspicuous of the remaining outliers. They're steadfastly opposed to the community sentiment and the mountains of evidence and analysis on the effects of tobacco. They are small in number, but there are still probably enough of them to apply the handbrake to further much-needed work in reducing the incidence of smoking. Indeed, there are still measures that we should be enacting that will help reduce cigarette smoking rates in Australia. We should also be cognisant of the effect of smoking in the developing world and on our near neighbours, and we should not hold back from support for reducing smoking rates in those countries. As we all know, with this government, it's the minority that sets the rules, unfortunately, while the rest only ever seem to assert their authority ineffectively or when it's too late—just ask Malcolm Turnbull. That wasn't always the case. Not all governments are afraid of their own shadow.

The reforms to cigarette packaging proposed by the Rudd opposition and enacted by the Gillard government and its health minister, Nicola Roxon, were trenchantly opposed at the time for all sorts of spurious and self-serving reasons. True to form, some of the Liberals and Nationals—the usual suspects—wanted to either duck the issue or play both sides of the fence. Others just wanted to make life difficult for those supporting plain packaging, because they saw political advantage in it. The Abbott opposition finally went along with Labor's plain packaging law, but only after some principled members of the coalition threatened to cross the floor to support it.

The public was warned that mandatory plain packaging was unconstitutional. What a silly reason to bring up! It clearly wasn't, and the High Court supported that. They were told the scheme was costly and impractical, which was wrong again. There were even claims from the tobacco industry that plain packaging would lead to increased levels of smoking. What a joke! It was quite silly, and archly and narrowly political to the nth degree. I support this bill. I'm proud, as I've said, to be a member of the Labor Party, which has done all it can to reduce smoking rates in Australia and elsewhere. I commend the bill.

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