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

I move:

That the amendments be agreed to.

This is incredibly important legislation. I've said that the House and the Senate have had the opportunity this week to do something meaningful and lasting for the health of young Australians, and I genuinely meant that. Vaping has become a very serious public health scourge in this country. Not only is it a health scourge but it is consistently rated as the number one behavioural issue in schools by school communities and by school leaders.

I want to thank the Senate for the way in which they conducted this debate. I particularly want to thank Senator Lambie, Senator Pocock and Senator Jordon Steele-John for their long, constructive discussions with the government, and with me particularly, about the way in which we can make a serious regulatory scheme work. I also want to thank a long list of outside stakeholders for their support here. This is a package of amendments not just from the Commonwealth but a package agreed between all governments. This has been a regular topic of discussion between state, territory and Commonwealth health ministers now for more than 12 months. We have a vaping enforcement working group that is co-chaired by the head of NSW Health and by Commissioner Outram, head of the Australian Border Force, that brings together not just health authorities but policing authorities. This is genuinely an intergovernmental package of reforms. These reforms are Commonwealth legislation, but they will be enforced by state and territory authorities.

I particularly want to thank officers, particularly the legal counsel of the TGA. I want to thank the tobacco branch in our department. Tony Lawler, the head of the TGA, played a direct role in the construction of these reforms. And there's a long list of groups which have fought for better tobacco control in this country for five decades: the Cancer Council; the AMA; the Australian Council on Smoking & Health; the Public Health Association; and a range of academics—in particular, Emily Banks from the ANU, who has been such a strong public advocate, as well as Becky Freeman and many others as well. I want to thank all of them for their support for this package of reforms.

The amendments to the bill that were passed in the Senate very much keep faith with the original intention of our reform. They ensure legitimate access to therapeutic goods is not unduly obstructed while recreational vaping in general retail settings is abolished in this country. If the House accepts these amendments, that abolition will take place from Monday 1 July.

This product was sold to us as a therapeutic good. It was never presented as a recreational product, particularly not one that would be so cynically and transparently marketed to our children. The tragedy of this subterfuge is that it's working. One in six high school kids is vaping; one in four young adults is vaping. We know that vaping in and of itself is unhealthy. Almost every month we are gathering new evidence about the harms that vaping is causing to young lungs and the harms that particularly nicotine addiction is causing to the mental health of young Australians, to their learning behaviours and to their socialisation. Most insidiously, we know this is a gateway to cigarettes, and that was the intention of big tobacco. I'm very confident that in the coming months and years around the world, just as their attitude to smoking control was eventually unmasked—to their shame—we will learn that this was the strategy all along from big tobacco to recruit a new generation to nicotine addiction. We are determined in this government, and I know many members of parliament in this chamber and the other share this determination. We are not going to stand by and let a new generation be recruited to nicotine addiction—not after all of the deaths, dislocation and grief that we have seen for decades and decades because of tobacco.

I strongly commend these amendments to the House. I want to thank everyone who has worked really hard in this building and beyond—in state governments and in the NGO sector in public health groups—for their support of our determination to take this very important public health measure. As I said, parliament doesn't always get an opportunity like this to do something as meaningful and as lasting for the health of the youngest members of our community as we have today. I urge the House to support these amendments.

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