Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

From 1 July, the only vapes available in this country should be those prescribed by medical practitioners and dispensed by pharmacies. As a paediatrician, I wish that the government had had the courage to do this years ago. As a politician, I am watching with concern the pushback from the tobacco and vaping lobby, and the political parties they support. Vaping is a public health emergency. This legislation, the Therapeutic Goods and Other Legislation Amendment (Vaping Reforms) Bill 2024, is long overdue.

Let's be clear: vaping is highly addictive. It's an entry point to nicotine addiction. It's an entry point to the tobacco industry, which still kills at least 20,000 Australians every year. Children and young adults use vapes as their first nicotine based product. They're not trying to quit; they've never smoked before. The number of younger Australians who vape has increased 12-fold in the last four years. About one in six high-school kids are vaping, and about one in four young adults in Australia are vaping. We know that young people who vape are three times more likely to take up smoking than other people. Those kids don't understand that the vapes they are using are much stronger than cigarettes, that many of them are vaping the equivalent of three or four packets of cigarettes every day.

In the process of vaping, those young people are inhaling toxic chemicals like diacetyl, formaldehyde, acrolein and heavy metals. In adolescence, vaping is associated with mental health challenges including depression and anxiety. Nicotine addiction is associated with cardiac and vascular disease. We don't yet fully understand the long-term side effects of vaping, but we know that this is not going to be good. This is a public health crisis.

In my own suburb of Hawthorn and in other suburbs in my electorate of Kooyong, we've seen vape shops popping up like noxious weeds. Nine out of ten of those shops in this country are within walking distance of schools. Those vape shops are selling e-cigarettes in child-friendly packaging with attractive flavours and devices that look like bananas, jelly babies and unicorns. They purport to sell non-nicotine vapes, but we know that more than 90 per cent of the vapes on sale in those stores contain nicotine and are highly addictive. Those devices aren't just poisoning our young people; they're also poisoning our environment. Single-use vapes have been described as a strong contender for being the most environmentally wasteful, damaging and dangerous consumer product ever made. Those vape shops are hanging in there at the moment, in the hope that the current intense lobbying by the vaping and tobacco industry, and by the politicians that they fund to advocate on their behalf, will be successful and that the vaping laws before the House at this time will be weakened.

This legislation could have been passed four years ago, when the former member for Flinders and the then health minister, Greg Hunt, first flagged it. At that time he caved in the face of opposition from big tobacco, fronted by people in his own ranks. We await their response to this legislation. But one suspects that the opposition will, as usual, be guided more by the dictates of its donors than by the best interests of its constituents.

Australians deserve better. To be effective these laws are going to have to be enforced. For that we will need appropriate manpower and support at a state and federal level. The federal government tells us that it will work hard in tandem with the state governments, the TGA and Border Force to enforce these laws. If they don't, this legislation will not work.

The Commonwealth must also work towards an effective national approach to ensuring that doctors and other healthcare providers have the funding, the capacity and the expertise to provide best practice support for individuals who are seeking to stop smoking. There are better ways to help people stop smoking than via vapes. It is up to us to provide those people with that support.

Many people don't understand that the vaping industry is the tobacco industry, and big tobacco is going hard on this issue. Firstly, they're going hard on influencer marketing and product placement. Instagram alone is home to 18,000 Australian vaping influencer profiles, many of which link directly to online vape stores. They're also now hawking nicotine pouches—they call them snus—again, online and, again, via influencers. Who makes those snus, those pouches? Zyn is produced by Philip Morris. Velo, which was marketed just last weekend in Melbourne as the official snus of Formula 1, is made by British American Tobacco.

Big tobacco has unhealthily close relationships with several large Australian retail associations. The Australian Retailers Association, the Australian Association of Convenience Stores, the Australian Taxpayers Alliance and related groups, Responsible Vaping Australia and Legalise Vaping Australia are all supported, directly or indirectly, by one or more of: Philip Morris International, British American Tobacco and Imperial Tobacco. It is no coincidence that they are pushing back hard against this legislation.

Then there are the links between political parties and the tobacco industry. Researchers from the University of Sydney and the Cancer Council NSW have reported that almost half of the tobacco company lobbyists who are now in positions in those big companies previously held positions in state, territory or federal government before or after working in the tobacco industry. That relationship is particularly close between the tobacco industry and the Liberal and the National parties. Almost a fifth of the National Party's receipts in 2022-23 came from tobacco companies. Those donations give BAT and PMI foundation memberships with access to National members and events, lunches and budget dinners.

Is it a coincidence that the member for Maranoa, Nationals leader David Littleproud, is now calling for regulation rather than prohibition of vaping in Australia? Senator Hollie Hughes joined with Senator Matt Canavan in a dissenting report to the Senate tobacco harm reduction inquiry in late 2022. Is it a coincidence that earlier that year Legalise Vaping Australia donated $44,000 to the New South Wales Liberal Party?

Meanwhile the tobacco industry is actively promoting its own vaping devices. It's walking on both sides of the street. It's also cultivating medical professionals who are promoting vaping as being a better alternative to cigarettes via Orwellian organisations like the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World, which is funded by Philip Morris International, and the Australian Tobacco Harm Reduction Association, which denies links to the tobacco industry but whose website's metadata has links to lobbying firms contracted to promote vaping. As described in the National Tobacco Strategy 2023-2030:

Evidence from Australia and overseas … reinforces the need to ensure that efforts to protect tobacco control from commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry also extend to the tobacco industry's practice of using individuals, retail groups, front groups and affiliated organisations to act, openly or covertly, on their behalf or to take action to further their interests.

Unfortunately, this does include doctors who represent big tobacco—or, I should say, big nicotine. Those doctors should also be held to account, because they are astroturfing for the tobacco industry; so too should the doctors who provide vapes via telehealth platforms like medicalnicotine.com.au, myduke.com.au, quitmate.com.au and medmate.com.au. Some of those platforms have been investigated for unlawful advertising of vaping products. Some of them—and ostensibly, let us remember, they are telehealth platforms—have entered into commercial agreements whereby they dispense discounted vapes provided via commercial agreements with Philip Morris International. PMI is also supplying some large Australian pharmacy chains with its VEEV vaping products below cost, on the condition that they sign a supply deal with the tobacco giant. Those doctors who are lobbying on behalf of the vaping industry and those doctors who are working on those telehealth platforms should be careful about their prescribing patterns. They need to remember that every vape is doing their patients damage. If they value their professional reputations, they need to consider the potential damage to them as well.

The opposition is now calling for regulation, rather than prohibition, of vapes. These calls are utterly disingenuous. This legislation does in fact regulate, rather than prohibit, vapes, but it limits the control of those regulations to medical professionals, not, as the opposition would like, to vape shops, supermarkets, milk bars and servos. Comparisons have been drawn with similar legislation elsewhere, but I draw the attention of the House, and of our constituents, to the fact that both the UK and New Zealand have recently backtracked on their earlier relatively permissive approaches to vaping regulation. Both the UK and New Zealand have recently banned disposable vapes, and they've legislated against the sale of vapes to children in the face of mounting evidence of young people experiencing nicotine addiction: kids sneaking vapes at school, kids vaping in the loos at lunchtime, kids getting up at midnight for a dose. The head of Quit Victoria recently reported that kids as young as 13 are calling the Quitline for help in getting off vapes.

This legislation, the Therapeutic Goods and Other Legislation Amendment (Vaping Reforms) Bill 2024, is overdue. It's important. It's going to be tough to enforce, but I congratulate the Minister for Health and Aged Care on having the courage to take on an industry which is a scourge to this country. Vaping is a public health emergency. We are looking at a tsunami, a generation of children hooked on nicotine. This legislation should be passed, and the federal, state and territory governments should work together to support its implementation. In the face of an unparalleled, unprecedented public health crisis affecting the young people of Australia, we need to act effectively, decisively and with integrity. I commend the legislation to the House.

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