Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

It's the truth. I'll wait for your speech. I'm sure, because you're a doctor you're going to—we've both been in here long enough. There's nothing wrong with people getting it; that's their right. But you know when the notes have come straight from the department. I can tell. I've been a minister God knows how many times. I know exactly how they talk and exactly how it sounds. I know how they send you down here.

I got a question the other day that was handed to me. I didn't write it. I listened to it later on and thought if I had my chance I'd never ask that again. That's the reality of it. Let's be honest about it. That's what we lack here—the honesty to say exactly how things work.

But let's go back to another thing. I was just up in the other joint, the Federation Chamber, passing a new excise on roll-your-owns. People who roll their own cigarettes are poor—they have no money—and the reason they roll their own is because they're cheaper than buying a packet of cigarettes. So we're putting up the excise on that. The only people you're now going to get your money off are the people who legally buy roll-your-own tobacco. All the rest are going to go to chop-chop, and they are. Thirty per cent of the market is chop-chop, and that's what we can determine—it's probably a lot higher than that. About 95 per cent of the vape market is illegal already, and we're not stopping that.

So we have decided that it is virtuous to go to people who cannot afford their fuel, their groceries or their rent and get $3 billion off them—$3 billion that they otherwise would have spent on milk, on their sanitary products, on fuel and on their rent. And we go: 'That's virtuous. What a good thing we did today.' What a load of rubbish. They're not going to stop smoking. You're just making them poorer. They will say to you, 'If I can't pay my rent because you, the government, are ripping me off because of my addiction, I'm going to go somewhere else and buy the product.' That's precisely what they will do.

I've heard that we are going to have a campaign. So we've just earnt $3½ billion up the hill in the Federation Chamber, and now we're down here and they're saying, 'We're going to put $63 million to it.' Hang on—you just earnt $3½ billion up there. Why don't you put $3½ billion on the table for an education campaign? Let's be properly pure about this. 'No, that's going into the budget.' The Treasurer will talk about that in a few weeks time. He got that; he's got it booked. One of the reasons he can't argue against this excise thing is that he has to go and find that $3 billion that the other side has found. It's just such a hypocritical load of rubbish, and we all come down here and participate in it.

So, no matter what you do here, I hope you all feel jolly good about it. I hope you all feel like you can walk out the door and think, 'I fought that one hard.' You'll walk out the door and, to be quite frank, forget about it, like most of us. You know what? Out there, nothing is going to change except that the illegal markets are just going to bigger and bigger and bigger.

I have a choice for my four girls and two boys. They can choose not smoke cigarettes and not vape. Please don't do either—have the character not to do it. When other people are starting when you're really young—around adolescence—and you're easily moved by things, that's generally when you have your first bunger. I don't know about everybody else, but that's generally when you do it. Be in an environment where you don't do it—if you can do that, bingo, that is what you want—and everything else that goes with it. Stay away from the parties where people are pulling cones. Certainly don't hang out with anybody—with any families—who are doing powders or at any places where they're doing it. Stay away from it. If you're a parent, be good and keep them away from it.

But, if you—like a lot of people—pick up the habit of smoking, then I want you to go to a service station or a shop and buy a regulated product that, as bad as it is, has some controls over what's in it. I want you to buy it off them. If you are vaping—the same thing. I don't want to have to rely on a factory in China to do the right thing by you. I'm pretty certain they won't. I'm pretty certain they don't give a toss about what they are putting in that product. I'm also absolutely certain that, just like we can test the sewage in Sydney and find in the inner suburbs that cocaine must be a big thing on Saturday night because it comes tearing through the sewage system, I can look at whole realms of laws about what happens to people if they take it—but it's there. What a surprise!

We can also check the sewerage system and see that smoking is going up—not down, up—but we're not selling more cigarettes. So where is this coming from? It's magic. Surely they were all sitting in the chamber and listening to our speeches about how we didn't want it to happen. What happened to that? Why aren't we moving the Australian people with the wonderous speeches we are giving here? Because this crazy boarding school is distracted from reality on issues such as this—not only this; it's also a range of issues, but this is such a classic example.

I know the good doctor over there—

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