Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I acknowledge I am a late addition to the speaking list. I rise to speak strongly in favour of the Therapeutic Goods and Other Legislation Amendment (Vaping Reforms) Bill 2024 to ban the importations, manufacture, supply and commercial possession of disposable, single-use, non-therapeutic vapes while preserving the legitimate patient access to therapeutic vapes through pharmacy settings for people who choose to use vapes as a way to try to manage their nicotine dependence.

In my contribution I want to pick up on a few things that some of those opposite have said. One of the factors that has been missing from their contribution has been the acknowledgement that a lot of young Australians don't know how dangerous vapes are, and that is so alarming. Recently, I met with my local headspace—and I do that quite regularly—to find out what it is they're hearing from their leaders. I met with the leaders of this local headspace. Usually, when you meet, their concerns are around anxiety, post pandemic worries and the need for more support for mental health. For this meeting, the entire hour was taken up with vaping: vaping is causing us so many problems; vaping is leading to anxiety; vaping amongst young people is causing massive problems in our community. This wasn't the first meeting that I'd had with young people who had raised this issue. I also met with the leaders of the City of Greater Bendigo, and it was their No. 1 concern. When I spoke to them they, like many other young people, did not know what's in a vape. They did not know the damage.

What struck me with those conversations that I was having with young people in my electorate was how identical that conversation was to one I had with my partner's mother about smoking. She took up smoking when she was young. She said: 'Leese, we didn't know. We didn't know how dangerous smoking was.' And here we are a few generations later and we've got another generation of young people saying to us, 'We don't know how dangerous vaping is.' This is on us. This is up to us to do something about it.

I have to say to the members of the National Party: don't throw your hands up and say it's too hard. It's not good enough just to say we're going to regulate it and let people be addicted, vape for the rest of their lives, cause damage, and be that next generation that die early of heart disease, of lung cancers or nicotine-and-smoking-related disease. Don't say, 'We're just going to create the next generation of consumers and of cigarettes and vaping.' We can do something about it today because we know the science is in, we know how addictive these products are and we know the damage that has been done.

I do feel fortunate that when I was younger I was part of a generation when the education was really strong. I would have schoolmates trying to tell their parents to give up smoking. They'd take their packets of cigarettes and they'd throw them out. I can remember the ads when I was a child. I can remember it. Both my grandfathers died of smoking-related diseases—I never met them. They died young. It is the story of so many Australians who didn't get the opportunity to meet their grandparents. They died young. As the member for Riverina said, far too many Australians died young because of the impact of smoking. And it's a legacy that we all have to live with, because people didn't know the science. But today we do. Today we can actually do something about it before that number is more than 1.7 million people and before it is more than one in six children. We have an opportunity to ban single-use vapes, to make sure that they're not in our schools and our playgrounds.

I say schools and playgrounds, and this is something that I also want to put on the record tonight. There's not one high school in my electorate where this hasn't been raised by parents, by teachers and by students: Victory Christian College, Girton Grammar, Marist Catholic School, Catholic College, Bendigo Senior, Weeroona College, Bendigo Southeast and Crusoe. They've all said that this is a big issue—children selling other children vapes because they didn't know it was bad. It's only now that we're doing something about it that the reality is setting in for these young people that this is bad, that this is as bad as smoking, if not worse.

And this product is more insidious because of the way it is being marketed to young people—the flavouring, the designs. This is a deliberate strategy by the manufacturers to get that next generation of people addicted. And once they're addicted, the solution from those opposite is to regulate and let this product be sold at supermarkets and service stations. That is not good enough. We can do better, and we must do better.

The latest national survey data has shown that there's been a fourfold increase in the number of young people vaping, and one in six high school students have recently vaped. And what are those young people telling us? What are their parents telling us? They're doing it because they didn't know it was as bad as smoking. That is a real story, told to me by hundreds of young people: 'Oh, but vaping's not smoking. It's not as bad as smoking.'

We've got to get in front of this, and we've got to get these products out of our schools and out of our community. That is why it is this government and a Labor minister that's continuing the tough line, because it isn't just about the impact of vaping today. It's about what happens to the health and the future of these young people, and the future burden on our health system. We cannot stand here and say that regulation is enough, that vaping is just like cigarettes and just like alcohol, because it's not. If it was just like cigarettes and just like alcohol there'd be more 30 -year-olds vaping, more 40-year-olds vaping, but they're not. It's being targeted at a younger audience who didn't grow up with grandparents dying young, who didn't grow up with parents smoking, throwing their parents' cigarettes away. Companies have targeted a new generation and are calling this a new product and saying it's not as dangerous when it is.

Strong and decisive action is needed to make sure we arrest and reverse the increase in vaping, and it can be done. We should not throw our hands up and say that the vape is out of the bottle and we just have to let it go—no. We can actually do something to stop the proliferation of vapes in our community. We can do something to prevent the long-term adverse effects on population health before it's too late.

I want to acknowledge at this point in the debate the bravery of some of the young people who have spoken to me, who have confessed: 'Yeah, I sold vapes. I made some money. I didn't know. What's going to happen to me now?' Well, nothing right now, because this bill targets the people who put the vapes into your hands. But don't do it again, because vaping will lead to harm, and we need to stop it. I've had parents reach out to me, desperate and anxious. Their young people are taking up vaping; what can they do? That's why I also commend the health minister for the package that has been put together to target and support and help to get these young people who are addicted to vaping off it.

I never thought that I'd be standing here in this parliament in this debate—because 10 years ago vaping wasn't really a thing—and I can't believe there is this division in the parliament, with one side saying, 'Yes, we didn't do enough when we were in government, so now we're going to push for regulation, and let's just let an entirely new generation be addicted to nicotine products, knowing what we know about the damage they can do.' We are playing catch-up to get the information into our schools and into our young people so that they know how dangerous this product is.

I have met with a number of retailers in my electorate and have had people reach out to me who do support vaping. I want to say to the people who support vaping who have reached out to me: we believe that if you have a medical script and your doctor agrees, you should still be able access products that can help reduce your dependency on nicotine. We support that being distributed through pharmacies in very controlled circumstances, and that is what this bill does. If it has worked for you, that is great. If it would work for others under that very controlled arrangement, we support that. But we have to do something to stop vaping and its proliferation into our schools.

The nicotine companies have done it to the Australian public again, just as they did to our grandparents when they said it doesn't harm and isn't bad for you. It breaks my heart that young people tell me, 'But this isn't like smoking.' We have to get in front of this and we have to ban these products. We have to ban them and get them out of our schools.

The only groups who really support regulation, apart from the members of the National Party, are those who want to sell vaping products, because they see the opportunity of a lifelong group of customers. That is what is really insidious about the idea that we can accept regulation. Some people came to me and spoke in good faith and spoke to me about their profits on cigarettes being down. I said, 'Look, I understand that your profits on cigarettes are down.' But I'm not going to agree that we should then regulate so that they can increase their profits through allowing vapes to be sold. It just isn't right and we have an opportunity to do something about it. Regulating vapes just condemns a generation of young people—a generation who may already be addicted, judging from the history and the science and what we already know. We can get in front of vaping and stop it, and stop a generation of young people becoming the next ones that find an early grave because of smoking related diseases.

It isn't just smoking related diseases that they put themselves at risk of, and we all know what they are. There are high correlations between asbestos related disease and smoking. That is just one example and there are so many others.

This is an opportunity for us as a parliament to get on the front foot and do something—not only educating—by banning the product that we know will create so much harm. This bill will ban the importation, manufacture, supply and commercial possession of disposable, single-use vapes and non-therapeutic vapes, while preserving the legitimate patient's access to therapeutic vapes through pharmacy settings for smoking cessation and management of nicotine dependency were clinically appropriate. This is the right bill and the right call for this time. We can do something to help that next generation. We want to see the figures reduced from one in six to zero. It is something we can do.

I would like to get back to a conversation I'm having in my community where we are talking about education, leadership and opportunity, a conversation where the first sentence with every school leader, school principal, school teacher and parent is, 'What are we doing about vaping?’ When I spoke in local media about what we are doing about vaping there was overwhelming support for it across the generations. Let's not be a society and a parliament that condemns another generation to smoking related disease. We can do something about it. I commend the minister for health, in the grand tradition of Labor health ministers, for putting forward this bill—the centrepiece of our government's reform on stopping vaping and banning vapes.

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