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

I thank the member for Holt for her question and for her support of these reforms. Vaping is a scourge. It is a public health menace, particularly for children and for young people. A product that was presented as a therapeutic good that would help hardened smokers finally kick the habit has actually been deployed by big tobacco as a tool to recruit a new generation to nicotine addiction.

You just have to look at the products—brightly coloured with cartoon characters on them and with ridiculous flavours like 'bubblegum ice'. They are often designed as highlighter pens or USB sticks so that they can be hidden in pencil cases, away from the eyes of teachers and parents. And you just have to look at where they're being sold: nine out of 10 vape stores are located within walking distance of schools. That is deliberate, because that is exactly their target market.

The tragedy is that big tobacco is winning this war. One in six high school students are vaping. One in four very young adults are vaping, and it is causing them real harm. Parents are having to manage kids with serious nicotine addictions. Teachers are being rostered not just to stand outside of toilets but inside school toilets during lunch breaks and recess to police vaping in their schools. They are, all of them, asking us in this building, 'How on earth did this happen?'

To his credit, Greg Hunt tried to stop the flood of imported vapes into this country, but he was rolled by his party room within a matter of days. They kept on flooding in until 1 January, when our government finally banned the import of disposal vapes. In those six months we have seized more than 2.8 million vapes, taking them out of the hands of our kids finally. Today, parliament passed the next phase of our reforms: to ban the sale and the supply of vapes outside therapeutic settings. Remember, this was supposed to be a therapeutic good. From Monday, you'll only be able to buy a vape from a therapeutic place for therapeutic reasons—

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