David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Therapeutic Goods and Other Legislation Amendment (Vaping Reforms) Bill 2024 is a really important bill. It may not be as sexy as some of the big Treasury bills, but this is something that will have major ramifications for generations of Australians. Serving in the health ministry was one of my most enjoyable times, because getting to apply the knowledge and the skills that people like you and I, Deputy Speaker Freelander, learnt through our professional career in a legislative whole-of-Australia sense was really quite a thrill. The current policy of restricting vapes to prescription use was a policy that I endorsed and promoted. A lot of what is involved in this is existing policy, and it's been going for many years.

But we do have a problem. To put it in perspective, a school down the road from my office, a high school in the beautiful Lyne electorate, has children in early high-school years dealing vapes at school. There are parents who see children's behaviour changing, and teachers are seeing it. They have a policy that people have to put their mobile phone away because they get anxiety not having their phone with them the whole time. That's a different level of mid-teen problems, but they are not concentrating, getting aggro at teachers because they are missing their nicotine hit. Then hello vaping, which was promoted as a vehicle to quit smoking and as a harm minimisation product may be a little bit less harmless. It is very early days, and there is so much more we are learning. Every time someone does a study, there's more to learn about how vaping is not safe.

So, what is proposed here is just ramping up what we started doing. As other speakers have said, when people are vaping, it is not just steam or hot water, like a Vicks VapoRub inhalation. It has many damaging chemicals: nickel and chromium, which are heavy metals; formaldehyde, which we use to preserve bodies; nitrosamines, many of which are known to cause cancer; acetone, which plenty of people use to take nail polish off; and acrolein. And people willingly put that into their lungs? It's just mind-blowing what people will do. People don't realise that the nicotine in these is actually much more concentrated in many instances than it is in the traditional roll-your-own or tailor-made cigarettes. Just so everyone understands: it's not safe. But it has allowed a lot of savings for people who are serious addicts who have smoked their life and their savings away.

A lot of the medical opinion is that there is less damage, but I can find you references that show that the same emphysematous processes, the hypersecretion and the oedema in the alveoli, are all happening among vapers as they do among cigarette smokers. What we're seeing is the tip of an iceberg that, if it isn't reduced by long-term measures, will grow and grow and grow. I've spoken to colleagues who are still working in Accidents and Emergencies, and it's not uncommon on any one shift in a busy A&E to have one or two cases of acute respiratory distress where vapes are involved. These patients either have asthma or have perfectly normal lungs and are just getting a reaction. We know about the EVALI reaction that was sort of like a mini-plague throughout North America, but there are many more chronic problems that will become much more evident when something that wasn't here in Australia 10 or 12 years ago becomes widespread

Some of the proposals aren't new. That's what I was just alluding to. We did ban them. We did limit them to prescription. But, as many speakers, including my colleague the member for Cowper and other members on the other side, said: the genie really is out of the bottle, and it is pretty much impossible to put it back in. But the reason we got down to almost single figures in many communities in Australia in terms of regular smoking is that we have had an antismoking campaign since I was a little tacker. That's what we need to do with vaping. It can't just be a program for a year, and we spend $20 million. We have to treat it exactly the same as we have done with regular cigarettes and tobacco, and that is to get people, from childhood through to adolescence and up to adulthood, knowing that vaping isn't safe, is not trendy and damages their lungs.

That's where we differ. We support all these measures that are proposed. I'm really pleased that the government are going to spend $63.4 million on an anti e-cigarette and vaping campaign. I'm glad they're going to all of a sudden check for importation at the border and restrict commercial quantities—banning importation, manufacture, supply and commercial possession. Individuals, whether adults or children, won't be charged or locked up. Well, we've seen that happen during COVID, so I hope that is not going to happen, but I did see in the popular press some guy being manhandled by policemen in Victoria because he was involved in vaping. So, it's a case of 'buyer beware' with these regulations. Some of the states might take this way further than it is intended to go.

But the genie that is out of the bottle is that at least one in six secondary students have recently or are regularly vaping, which is a fourfold increase. I suggest that the figure is much higher. I have seen polling showing that eight per cent of all Australians are now vaping. Fifteen years ago, no-one was vaping, and smoking was down to 14 per cent across the country. So the so-called harm minimisation—well, in a way it is minimising harm for people who were smoking two or three packets a day. And, trust me, my parents were both two- or three-packet people. I grew up being a passive smoker and I had asthma as a child. Luckily when I went away to boarding school I stopped wheezing and coughing. It was probably because I wasn't surrounded by smoke. But, that aside, vaping probably is a little bit safer than burning stuff and inhaling it—but we don't know.

We are going to see, when we've had 20 or 30 years of vaping, lots of people with emphysema, chronic bronchitis, chronic airflow limitation and maybe even fibrotic lung disease, given all the other chemicals in those mixtures. And God only knows what's in some of them—the single-use stuff that comes out of China and these knock-up shops. I've been told by people who visit China, who have Chinese heritage, that the vapes sold in China are actually more regulated than some that are made there and sent for export only. And guess what? Because selling vapes has been, by our policy, restricted to pharmacies and no-one has been checking the borders and no-one has been preventing vapes from being on sale, in some towns in my electorate there are two places you can go for vapes. You can buy them in many supermarkets. It's widespread. The genie really is out of the bottle.

So we have analysed this very thoroughly. And it's not a binary choice, but we think we should be regulating it, restricting it based on age and restricting it to assessed and checked vapes that don't have toxic levels of concentrated nicotine and all the other secret herbs and spices that some of the manufacturers put in there to increase absorption across the blood-brain barrier and make it more addictive. The thing with chewing gums, patches and things like that is that someone who's seriously addicted to nicotine doesn't get that 'ah', that relief, because they don't get the hit. The vapes actually have more of a hit, if it's one of the highly concentrated vapes.

I'm thinking that the policy that the member for Cowper outlined is the way we should be going now. As that wise man once said—he was a very famous Nobel-prize-winning guy—'If you keep doing the same thing and expect a different outcome, that is a sign of madness.' So time-out, everyone—we're all against vapes. We don't want our children getting addicted to vapes. We don't want our young adults getting addicted to vapes. But, hey presto, they're all the people that are getting into vapes. It's not the hardcore smokers that need them. We have got to have something that you don't have to go to the pharmacy for and that you know has got a minimum amount or a maximum amount, and we have got to have the $63.4 million program permanently—possibly even more—so that we have plain packaging on vapes and we license and regulate them and check that they haven't got all these other horrible things in them that they say aren't there but, in fact, are. In fact, according to surveys, nine out of 10 that are sold as nicotine free actually have nicotine in them.

So we have got a big problem, and that is why we think about regulating it, restricting it by age, having it enforced and making sure that what is in it is what is in it, not all these other things that are bad. I hope for that enforcement over time—that was the missing part of the link. Talking about having pharmacists selling it, I don't know if a lot of pharmacists want to get into selling vapes. That's another practical part. There's the pure—I don't want something that is good being the enemy of something that's perfect, if you want to reverse the analogy.

We've got to be realistic. We have got a huge problem. It has taken us 40 years to get smoking down to this, so we need an equivalent response. You're only going to get that if you get the excise and the money out of licensing it and running it and using some of that money that comes out of those things, if you did have a regulated model, not a virtual prohibition—except for a few specialist pharmacies that are happy to have that. Do you think a pharmacist will want to sell cigarettes? No, it's anti-health. I don't think most pharmacists, unless they were really financially strapped, will get into the vape business, but we do have to approach it on multiple fronts. That includes taxing it, keeping the revenue, and putting it into the health system, education and long-term advertising so that we can get rid of this scourge.

For those people that need it, it will be there, but you're not going to get some of the backyard labs that make it in faraway nations to the near north of us. We want our kids to know the dangers of it, and we want to make it hard for them to get it. You're not going to stop it. We're not being unrealistic. There will still be kids who are hooked, and now, if they can't get it, they might go start smoking. In fact, as the previous speaker said, vaping is a gateway drug. It was designed as a replacement for people who are already hardcore addicts. For those people, it probably is good, but that is the minority of people. We're worried about the big population of people—young people—who will be potential addicts of nicotine just introduced through vaping.

All strength to the regulatory people who are now faced with this. I can't imagine the Department of Health and Aged Care turning up and doing raids on bikie and gangster controlled little sheds or something out in the burbs. You've seen all these places that are being torched. They're gang wars and turf wars, because the illegal tobacco trade has, like vaping, been taken over by people that do lots of other bad stuff that's highly illegal, like drugs of addiction—the trade in ice, heroin and coke—as well as vaping. It's high return. I really realise that we have a problem when people in my home town are talking about kids dealing vapes and running businesses, in their teens, in schools. And behavioural problems in schools. Like I said, if we keep doing the same thing we will get the same outcomes. So we've got to look at this with a rational, commonsense approach. I commend the rest of the bill to the House.

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