Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

I thank members for their further contributions. This question of possession has been a process of discussion and consideration. As members know, particularly when it comes to the pods—because all of these will be reusable vapes; you will not be able to buy disposable vapes anymore—we're conscious that, when we set regulations about these things, the industry tries to readjust their product to get around them. So these are, again, matters of judgement.

What we have sought to do is to set those offence provisions, or the number of devices, at a level that does not lead to users being potentially targeted or potentially in breach of offence provisions here, to allow for a range of different scenarios. One of the matters that were put to us quite strongly in the Senate debate was that people in rural and regional Australia will often buy additional supplies so that they don't have to keep going back every month. So we're trying to take account of a range of things.

This is a new area. I think one of the really positive things about the Senate amendments is the legislated review of this. Because this new regime is quite different—it's very different to the way in which we've managed tobacco; it's quite world leading—I don't think any of us pretend to know exactly how it will roll out or whether, three years down the track, we as a parliament won't say that there are not ways in which we would want to tweak a range of things and maybe change it substantially. I think that's been a constructive part of the amendments coming through from the Senate.

As to data collection, again, this is something that was the subject of discussion over in the other place. Many members of the crossbench, particularly the member for Mackellar, who is a GP, know of Project STOP, the model for pseudoephedrine, which was also set up as a schedule 3 medicine so that obtaining it requires a discussion with a pharmacist. You're not always successful in obtaining pseudoephedrine-containing products when you go and have that discussion with a pharmacist. I can attest to that from a personal experience earlier this year—being marched out of my local pharmacy on a Sunday morning on the basis that I did not meet all of the conditions for access to cold and flu tablets that contain pseudoephedrine. It was rather humiliating, I must say, as the country's health minister! But I can attest that that discussion does work. The data entry requirements of Project STOP for pseudoephedrine were put in place because of law enforcement concerns around what was happening to pseudoephedrine—it was being cut up for methamphetamine manufacture—so there was a particular law enforcement imperative, or motivation, for that measure. We considered that there was not the thing here same here.

There is a concern about people going into multiple pharmacies, potentially, buying more than one vape in a month and then onselling them. Balanced against that was for pharmacists to focus their the time on the therapeutic discussion rather than on data entry—generally, that's for schedule 3 medicines, with really only the exception of pseudoephedrine because of the law enforcement concern. To be effective, that would then have to be linked to other pharmacies and have some other monitoring regime, which we were not convinced was really going to be proper regulation. If that judgement is not proven out over time then we'll have the opportunity to continue to talk about that, but I thought I'd give members of the crossbench some explanation about where we landed on that.

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