Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to begin by following up exactly where the previous speaker spoke, in regard to a willingness, a wish and an aspiration that people be free to choose to consume, and choose not to consume, tobacco based products, that people will make informed decisions about their health and welfare, that they will be in a position to make informed judgements and that they will choose to put their health at the fore. It's a pretty simple principle at the heart of a liberal democracy. More critically, in a society that has to deal with the complex nature of health needs, it's a wish that people will make the right choices.

The task before this parliament is always in knowing how to get those laws right and in making sure that people are free to do so. There are complications, always, in making sure that we preserve people's freedom to choose and in achieving the ambitions, shall we say, or the collective interests of the whole of the nation. That's why I'm supporting this amendment today, the Customs Amendment (Collecting Tobacco Duties at the Border) Bill 2018. It's pretty prescriptive in its title about what its objective and purpose is. It's a relatively straightforward exercise in making sure that duties for tobacco are paid at the border, so the government gets the revenue. It simplifies the process and, hopefully, reduces costs. Ultimately, it guarantees the revenue supply for the government to offset the consequences of people who consume tobacco based products, including funding the health and welfare system to support those consequences, which is fundamentally a good thing.

Like the previous speaker, I have concerns about how we find this right balance in law. One of the concerns I've had, and I've spoken about it in this place before, is some of the consequences of past policies. The great Milton Friedman always argued that we should judge a policy by its consequences not merely its intentions. We've seen policies that have made tobacco based products interchangeable. That's called plain packaging. They all look the same. They're all treated the same. It's very hard to distinguish between products anymore. We've also had more tax increases on the products. Unsurprisingly, as soon as you increase the cost of the products, the gap between production and consumption—price—is considerable. We know what happens when you do that. It's not just in tobacco products. The attractiveness for illegal activity increases as well, because people can make nefarious profits easily by providing counterfeit goods. We say this against a backdrop where reduction in tobacco consumption is not going down, in historical trends, in Australia. What we know is that more and more people, because of that gap between production and consumption, are looking for alternative avenues. Because we have an interchangeable product now, they find it easy to do so—as do those who would seek to take advantage of that environment by providing products that are counterfeit.

We always have to factor in the consequences of going down this path: in the end, the government loses because we don't collect the tax revenue when people sell counterfeit products, but we carry all of the costs and the consequences. But, of course, we also face a problem where people have alternative options and turn to essentially criminal behaviour because of the consequences of the decisions the government has made. I have to say I have a real problem with that—when the government seeks to actively promote an environment where people want to flout the law. I don't want people flouting the law; I want people complying with the law. I want people to think that they should be doing the right thing by this community and their country, as well as, of course, choosing to do the right thing for their own health.

That's been one of the critical problems we've had in much of this space, particularly when people are also denied pathways to end their addiction to combustible tobacco products, because we make it illegal to access nicotine tablets and electronic vaping. It's on the public record that I believe that, while I don't think it is a perfect solution and I fully accept there may be health consequences associated with it, when you have a product which actually directly reduces harm and people wish to reduce their harm. then a legal pathway for people to do so is a sensible course of action. We see this in other areas where we regularly talk about harm reduction, because we put people's health and welfare first, ahead of the ideological objectives of others.

I will continue to be guided by that, because when I have gone to the United States or Europe, where they now have vaping fully legally available, one of the things I see is how many people who used to smoke cigarettes have switched. It's not perfect. There are people who shouldn't have ever taken up vaping who have—of course, some of those people may very well have taken up tobacco consumption had they not had that pathway. But the number of dogged serial smokers who were given a choice and chose the path of least harm is quite considerable. You see it in the streets. It's not like it's something that happens in marginal communities away from the prying eyes of the public. It's naked. It's obvious—so much so that you have the National Health Service in the United Kingdom recommending people take it as a pathway because of the potential reduction in harm. It's not just harm reduction in terms of people's immediate health consequences, though there are those; there is potential reduction in harm which then obviously has to be addressed through the health system. I would rather see fewer people with emphysema and fewer people dealing with the health consequences and going through our hospital systems, so that those services can be reprioritised towards helping other people. I make no apology about that; I think it's a fundamental good.

When we are looking at policies in this space, whether it's about how we collect the tax or whether it's about how we design logos, branding, advertising and compulsory labelling, when it comes down to the tax regimes that are applied and the incentives that drive them, the one thing we should always look at is: what is the actual consequence of what we're doing? It's not the intent and it's not whether we're going to get the applause of the health sociology community and their agendas, because they're fighting wars from years past and are looking constantly for new ways to seek grants to continue their research and work. What's the actual consequence for Australians? They should be at the forefront of our minds. They're the people that I represent and that everybody else in this place represents. They're the people that I would have thought the Australian people want us to be thinking about—not ourselves, not the government and government first, and not the objectives of bureaucratically-designed health systems. It's them: the Australian people. It's whether we are going to put their health and welfare first, or whether we're going to create incentives for them to do the wrong thing, and, more critically, incentives for those who don't wish any of us well and actually have the nefarious intent to take advantage of the decisions that are made in this place.

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