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

Mr Deputy Speaker, you probably noticed my interjection during the member for New England's speech. I did find it offensive because my speech is not about detailed talking points from the minister or departmental advices—this is lived experience.

The vaping industry is being promoted and financed by the tobacco industry, which, like the product itself, is malignant. This is an industry that, decades after there was unequivocal evidence that smoking was heavily associated with lung cancer, bowel cancer, cardiovascular disease and peripheral vascular disease, the tobacco industry was denying this and actively running campaigns to promote smoking that was killing millions of people around the world. The vaping industry is being promoted by the tobacco industry. It's part of their business model. This is our last chance to introduce measures that will stop our kids becoming addicted to nicotine.

I thank the Minister for Health and Aged Care very much for moving this very important legislation. It's associated with other measures as well, such as using excise taxes on tobacco to finance things like lung cancer screening and other public health measures. This is a huge moment in public health policy in Australia. I am proud to be a member of the Labor Party, which has longed believed in public health measures to improve the health and wellbeing of our citizens. I am very grateful, personally, for Nicola Roxon, who was Minister for Health and Ageing and, ultimately, the Attorney-General in the Rudd-Gillard years, for bringing in plain packaging and other measures to reduce smoking in Australia.

Smoking is not increasing; it has been around the 14 per cent mark in most jurisdictions in Australia for the last few years. Of course, we have pockets of high levels of smoking, particularly in disadvantaged communities. In South Western Sydney we have a higher incidence of smoking than the national average, and smoking is quite a problem in many Indigenous communities around the country. That's why we're also investing in Indigenous anti-smoking campaigns.

This legislation builds on a long history of public health policy that Labor Party has been doing in office. We've had 50 years of this. It started with the Whitlam government introducing the first restrictions on tobacco advertising. We followed this with the introduction of Australia's world-leading tobacco plain-packaging reforms, as I've mentioned. It was dismissed by the Liberal and National parties a too big government, too intrusive. Yet a decade on plain packaging has reduced smoking levels significantly.

There is still much to do, I agree with you. I've recently been on a trip to the Northern Territory with the health committee looking at diabetes. We heard very strongly about the combination of diabetes, cigarette smoking and peripheral vascular disease and cardiovascular disease, leading to people under 30 having heart attacks and people under 40 having limb amputations because of diabetes. There's a very strong association of the combination of diabetes and smoking and vascular disease and also, unfortunately, in renal failure due to that combination of diabetes and smoking.

We're dealing now with another menace. I should say, before I talk any further, that I used to a very heavy smoker. It did damage my health. Thank God, I was able to stop before it killed me. But I have seen many people die from cigarette smoking, and I fear I will see the same with vaping. The causes of the complications of vaping are still unclear, but clearly it is a combination of inhalation of nicotine, which itself causes damage to little air sacs in the lung, the alveolae and the small blood vessels in the lung. But all the other chemicals that have been mentioned—I can list them, from heavy metals to formalin, which itself is carcinogenic, to the many other unknown chemicals in vapes.

People have compared this to other addictions. We should all remember that nicotine is a highly addictive chemical. But it is not the same, because we are allowing people to obtain vapes by prescription. These will be TGA approved, so they will be tested for dangerous chemicals et cetera and for nicotine content. They will be associated also with a visit to the doctor and getting appropriate advice about vaping. There have been issues, I will admit, with doctors prescribing vapes. Many doctors have been reluctant to do it. Many doctors are not educated in how to prescribe vapes and how to introduce other antismoking measures and where they fit in the antinicotine and antismoking measures that we can introduce, like the oral treatments and other things. But this campaign will also be associated with an education campaign through our general practitioners. I met with the college of general practitioners yesterday and we discussed how we need to upskill our medical force. There will be ways that people who are addicted to nicotine can safely get prescriptions to vapes so that they can be gradually weaned off nicotine. It may be a small role in using vapes to win people from smoking, but that is by no means clear. The industry itself has not been able to demonstrate that in any convincing way. So there will be ways where people can obtain nicotine vapes through prescription and that will also help them be weaned from the nicotine themselves.

We should remember also that these vapes are having a terrible effect on children. I go to local high schools and run antivaping campaigns in those schools. They are confiscating literally thousands of illegal vapes that are clearly targeted to children, with bubblegum flavours, rum and raisin flavours I have seen, strawberries and cream. We all know that these are available and being imported in their thousands and they are damaging our kids. The side-effects are affecting their behaviour in school, their concentration. It's increasing their risk of having a mental illness. These vapes contain many thousands of times the concentration of nicotine in cigarettes as well, and they can be used 24 hours a day. I hear stories from my own patients about kids having vapes beside their bed, so they're having them 24 hours a day.

To me this is something that we have to do everything we possibly can to stop. This is our last chance to do it. If we let this go now, this will have ongoing health effects on our children and adolescents for many, many years and we will be paying the price for that in terms of mental health issues and deaths. We know that there have been deaths recorded from shock lung from the overuse of vapes. We know that it increases the risk of cardiovascular disease. In people who have high risk of vascular disease, such as our Indigenous population, we know that it is already causing things like peripheral vascular disease and cardiac disease. We have to stop it now. This is our last chance.

I have had extensive involvement with my local communities, GPs and hospital about electronic cigarettes and vapes. We did an enquiry in the Committee on Health, Aged Care and Sport in the last parliament. We found that there was no evidence for the use of vapes in a healthy context to wean people from cigarettes. We have not seen convincing statistics about this. We spoke to many respiratory physicians, anti-smoking campaigners et cetera. There is no evidence of harm minimisation.

There are some doctors groups going around the country that are promoting the use of vapes, saying that they are protective of health and that they are better than cigarettes. They have no evidence for saying that, nor do they have convincing evidence that they can be used to wean people from cigarettes. In our inquiry we found that these products are clearly a gateway to smoking, hence the involvement of the tobacco industry. The tobacco industry has run a very strong campaign against this legislation for one reason: so they can make billions of dollars—and they are billion-dollar industries—from causing serious health harm to our population, from our children and our at-risk groups, such as Aboriginal communities, to our older people. We should not in any way believe what they are saying. This is dangerous.

More and more Australians are taking up recreational vaping. I've seen it in this building, I see it when I go to schools, I see it in our local hospitals—I see it everywhere I go. Literally thousands of vapes are being discarded in our rubbish dumps around the country—and there a particular harms with that as well, because they all contain lithium batteries, and have caused fires in a number of situations. In the recently released Australian Secondary Students Alcohol and Drug Survey, they found that almost 20 per cent of 12- to 15-year-olds were using vapes. That is a disaster in the making. We have to stop it, and this is our last chance. The thing that upsets me the most is that these things are being targeted at our children, even in our local primary schools. Principals have complained to me about vapes being found in their toilets. We have got to stop it.

I was invited last year to Macquarie Fields High School to meet some of the parents and teachers and to discuss their concerns about vaping and the dangers that presents to their children, because of the number of vapes that they found being sold secretly at school. The schools are finding it incredibly difficult to police. I was thankful for the opportunity to speak to the schools, but I was also very thankful to speak to some of the parents, who told me the problems they were having with their kids, with sleep disturbance, anxiety, poor concentration, lack of attention to schoolwork, and the fact that they were sometimes selling their own possessions to be able to afford to buy vapes from the kids who were selling them at school. This is just terrible. I was very thankful to the school for having me there. I've been to some other high schools with similar issues.

We're still in the early days of the vaping industry. Overseas it's much more persistent. Schools in places as diverse as Great Britain and Germany are finding huge problems with their kids, vaping at school and concentration and mental health issues. We in Australia have led the world in anti-tobacco policies. We can do it here with vaping, but it is important that we do it in a consistent and persistent manner.

I do agree with the member for New England. We need to spend as much as we can on education programs and support for schools and other institutions to try and prevent our kids vaping. We also need to invest in our general practitioners and help them understand how they can help in this battle, with prescriptions and with antismoking and antinicotine programs—I'll call them antinicotine programs overall.

It will only continue to get worse if we have the so-called regulation model with vapes available. If we regulate, I can't guarantee that, when someone goes into our local supermarket, our local service station or even our local pharmacies, the vapes will just be given to those over 18. In fact, I don't think that will happen. I think that we need to be very careful when we put up these artificial models, such as the regulation model, without any evidence that they will work. They certainly don't work overseas. They're not going to work in Australia.

Some of my concerns are about not only nicotine addiction but what these materials are doing to our kids' lungs. We know from the asthma foundation that there is increasing evidence that vaping use makes severe asthma much more difficult to control. It also means that kids are spending money on things that they shouldn't. They're ending up in hospital with side effects from vaping. They're ending up with more mental health issues. I really thoroughly commend this bill to the House because I think that it is very important, that this is our last chance and that we should do it persistently and consistently. Thank you.

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