Helen Haines (Indi, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Curtin University research revealed a toxic cocktail of ingredients, highlighting the significant health risks that vape users are exposing themselves to. Of the vapes tested, they were all found to have been inaccurately labelled, containing chemicals with unknown effects on respiratory health. Sixty-two per cent contained chemicals likely to be toxic if inhaled repeatedly. Research also shows that more than 20 per cent of vapes available in Australia contain nicotine, despite this being illegal. It's unlawful to use, sell or buy nicotine for use in vapes in Australia without a prescription.

Time and time again, people tell me that vaping is highly addictive. That's why this bill is needed, to help people make healthier informed choices. The Therapeutic Goods and Other Legislation Amendment (Vaping Reforms) Bill 2024 will strengthen standards for therapeutic vapes by requiring a prescriptive list of permitted ingredients; accurate pharmaceutical packaging and labelling; and a ban on advertising, except in limited circumstances. Numerous studies highlight concerns about the potential adverse effects of vaping, including impacts on adolescent brain development, adverse pregnancy outcomes, cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease and cancer. A range of other health risks are also associated with vape use, including severe burns, poisoning and seizures.

Therapeutic vapes can play a role in helping people to give up cigarettes, so we must ensure that anyone with a genuine desire to quit can afford prescriptions and has access to credible prescribing services, particularly in regional, rural, and remote areas, where access to medical services can be challenging. As we take these measures to protect people from the harm of nicotine addiction, we must ensure that we do not cause more harm to already vulnerable people struggling with addiction. I can't overstate it: we need to make sure that, for people struggling with giving up cigarettes, we do everything we can, with a full suite of therapeutic actions to support them and assist them to quit.

At least 20,000 Australians die each year from diseases linked to smoking. Successive governments over many years have taken action to regulate the tobacco industry, and now the industry is hedging by investing in the vape sector. Tobacco companies are signing supply contracts with Australian pharmacies and telehealth providers who equip patients with scripts for therapeutic vapes. Vapes are indeed big business for big tobacco. With this bill adopted, the only vapes available legally in this country from 1 July would be those prescribed by medical practitioners and dispensed by pharmacies—and perhaps prescribed by other practitioners, too, such as nurse practitioners. It's outrageous to think that the tobacco industry has any involvement in products prescribed for therapeutic use.

We must stamp out the pervasive lobbying, cash for access and political donations that buys big tobacco influence over state and federal MPs. Conflicts of interest and gifts must be clearly declared, as should the relationships between political parties and tobacco companies. Public health reforms must be about the community need, never about corporate greed.

This bill builds on the progress the government has already made to ban all non-therapeutic vapes, by providing a national framework to regulate the importation, domestic manufacture, supply, commercial possession and advertisement of all vapes, irrespective of nicotine content or therapeutic claims.

I commend the Minister for Health and Aged Care for prioritising this issue and establishing the National Vaping Working Group to oversee the development and implementation of a national vaping enforcement framework. I'm frequently told how easy it is to access vapes despite the regulations currently placed on them, and that's why these reforms are needed. Importantly, they must be enforceable, so we need as many resources put to this as we possibly can.

I welcome strong and decisive action to halt and reverse rapidly increasing vape intake, to prevent long-term adverse effects on the health of our communities, especially the health of our next generation. It has taken far too long for the Commonwealth to reach this point, but I'm so glad that they have, with so many Australians already addicted. As a parliament, it's critical now that we work together to turn this public health issue around.

Louise Miller-Frost (Boothby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tobacco use is responsible for around 21,000 deaths a year in Australia—more than one in every eight fatalities. Around 15,000 people are diagnosed with lung cancer every year in this country, with 90 per cent of them tobacco related. Tobacco is responsible for 9.3 per cent of the burden of disease in this country. A pack-a-day habit costs around $14,600 a year. For us as a community, the AIHW estimates smoking costs Australia around $5 billion in lost productivity, $2 billion for family members caring for someone with smoking related disease and $6.8 billion in healthcare costs, including 1.7 million hospital admissions. If you factor in premature death, the total cost to the Australian community is estimated at $136 billion annually.

Imagine if we could travel back in time. Imagine if we could go back in time and prevent tobacco being normalised in Australia. Imagine all those Australians, 21,000 every year, not dying. Imagine 21,000 families every year not having the sorrow of the premature death of their loved one. Imagine 15,000 Australians every year not having to go through the rigours, physical pain and distress of lung cancer treatment—operations, chemotherapy and radiation therapy. Imagine saving that cost in our health system. That is where we are now with vaping.

Vaping was initially introduced to Australia as a therapeutic product to help people stop smoking, and there are some people for whom this works. This week I spoke to a man in my electorate who told me he had given up smoking seven years ago through the use of vapes, so it does work for some people. For those people, therapeutic-grade vapes will still be available via prescription. But more broadly we find that people, particularly young people, are taking up vaping recreationally—and vaping is a gateway drug, with one in three people who vape going on to smoke cigarettes. While around 9.4 per cent of people aged 18 to 24 smoke cigarettes, down from 32 per cent in 2001, 25 per cent of people in that age group have used vapes. So it is no surprise that this age group is now starting to record an increase in smoking rates as well. Vaping is not helping people in our community get off smoking. Instead it is addicting them and providing the gateway to smoking. It is creating the next generation of lifelong consumers, because addicts make for an excellent consumer market for companies.

Vaping itself is not a safe activity. Just as cigarettes contain a lot of chemicals beyond the addictive nicotine, so also do vaping fluids, which can contain up to 200 chemicals including those found in nail polish remover, weedkiller and paint stripper. Vaping carries the risk of nicotine addiction; nicotine poisoning; serious injuries and burns, including internal burns; and seizures. Of course, we do not yet know the long-term effects of vaping, but I think as a general rule we can say that inhaling chemicals into your lungs is not a good thing.

Lung cancer is already a cancer that causes the most deaths in Australia—21,000 a year. Worse than that, we know that children are being targeted by vaping companies. Just as the cigarette industry targeted children and young people to create lifelong consumers, addicts for their products, so too is vaping. Vaping is marketing itself with bright colours, with images like unicorns and rainbows, with sweet flavours. Vapes are disguised as highlighter pens so they can sit undetected in a pencil case, and it's working. Teachers and school principals tell of children so addicted to vaping that they can't sit through an entire class or an exam without nicotine patches. Nicotine increases anxiety and depression, increases sleep problems and affects memory and concentration, particularly in developing brains. Students are sneaking out of class or skipping classes because they're experiencing nicotine withdrawal.

Australia has world-leading tobacco legislation, and we have made significant inroads into decreasing the impact of smoking on the health of Australians and the associated personal and financial costs to individuals, families and the community. But if we could go back in time and put the genie back in the bottle, wouldn't we? If we could stop tobacco taking hold in Australia, wouldn't we? Wouldn't we want to save those lives, save the sorrow, the misery, the pain, the cost to the health system and the cost to the community? This legislation to curb vaping is our opportunity to do just that, to put the genie back in the bottle. It is the new public health challenge, an entirely preventable one, and we should learn from the past. I commend the bill to the House.

David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Therapeutic Goods and Other Legislation Amendment (Vaping Reforms) Bill 2024 is a really important bill. It may not be as sexy as some of the big Treasury bills, but this is something that will have major ramifications for generations of Australians. Serving in the health ministry was one of my most enjoyable times, because getting to apply the knowledge and the skills that people like you and I, Deputy Speaker Freelander, learnt through our professional career in a legislative whole-of-Australia sense was really quite a thrill. The current policy of restricting vapes to prescription use was a policy that I endorsed and promoted. A lot of what is involved in this is existing policy, and it's been going for many years.

But we do have a problem. To put it in perspective, a school down the road from my office, a high school in the beautiful Lyne electorate, has children in early high-school years dealing vapes at school. There are parents who see children's behaviour changing, and teachers are seeing it. They have a policy that people have to put their mobile phone away because they get anxiety not having their phone with them the whole time. That's a different level of mid-teen problems, but they are not concentrating, getting aggro at teachers because they are missing their nicotine hit. Then hello vaping, which was promoted as a vehicle to quit smoking and as a harm minimisation product may be a little bit less harmless. It is very early days, and there is so much more we are learning. Every time someone does a study, there's more to learn about how vaping is not safe.

So, what is proposed here is just ramping up what we started doing. As other speakers have said, when people are vaping, it is not just steam or hot water, like a Vicks VapoRub inhalation. It has many damaging chemicals: nickel and chromium, which are heavy metals; formaldehyde, which we use to preserve bodies; nitrosamines, many of which are known to cause cancer; acetone, which plenty of people use to take nail polish off; and acrolein. And people willingly put that into their lungs? It's just mind-blowing what people will do. People don't realise that the nicotine in these is actually much more concentrated in many instances than it is in the traditional roll-your-own or tailor-made cigarettes. Just so everyone understands: it's not safe. But it has allowed a lot of savings for people who are serious addicts who have smoked their life and their savings away.

A lot of the medical opinion is that there is less damage, but I can find you references that show that the same emphysematous processes, the hypersecretion and the oedema in the alveoli, are all happening among vapers as they do among cigarette smokers. What we're seeing is the tip of an iceberg that, if it isn't reduced by long-term measures, will grow and grow and grow. I've spoken to colleagues who are still working in Accidents and Emergencies, and it's not uncommon on any one shift in a busy A&E to have one or two cases of acute respiratory distress where vapes are involved. These patients either have asthma or have perfectly normal lungs and are just getting a reaction. We know about the EVALI reaction that was sort of like a mini-plague throughout North America, but there are many more chronic problems that will become much more evident when something that wasn't here in Australia 10 or 12 years ago becomes widespread

Some of the proposals aren't new. That's what I was just alluding to. We did ban them. We did limit them to prescription. But, as many speakers, including my colleague the member for Cowper and other members on the other side, said: the genie really is out of the bottle, and it is pretty much impossible to put it back in. But the reason we got down to almost single figures in many communities in Australia in terms of regular smoking is that we have had an antismoking campaign since I was a little tacker. That's what we need to do with vaping. It can't just be a program for a year, and we spend $20 million. We have to treat it exactly the same as we have done with regular cigarettes and tobacco, and that is to get people, from childhood through to adolescence and up to adulthood, knowing that vaping isn't safe, is not trendy and damages their lungs.

That's where we differ. We support all these measures that are proposed. I'm really pleased that the government are going to spend $63.4 million on an anti e-cigarette and vaping campaign. I'm glad they're going to all of a sudden check for importation at the border and restrict commercial quantities—banning importation, manufacture, supply and commercial possession. Individuals, whether adults or children, won't be charged or locked up. Well, we've seen that happen during COVID, so I hope that is not going to happen, but I did see in the popular press some guy being manhandled by policemen in Victoria because he was involved in vaping. So, it's a case of 'buyer beware' with these regulations. Some of the states might take this way further than it is intended to go.

But the genie that is out of the bottle is that at least one in six secondary students have recently or are regularly vaping, which is a fourfold increase. I suggest that the figure is much higher. I have seen polling showing that eight per cent of all Australians are now vaping. Fifteen years ago, no-one was vaping, and smoking was down to 14 per cent across the country. So the so-called harm minimisation—well, in a way it is minimising harm for people who were smoking two or three packets a day. And, trust me, my parents were both two- or three-packet people. I grew up being a passive smoker and I had asthma as a child. Luckily when I went away to boarding school I stopped wheezing and coughing. It was probably because I wasn't surrounded by smoke. But, that aside, vaping probably is a little bit safer than burning stuff and inhaling it—but we don't know.

We are going to see, when we've had 20 or 30 years of vaping, lots of people with emphysema, chronic bronchitis, chronic airflow limitation and maybe even fibrotic lung disease, given all the other chemicals in those mixtures. And God only knows what's in some of them—the single-use stuff that comes out of China and these knock-up shops. I've been told by people who visit China, who have Chinese heritage, that the vapes sold in China are actually more regulated than some that are made there and sent for export only. And guess what? Because selling vapes has been, by our policy, restricted to pharmacies and no-one has been checking the borders and no-one has been preventing vapes from being on sale, in some towns in my electorate there are two places you can go for vapes. You can buy them in many supermarkets. It's widespread. The genie really is out of the bottle.

So we have analysed this very thoroughly. And it's not a binary choice, but we think we should be regulating it, restricting it based on age and restricting it to assessed and checked vapes that don't have toxic levels of concentrated nicotine and all the other secret herbs and spices that some of the manufacturers put in there to increase absorption across the blood-brain barrier and make it more addictive. The thing with chewing gums, patches and things like that is that someone who's seriously addicted to nicotine doesn't get that 'ah', that relief, because they don't get the hit. The vapes actually have more of a hit, if it's one of the highly concentrated vapes.

I'm thinking that the policy that the member for Cowper outlined is the way we should be going now. As that wise man once said—he was a very famous Nobel-prize-winning guy—'If you keep doing the same thing and expect a different outcome, that is a sign of madness.' So time-out, everyone—we're all against vapes. We don't want our children getting addicted to vapes. We don't want our young adults getting addicted to vapes. But, hey presto, they're all the people that are getting into vapes. It's not the hardcore smokers that need them. We have got to have something that you don't have to go to the pharmacy for and that you know has got a minimum amount or a maximum amount, and we have got to have the $63.4 million program permanently—possibly even more—so that we have plain packaging on vapes and we license and regulate them and check that they haven't got all these other horrible things in them that they say aren't there but, in fact, are. In fact, according to surveys, nine out of 10 that are sold as nicotine free actually have nicotine in them.

So we have got a big problem, and that is why we think about regulating it, restricting it by age, having it enforced and making sure that what is in it is what is in it, not all these other things that are bad. I hope for that enforcement over time—that was the missing part of the link. Talking about having pharmacists selling it, I don't know if a lot of pharmacists want to get into selling vapes. That's another practical part. There's the pure—I don't want something that is good being the enemy of something that's perfect, if you want to reverse the analogy.

We've got to be realistic. We have got a huge problem. It has taken us 40 years to get smoking down to this, so we need an equivalent response. You're only going to get that if you get the excise and the money out of licensing it and running it and using some of that money that comes out of those things, if you did have a regulated model, not a virtual prohibition—except for a few specialist pharmacies that are happy to have that. Do you think a pharmacist will want to sell cigarettes? No, it's anti-health. I don't think most pharmacists, unless they were really financially strapped, will get into the vape business, but we do have to approach it on multiple fronts. That includes taxing it, keeping the revenue, and putting it into the health system, education and long-term advertising so that we can get rid of this scourge.

For those people that need it, it will be there, but you're not going to get some of the backyard labs that make it in faraway nations to the near north of us. We want our kids to know the dangers of it, and we want to make it hard for them to get it. You're not going to stop it. We're not being unrealistic. There will still be kids who are hooked, and now, if they can't get it, they might go start smoking. In fact, as the previous speaker said, vaping is a gateway drug. It was designed as a replacement for people who are already hardcore addicts. For those people, it probably is good, but that is the minority of people. We're worried about the big population of people—young people—who will be potential addicts of nicotine just introduced through vaping.

All strength to the regulatory people who are now faced with this. I can't imagine the Department of Health and Aged Care turning up and doing raids on bikie and gangster controlled little sheds or something out in the burbs. You've seen all these places that are being torched. They're gang wars and turf wars, because the illegal tobacco trade has, like vaping, been taken over by people that do lots of other bad stuff that's highly illegal, like drugs of addiction—the trade in ice, heroin and coke—as well as vaping. It's high return. I really realise that we have a problem when people in my home town are talking about kids dealing vapes and running businesses, in their teens, in schools. And behavioural problems in schools. Like I said, if we keep doing the same thing we will get the same outcomes. So we've got to look at this with a rational, commonsense approach. I commend the rest of the bill to the House.

Cassandra Fernando (Holt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to address the urgent need for legislative action in response to the escalating crisis posed by vaping in Australia. The spread of vaping among our youth demands our immediate attention and robust intervention. The Therapeutic Goods and Other Legislation Amendment (Vaping Reforms) Bill 2024 presents a crucial opportunity to safeguard the health and well being of Australians, particularly our youngest. Recent data underscores the alarming surge in vaping across Australia, with a particularly concerning rise among adolescents and young adults. Data shows that approximately one in eight 12- to15-year-olds and one in five 16- to17-year-olds have engaged in vaping within the past month. Shockingly, 23 per cent began vaping at the age of 12 or younger.

These figures paint a stark picture of a growing public health crisis that needs action at all levels of government. In my electorate of Holt, where one in four people are below the age of 14, this is especially a concern for the parents I meet every single day. Disposable vapes have become readily accessible, further fuelling the problem among our youth. The sight of vape shops cropping up close to our children's schools has sparked concern among parents nationwide. These vapes are being sold alongside everyday items like chocolate bars and bubblegum in convenience stores, attracting children with flashy displays. The sales of vapes alongside snacks and lollies normalises vaping behaviour and increases the likelihood of youth experimentation and uptake. Even former state premiers have fallen victim to this scourge, with former New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet admitting to enjoying the occasional one, with his favourite flavour being mixed fruit.

As parents, educators and policymakers it is imperative that we address this concerning trend and implement measures to restrict the access of our young to vaping products. It is imperative that we confront these predatory practices and enact measures to protect our young people from falling victim to nicotine addiction and its health risks.

This bill represents the second stage of measures taken this year to address the risks posed by vaping. It follows an important ban under the Customs (Prohibited Imports) Regulations 1958 that commenced on 1 March 2024, for all vapes, unless those vapes are for therapeutic purposes and are accompanied by an import licence. The measures outlined in this bill build upon that foundation, providing a comprehensive framework for tackling the broader challenges associated with vaping. This legislation seeks to prohibit the importation, domestic manufacture, supply, advertising and commercial possession of non-therapeutic and disposable single-use vapes. By implementing strict regulations and penalties we aim to stem the tide of vaping related harm and safeguard the health of Australians, particularly our youth and young adults.

Crucially, it is important to emphasise that these reforms do not amount to a blanket ban on all vaping products.

Therapeutic vaping goods will remain available subject to rigorous regulation in line with other medication. The measures in this bill include regulating vapes under the Therapeutic Goods Act, imposing restrictions on advertising, introducing new offences and civil penalty provisions and enhancing compliance and enforcement powers. By strengthening our regulatory framework and enforcement mechanisms we can effectively curb the illegal supply and promotion of vapes while upholding public health. By imposing significant penalties we send a clear message that the exploitation of children for profit will not be tolerated in this country.

In addition to regulatory measures, our approach to addressing vaping includes a range of complementary actions, including public health information campaigns and 'quit smoking' services. By adopting a multitargeted strategy we can effectively reduce the prevalence of vaping and protect the health and wellbeing of all Australians, especially our young ones—the leaders of the future. I commend this bill to the House.

Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm just reflecting on what the member for Holt said, and I respect absolutely the position she has put forward. I reckon, because I can hear it from the narrative, that a lot of that came from the department or from the minister's office. You can just tell from the tenor of the speech. It's got the generic words and issues that are pertinent to those speeches. And there's nothing wrong with that. What's wrong with it is that it's coming from the esoteric views of departments and people removed from the realities of exactly how this issue works.

Not for one moment, not for one second, would I suggest that you should either smoke or vape or drink too much—I've given up all three, and I never realised how boring I am—but people do. That's just the truth. That is just the truth of the matter.

Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What do you say about me, Barnaby?

Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You don't drink, and I've realised that I'm now as boring as you!

I'm not proud of it, but I had my first cigarette in year 6, and about 35 years later I managed to stop smoking. I stopped it by vaping. I don't condone vaping, but I definitely went to vaping to try and get off cigarettes. That was the trick, and it worked for me. I fully acknowledge that some people are vaping and going onto cigarettes. What I do know is this: smoking—there's inelasticity of demand. In the end, demand gets so low and it just doesn't stop. We know because we did the analysis of sewage. It's still there. The question is: where is it coming from now?

I believe in a market economy. I just want to quickly go through this—I was just scribbling this down a second ago. A lot of those illegal vapes, the ones that are coming in from China, which have got antifreeze and formaldehyde in them—if you want to stick something in your chops and cause yourself problems, that would be a very good place to start. Start sucking that in. But the kiddies do, and we've got to do something to stop them doing it. But this is what they're thinking, and this is what others are thinking. I've had a look at one. I don't know what it was—raspberry flavoured or blueberry flavoured. It has 3,500 drags. In a bunger there are 13. If you're going for 25 in a packet, with 325 drags and 10 packets, you get 3,250 drags. So it's 10 packets of cigarettes to one blueberry-, raspberry-, banana-or mixed-berry-flavoured vape. A packet of durries is now about $57, or let's say 50. So you've got a choice: pay $500 or $35. What do you reckon is going to happen? If you believe the market, they're going to find the $35 one.

What you do here is so virtuous—I don't know whether you lack authenticity or you're totally and utterly naive. If you're so virtuous as to stop drugs, go out and stop dope. See how you go. If you can't leave this building and pick up a bag of dope within half an hour, then I don't think you're trying. That's just the truth.

I've got a better one for you to solve! Stop ice. There it is. In the suburbs and in the city it's coke—anyone in the universe can tell you how much coke is worth. Unfortunately, we're not rich out in the country, so it's ice, which is like picking your nose and eating it. It is the scum-of-the-earth drug. I have been to the funerals of people I've known and grown up with who killed themselves on ice. Their lives just went down and down. Beautiful girls—I remember one Aboriginal girl and just couldn't believe, piece by piece, the dissembling of her life.

The people who bring that stuff into our regional towns are total and utter trash. They are human filth, and they prey on the vulnerable.

My two boys grew up in a very poor town. In fact, Woolbrook Public School is the poorest in Australia. That's where my two boys go. Have a look at it. If you don't believe me, check it out; check out Woolbrook Public School. I don't want them ever meeting the person who sells ice. I don't want them meeting the person who sells smack. I don't want them meeting the person who lives in that evil world that brings those drug in. But they're there. You can tell the police about it; you can whisper and tell the police about it. But it's the height of naivete to think that—those people are now bringing in the illegal cigarettes.

As I said, it's 57 bucks for a packet of cigarettes. For international cigarettes, it's 15 bucks. So which ones do you think they're buying? When you think you've stopped it and got it under control, that there's none at all—no you haven't, and you're not going to.

In the western suburbs of Sydney—I don't know; some of you might be from around there, but you probably aren't—once upon a time the people selling drugs would be swinging around in a Porsche, a bit of a flash car, a souped-up Monaro. I can tell you, right now they've got Bentleys and Rolls. They're killing it. They're loving this. They will be loving the fact that you're banning this. This is working very well for their business plan. People don't want competition against their dirty little business. But you're doing that.

What you have to do is regulate this market. You have to accept that people look at international cigarettes and vapes and say: 'Well, they take them. They can still drive. They're not really intoxicated. They don't go home and beat up their partner, so in the Maslow moral hierarchy of virtue I don't put these down as a huge evil. They're bad, but not a huge evil. So, my motivation to go looking for them is not really there.'

If I'm a copper and someone's broken into a house, someone has beaten up their partner, someone's trying to set fire to someone and kids are vaping, and I've got only a certain amount of time to deal with it, I'll tell you which one I'm going to be looking for. It's not going to be the kids vaping. There are more important things to be doing out there. The person bringing ice into town—go look for them.

This is a classic example of how this crazy boarding school which is Parliament House gets these issues and how people get their talking notes from the department or from the minister and get in here and give this really earnest speech—thumping their chest and then going out and probably forgetting all about it. But it's not touching the earth about exactly what is going on.

Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That is quite offensive.

Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's the truth. I'll wait for your speech. I'm sure, because you're a doctor you're going to—we've both been in here long enough. There's nothing wrong with people getting it; that's their right. But you know when the notes have come straight from the department. I can tell. I've been a minister God knows how many times. I know exactly how they talk and exactly how it sounds. I know how they send you down here.

I got a question the other day that was handed to me. I didn't write it. I listened to it later on and thought if I had my chance I'd never ask that again. That's the reality of it. Let's be honest about it. That's what we lack here—the honesty to say exactly how things work.

But let's go back to another thing. I was just up in the other joint, the Federation Chamber, passing a new excise on roll-your-owns. People who roll their own cigarettes are poor—they have no money—and the reason they roll their own is because they're cheaper than buying a packet of cigarettes. So we're putting up the excise on that. The only people you're now going to get your money off are the people who legally buy roll-your-own tobacco. All the rest are going to go to chop-chop, and they are. Thirty per cent of the market is chop-chop, and that's what we can determine—it's probably a lot higher than that. About 95 per cent of the vape market is illegal already, and we're not stopping that.

So we have decided that it is virtuous to go to people who cannot afford their fuel, their groceries or their rent and get $3 billion off them—$3 billion that they otherwise would have spent on milk, on their sanitary products, on fuel and on their rent. And we go: 'That's virtuous. What a good thing we did today.' What a load of rubbish. They're not going to stop smoking. You're just making them poorer. They will say to you, 'If I can't pay my rent because you, the government, are ripping me off because of my addiction, I'm going to go somewhere else and buy the product.' That's precisely what they will do.

I've heard that we are going to have a campaign. So we've just earnt $3½ billion up the hill in the Federation Chamber, and now we're down here and they're saying, 'We're going to put $63 million to it.' Hang on—you just earnt $3½ billion up there. Why don't you put $3½ billion on the table for an education campaign? Let's be properly pure about this. 'No, that's going into the budget.' The Treasurer will talk about that in a few weeks time. He got that; he's got it booked. One of the reasons he can't argue against this excise thing is that he has to go and find that $3 billion that the other side has found. It's just such a hypocritical load of rubbish, and we all come down here and participate in it.

So, no matter what you do here, I hope you all feel jolly good about it. I hope you all feel like you can walk out the door and think, 'I fought that one hard.' You'll walk out the door and, to be quite frank, forget about it, like most of us. You know what? Out there, nothing is going to change except that the illegal markets are just going to bigger and bigger and bigger.

I have a choice for my four girls and two boys. They can choose not smoke cigarettes and not vape. Please don't do either—have the character not to do it. When other people are starting when you're really young—around adolescence—and you're easily moved by things, that's generally when you have your first bunger. I don't know about everybody else, but that's generally when you do it. Be in an environment where you don't do it—if you can do that, bingo, that is what you want—and everything else that goes with it. Stay away from the parties where people are pulling cones. Certainly don't hang out with anybody—with any families—who are doing powders or at any places where they're doing it. Stay away from it. If you're a parent, be good and keep them away from it.

But, if you—like a lot of people—pick up the habit of smoking, then I want you to go to a service station or a shop and buy a regulated product that, as bad as it is, has some controls over what's in it. I want you to buy it off them. If you are vaping—the same thing. I don't want to have to rely on a factory in China to do the right thing by you. I'm pretty certain they won't. I'm pretty certain they don't give a toss about what they are putting in that product. I'm also absolutely certain that, just like we can test the sewage in Sydney and find in the inner suburbs that cocaine must be a big thing on Saturday night because it comes tearing through the sewage system, I can look at whole realms of laws about what happens to people if they take it—but it's there. What a surprise!

We can also check the sewerage system and see that smoking is going up—not down, up—but we're not selling more cigarettes. So where is this coming from? It's magic. Surely they were all sitting in the chamber and listening to our speeches about how we didn't want it to happen. What happened to that? Why aren't we moving the Australian people with the wonderous speeches we are giving here? Because this crazy boarding school is distracted from reality on issues such as this—not only this; it's also a range of issues, but this is such a classic example.

I know the good doctor over there—

Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Macarthur.

Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Macarthur! Mike Freelander is from Macarthur, thank you. The speech he will give will be an earnest description and precise about this issue. I know him well enough to know that's precisely what he will do. I know that Dr Anne Aly, right in front of me here, from Cowan—

Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Cowan.

Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member from Cowan would also have a pretty good understanding of the reality of what she'd say if she were outside this building—the reality of how we deal with issues such as this. I think on this issue we've all got to try to get our heads together and say: 'Both are evil, but what is the better of the two evils? What is the better outcome for two positions where, to be honest, if we had our choice we'd be in neither?' That is the only way we deal with this issue, and in the meantime, the drug dealers out there are clapping their hands and cheering from the rooftops because we have just made their business plan so much easier.

Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, you probably noticed my interjection during the member for New England's speech. I did find it offensive because my speech is not about detailed talking points from the minister or departmental advices—this is lived experience.

The vaping industry is being promoted and financed by the tobacco industry, which, like the product itself, is malignant. This is an industry that, decades after there was unequivocal evidence that smoking was heavily associated with lung cancer, bowel cancer, cardiovascular disease and peripheral vascular disease, the tobacco industry was denying this and actively running campaigns to promote smoking that was killing millions of people around the world. The vaping industry is being promoted by the tobacco industry. It's part of their business model. This is our last chance to introduce measures that will stop our kids becoming addicted to nicotine.

I thank the Minister for Health and Aged Care very much for moving this very important legislation. It's associated with other measures as well, such as using excise taxes on tobacco to finance things like lung cancer screening and other public health measures. This is a huge moment in public health policy in Australia. I am proud to be a member of the Labor Party, which has longed believed in public health measures to improve the health and wellbeing of our citizens. I am very grateful, personally, for Nicola Roxon, who was Minister for Health and Ageing and, ultimately, the Attorney-General in the Rudd-Gillard years, for bringing in plain packaging and other measures to reduce smoking in Australia.

Smoking is not increasing; it has been around the 14 per cent mark in most jurisdictions in Australia for the last few years. Of course, we have pockets of high levels of smoking, particularly in disadvantaged communities. In South Western Sydney we have a higher incidence of smoking than the national average, and smoking is quite a problem in many Indigenous communities around the country. That's why we're also investing in Indigenous anti-smoking campaigns.

This legislation builds on a long history of public health policy that Labor Party has been doing in office. We've had 50 years of this. It started with the Whitlam government introducing the first restrictions on tobacco advertising. We followed this with the introduction of Australia's world-leading tobacco plain-packaging reforms, as I've mentioned. It was dismissed by the Liberal and National parties a too big government, too intrusive. Yet a decade on plain packaging has reduced smoking levels significantly.

There is still much to do, I agree with you. I've recently been on a trip to the Northern Territory with the health committee looking at diabetes. We heard very strongly about the combination of diabetes, cigarette smoking and peripheral vascular disease and cardiovascular disease, leading to people under 30 having heart attacks and people under 40 having limb amputations because of diabetes. There's a very strong association of the combination of diabetes and smoking and vascular disease and also, unfortunately, in renal failure due to that combination of diabetes and smoking.

We're dealing now with another menace. I should say, before I talk any further, that I used to a very heavy smoker. It did damage my health. Thank God, I was able to stop before it killed me. But I have seen many people die from cigarette smoking, and I fear I will see the same with vaping. The causes of the complications of vaping are still unclear, but clearly it is a combination of inhalation of nicotine, which itself causes damage to little air sacs in the lung, the alveolae and the small blood vessels in the lung. But all the other chemicals that have been mentioned—I can list them, from heavy metals to formalin, which itself is carcinogenic, to the many other unknown chemicals in vapes.

People have compared this to other addictions. We should all remember that nicotine is a highly addictive chemical. But it is not the same, because we are allowing people to obtain vapes by prescription. These will be TGA approved, so they will be tested for dangerous chemicals et cetera and for nicotine content. They will be associated also with a visit to the doctor and getting appropriate advice about vaping. There have been issues, I will admit, with doctors prescribing vapes. Many doctors have been reluctant to do it. Many doctors are not educated in how to prescribe vapes and how to introduce other antismoking measures and where they fit in the antinicotine and antismoking measures that we can introduce, like the oral treatments and other things. But this campaign will also be associated with an education campaign through our general practitioners. I met with the college of general practitioners yesterday and we discussed how we need to upskill our medical force. There will be ways that people who are addicted to nicotine can safely get prescriptions to vapes so that they can be gradually weaned off nicotine. It may be a small role in using vapes to win people from smoking, but that is by no means clear. The industry itself has not been able to demonstrate that in any convincing way. So there will be ways where people can obtain nicotine vapes through prescription and that will also help them be weaned from the nicotine themselves.

We should remember also that these vapes are having a terrible effect on children. I go to local high schools and run antivaping campaigns in those schools. They are confiscating literally thousands of illegal vapes that are clearly targeted to children, with bubblegum flavours, rum and raisin flavours I have seen, strawberries and cream. We all know that these are available and being imported in their thousands and they are damaging our kids. The side-effects are affecting their behaviour in school, their concentration. It's increasing their risk of having a mental illness. These vapes contain many thousands of times the concentration of nicotine in cigarettes as well, and they can be used 24 hours a day. I hear stories from my own patients about kids having vapes beside their bed, so they're having them 24 hours a day.

To me this is something that we have to do everything we possibly can to stop. This is our last chance to do it. If we let this go now, this will have ongoing health effects on our children and adolescents for many, many years and we will be paying the price for that in terms of mental health issues and deaths. We know that there have been deaths recorded from shock lung from the overuse of vapes. We know that it increases the risk of cardiovascular disease. In people who have high risk of vascular disease, such as our Indigenous population, we know that it is already causing things like peripheral vascular disease and cardiac disease. We have to stop it now. This is our last chance.

I have had extensive involvement with my local communities, GPs and hospital about electronic cigarettes and vapes. We did an enquiry in the Committee on Health, Aged Care and Sport in the last parliament. We found that there was no evidence for the use of vapes in a healthy context to wean people from cigarettes. We have not seen convincing statistics about this. We spoke to many respiratory physicians, anti-smoking campaigners et cetera. There is no evidence of harm minimisation.

There are some doctors groups going around the country that are promoting the use of vapes, saying that they are protective of health and that they are better than cigarettes. They have no evidence for saying that, nor do they have convincing evidence that they can be used to wean people from cigarettes. In our inquiry we found that these products are clearly a gateway to smoking, hence the involvement of the tobacco industry. The tobacco industry has run a very strong campaign against this legislation for one reason: so they can make billions of dollars—and they are billion-dollar industries—from causing serious health harm to our population, from our children and our at-risk groups, such as Aboriginal communities, to our older people. We should not in any way believe what they are saying. This is dangerous.

More and more Australians are taking up recreational vaping. I've seen it in this building, I see it when I go to schools, I see it in our local hospitals—I see it everywhere I go. Literally thousands of vapes are being discarded in our rubbish dumps around the country—and there a particular harms with that as well, because they all contain lithium batteries, and have caused fires in a number of situations. In the recently released Australian Secondary Students Alcohol and Drug Survey, they found that almost 20 per cent of 12- to 15-year-olds were using vapes. That is a disaster in the making. We have to stop it, and this is our last chance. The thing that upsets me the most is that these things are being targeted at our children, even in our local primary schools. Principals have complained to me about vapes being found in their toilets. We have got to stop it.

I was invited last year to Macquarie Fields High School to meet some of the parents and teachers and to discuss their concerns about vaping and the dangers that presents to their children, because of the number of vapes that they found being sold secretly at school. The schools are finding it incredibly difficult to police. I was thankful for the opportunity to speak to the schools, but I was also very thankful to speak to some of the parents, who told me the problems they were having with their kids, with sleep disturbance, anxiety, poor concentration, lack of attention to schoolwork, and the fact that they were sometimes selling their own possessions to be able to afford to buy vapes from the kids who were selling them at school. This is just terrible. I was very thankful to the school for having me there. I've been to some other high schools with similar issues.

We're still in the early days of the vaping industry. Overseas it's much more persistent. Schools in places as diverse as Great Britain and Germany are finding huge problems with their kids, vaping at school and concentration and mental health issues. We in Australia have led the world in anti-tobacco policies. We can do it here with vaping, but it is important that we do it in a consistent and persistent manner.

I do agree with the member for New England. We need to spend as much as we can on education programs and support for schools and other institutions to try and prevent our kids vaping. We also need to invest in our general practitioners and help them understand how they can help in this battle, with prescriptions and with antismoking and antinicotine programs—I'll call them antinicotine programs overall.

It will only continue to get worse if we have the so-called regulation model with vapes available. If we regulate, I can't guarantee that, when someone goes into our local supermarket, our local service station or even our local pharmacies, the vapes will just be given to those over 18. In fact, I don't think that will happen. I think that we need to be very careful when we put up these artificial models, such as the regulation model, without any evidence that they will work. They certainly don't work overseas. They're not going to work in Australia.

Some of my concerns are about not only nicotine addiction but what these materials are doing to our kids' lungs. We know from the asthma foundation that there is increasing evidence that vaping use makes severe asthma much more difficult to control. It also means that kids are spending money on things that they shouldn't. They're ending up in hospital with side effects from vaping. They're ending up with more mental health issues. I really thoroughly commend this bill to the House because I think that it is very important, that this is our last chance and that we should do it persistently and consistently. Thank you.

Anne Webster (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I listened to the member for Macarthur. In fact, we were talking about this very issue yesterday. I think the painful fact is that, on both sides of the House, we want the same result. We want to see our children safe from vaping and safe from taking up drugs and cigarettes. At this point in time, at this juncture, we have a different way that we want to get there.

Around 10 per cent of vapers are purchasing their product via the prescription model. Let's remember: this has actually been in place since the previous health minister. Around 90 per cent of vapers are not. Our concern is, as I said, for our young people currently accessing vaping products. I'm told that as many as 1.7 million Australians are vaping, close to seven per cent of the total population or, if you like, one in 15 Australians. Compare that with one in 21 Australians being a member of an AFL club, according to the AFL. That number of people, 1.7 million Australians, is more than the populations of Tasmania, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory combined; it's more than the number of Australians who are over 80 years of age. I draw those random examples to point out that the number of Australians vaping is a significant proportion of the population. By no means am I saying that vaping is good for your health. We've heard plenty about why it's terrible for your health. However, that is the scale of the situation that we are facing here in Australia.

The government proposes a prescription-only model, or to continue the prescription-only model, and anyone vaping without a prescription will be deemed a criminal. Let me also remind the House, yet again, that Labor has a blind side, and that is regional Australia. In the regions we have a higher prevalence of tobacco addiction. But, yet again, we see the government taking a metropolitan-centric approach to policymaking. In fact, the latest data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare indicates that people aged 14 years or older living in a remote or very remote area of Australia have a smoking rate of 19.6 per cent and are more likely to smoke daily than people living in inner regional areas and major cities, where the smoking rate is 9.7 per cent. According to the AIHW there are two groups of people who use vapes:

People aged under 30 were more likely to nominate curiosity while people aged 50 or older were more likely to use e-cigarettes as a cessation device.

The voices of regional Australian voters in my electorate of Mallee, in north-western Victoria, have shared their stories of vaping with me. One constituent from the west of my electorate highlighted how hard it is to get to see a doctor in the first place—something I have been raising constantly in this House as shadow assistant minister for regional health. This constituent said: 'I cannot even get an urgent doctor's appointment for a shingles vaccine within a week, let alone to get a prescription for smoking cessation. I cannot have my blood taken for blood tests, despite having an appointment for a week prior, because there is no replacement nurse when the nurse is sick. I have to wait at the hospital until a nurse is free to take my blood, never mind if they are fasting bloods and I have to wait until midday'—we all know what that feels like—'so how is my local health provider supposed to find the time to write prescriptions for people to give up smoking or continue to stay smoke-free?'

A constituent from the east of my electorate said: 'My husband and I have recently retired and live a quiet life in central Victoria. My husband had smoked for many years, much to my dismay, until he got put on to vaping by an acquaintance a couple of years back. The vape he uses is much less nicotine now than when he was smoking, as he has been gradually weaning himself. His doctor is in full support of this. It's getting hard to buy products for him, even with a prescription. If and when vaping is completely banned, he says he will go back on to cigarettes.'

A constituent from the south of my electorate said: 'In 2017, I gave up smoking for the last time ever, with the help of vaping. I weaned myself off all nicotine eventually, and then gave up vaping. All other cessation aids didn't help me whatsoever, and, embarrassingly, I smoked through three of my four pregnancies because the cessation tools on offer just didn't work.' She says: 'Vaping has been scientifically proven to be less harmful than smoking, and in the UK, for example, it's advertised in hospitals for people to start vaping and quit smoking.'

Another, from the north of my electorate, said: 'Being a health promotion officer and a parent of a teenager, I've been told numerous times how easy it is for underage children to simply walk into a shop and purchase vapes. I was also part of a youth mentoring program and became concerned with how reliant some of the teenagers were on their vapes. The only way to stop this is to follow the lead of New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Canada and regulate nicotine vapes with strict consumer safety standards. This would see them classified as an adult consumer product, sold only by responsible retailers upon age verification.'

Another constituent, from the centre of my electorate of Mallee—constituents from all around—said: 'We need a system that makes it easy for smokers to switch to vaping without having to jump through hoops. Adults also need appealing flavours to match the switch. The current nicotine products available in supermarkets taste horrific. The only way we can do this is by empowering responsible retailers to sell regulated vaping products.'

Another constituent from the north of my electorate said: 'The complex requirements for buying vapes have created a black market'—Have we heard about that today? Yes—'where products are unregulated and easily available to children.' Another constituent from the south of Mallee says, 'Banning vaping will force people back to smoking, which will only fill your own pockets from the taxes and take more from the people.' Now, the thing that strikes me about all these emails that I've received this week, and more, is that they are all pro regulating vaping—having the controls that we need in order for people to be able to buy products that are known to be less harmful than the horrible products bought in some of our black-market shops.

When it comes to my purpose in this place, I represent the people of Mallee, as I did with the government's wasteful referendum and as I have on Australia's future energy mix and in opposing the reckless railroading of electricity transmission lines through Mallee and the turning of my electorate into a wind-turbine pincushion. My constituents are on board with that representation, and hence it is utterly responsible for me to share their views on this bill. As shadow assistant minister for regional health, I refer back to one of the first quotes I raised from a constituent from the west of my electorate who can't even see a doctor. How on earth does Labor believe their prescription model will work if people can't see a doctor for shingles, vaccines or their myriad other health issues?

Labor robs the regions to buy votes in the city, as they did in expanding the distribution priority areas for international medical graduates. In the first six months of that policy, there was a 56 per cent increase in those doctors leaving the regions for metropolitan suburbs. Labor has 'bled' the regions of doctors—that's the term used by the Rural Doctors Association, not me—and now they want to put more pressure on medical practices by requiring them to write new vaping prescriptions.

Health department data indicates around 450,000 people are seeking vaping prescriptions under the current model, but, under what Labor is proposing in this bill, one million people more will seek those prescriptions. While Fred and Vera are holding hands in an overflowing regional Australian clinic waiting to see their doctor, they'll have to wait for Tom, Dick or Harry to get their vaping scripts. Theoretically, that could be managed in the city, but regional health is not on the same page. The bill is setting regional health up to fail further.

The government's prescription model is failing, and they are simply doubling down and banning vaping harder. This comes as the black market in vapes is now estimated to be about $1 billion per annum through over 100 million illegal vapes per annum. In Melbourne, we have serious problems with crime associated with what police are allegedly saying is a battle between two Middle Eastern organised crime groups for control of the illicit tobacco trade. Police operations are seizing cigarettes, tobacco and vapes in significant numbers. There have been arson attacks on tobacco shops, vape shops, gyms, restaurants and private addresses.

In opposition, it is our role to hold the Albanese Labor government to account, and what they have proposed in this prescription model is unseen anywhere else in the world. This week we saw the bravado of Minister Bowen evaporate as Australia was going to have the most aggressive vehicle emissions standards. Once again, the Nationals highlighted the problems imminent with yet another reckless rush posed to regional Australia and demonstrated the valid critiques of the automotive industry, and, voila, Minister Bowen has backed down—or, as the West Australian newspaper put it, the Prime Minister took the wheel.

Indeed, the Prime Minister may be on the wrong side of the road altogether when it comes to vaping. Let's look at the overseas data. In the UK, where vapes are regulated for those over 18 years old and banned for those under 18, more than 50,000 smokers stopped smoking with assistance from a vaping product in 2017, with a 33 per cent reduction in smoking in the four years to 2022. In New Zealand, there was a 39 per cent decline in smoking, from 13.7 per cent to 8.3 per cent, over three years since vaping was legalised and regulated in November 2020. I am told the Maori smoking prevalence declined by 35 per cent. Canadian surveys have indicated a 15 per cent reduction in smoking for those aged over 15, and in the 15- to 24-year-old cohort there was a reduction of 32 per cent for males and 52 per cent of females. In the over-18 market, 14 per cent less men and 19 per cent less women were smoking. There are huge reductions in smoking rates in the 18- to 24-year-old age bracket: 42 per cent less for men and 53 per cent less for women.

The opposition is holding this government accountable for this proposal, and we have concerns about the adequacy of funding to regulate and enforce laws to prevent the illicit tobacco and vaping trade. The fact is that, currently, their efforts to stop vapes at our borders have been ineffective. We've also seen the peculiar footage recently of Therapeutic Goods Administration officers with TGA emblazoned on their flack jackets—SWAT team or FBI style—raiding a smoking shop. Is the TGA really well equipped to run policing operations potentially in situations where organised crime might be involved?

Labor is spending some $700 million to fight vapes as illegal products. Yet they are forgoing—potentially, if this where the public policy goes—$4.2 billion in annual tax revenue, if a regulatory model were adopted, which could go into regional health. What a great idea!

All the alternatives need to be considered thoroughly and costed. So we take this moment to seriously address this public health issue.

As the shadow assistant minister for regional health, I urge the government to consider the higher prevalence of smoking in the regions, the use of vapes to quit and the maldistribution of doctors away from regional Australia. The very overworked and under pressure medical practices in Mallee and across regional Australia are the very ones Labor is going to pile more pressure on, with potential tripling of vaping prescription consultations. Will Labor provide special funding to primary care providers in the regions for this burden? I won't hold my breath.

The coalition wants this bill thoroughly examined by a Senate committee, and we will be moving to do just that in the other place. This is a very serious topic, and this government's crash-through approach on policy could yet again result in a backflip, a U-turn—a realisation that their bluster doesn't match the reality around the world. As an opposition, we will be holding them accountable for their missteps on this very serious public issue.

Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I've been listening to the comments that have been made around the chamber, and it is really disappointing to me that we are not putting health first. We are finding all sorts of reasons, on the other side of the chamber, for not taking strong action to put the health of young people, in particular, first. This is not just the health of kids who are 17, 16 or 15. This is the health of kids who are now only 10, and of those coming behind them—the seven- and eight-year-olds who, before long, will become part of the statistics of children using vapes.

It horrifies me to think that this chamber would fall for a story from an industry which, we know, is so good at spinning a story. Vaping was originally sold to governments and the wider community, right around the world, as a therapeutic product to help long-term smokers quit, a help-people-to-quit product. It wasn't sold as a recreational product, especially not one targeted at kids—but that is what it has so quickly become.

Unfortunately, there is absolute, consistent evidence that young Australians who are vaping now are three times more likely to take up tobacco smoking than young Australians who have never vaped—and this is in a country where we've been really proud to lead the world in tobacco control, in reducing the use of tobacco and in taking measures that mean there is less incentive to be a smoker.

You know, I'm one of those people who grew up in the era of big big-tobacco ads, at the movies and on TV. How quickly it feels like we can go back to that state, where we thought it was okay—in that case, to have a cigarette, or, in this case, to say, 'Oh, we need to allow vaping to continue,' in spite of the things we already know, at this very early stage, about the impacts it has on our kids. It is creating a whole new generation of nicotine dependency. In fact, when I go to schools and talk to schools, it isn't just the principals who say to me, 'Oh, my goodness! Can you do something about vaping?' It's not just the teachers who can see the consequence of nicotine withdrawal and the need for a vape in their students. It's the students themselves who can see what it's doing to their friends and even to themselves.

So this is a time for us to listen to the kids—not just to those who think it's going to be a little bit inconvenient to get along to a GP and get a script. Yes, it may be, and it may put more pressure on those systems, and we're doing everything we can to make that process as simple as possible. But I hope everybody here thinks about the seven-year-old who hasn't yet had a vape, but who might next week and then find that it's just something that they can't stop doing. Think about what that is, and—as if you were that child's mum or aunt or grandparent—just what our decisions here have a consequence on. The sooner this legislation is moved through this parliament, the better. That's why we are taking world-leading action to tackle vaping, and we're really proud to be taking it. These reforms are about protecting Australians, particularly young people, from the harms of vaping and nicotine dependence while making sure that those with an absolutely legitimate need to access it as a therapeutic device are able to continue to get it where it is clinically appropriate.

The latest data from the Australian Secondary School Students Alcohol and Drug survey is very sobering. About one in eight 12- to 15-year-olds and one in five 16- to 17-year-olds have vaped in the past month. About 80 per cent of these young people are using disposable vaping devices. Nearly a third of students tried vaping for the first time when they were 15 or 16, while 23 per cent say they tried it before they were 13. They were 12 years old or younger, not even a teenager. We know that's because the vaping industry, which those opposite continue to defend and support, are targeting young people deliberately.

Social media is awash with advertising for vaping products. Parents are telling me about the vaping stores opening right near their schools, and I see them in my communities. Young people are attracted to the illicit vapes because they are so readily available, and the vapes are deliberately designed by the industry to promote their uptake—their aggressive marketing, their outrageous packaging and their ridiculous flavours.

If we look at the studies that have highlighted the concerns about potential adverse health effects of vaping—and I'm really conscious that these are studies that are happening in the very early years. It takes me to the sorts of studies that happened in the early years of the tobacco industry really getting a grip. There were studies, and they were suppressed. Thank goodness we know what the studies are saying. We can't pretend that we're ignorant. We absolutely know that there are effects like impacts on the developing adolescent brain. There are worse pregnancy outcomes. There is cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease and cancer, and a range of other health risks are also associated with vape use, including severe burns, poisoning and seizures. We're only just beginning to understand the long-term effects of vaping, and I think we all know that it is not going to be good news.

This bill brings in both offences and penalty provisions designed to protect Australians, particularly young people, from the harms associated with illicit vapes. Principally, this is going to be achieved by banning the importation, the domestic manufacture, the supply, the commercial possession and the advertising of non-therapeutic and disposable single-use vapes. All vaping ads on social media and retail websites and the promotion of vaping goods by influences on social media are going to be banned.

The enhanced quality and safety standards, which began earlier this month, have limited flavours to mint, menthol and tobacco, and further enhancements to the standards have been foreshadowed, which include requirements relating to maximum nicotine concentrations, pharmaceutical packaging and labelling. This suite of measures is really trying to take the holistic action needed to properly address the impacts of vaping being felt across our community.

I want to commend the Minister for Education for the work he has done, alongside the New South Wales Minister for Education, Prue Car, in making sure our principals in our schools know what we're doing, why we're doing it and what we could do with them sharing that message. It is their teachers, their parents and their students who are actually going to benefit from this. I really acknowledge the work that you did at the start of the school year, Minister, to raise awareness about it. As I said, when I go to schools it isn't just principals who talk to me about this and it isn't just teachers; it's the students themselves. In fact, about 18 months ago, the student leadership at one school were so concerned about it that they reached out to have a meeting purely on that issue. They came to this place to ask what the government was doing about it. In fact, it was before we were elected, so it was before the last election. They was so concerned about it. This is something the previous government could have acted on. They could have seen what was going on and, rather than falling for the lines they were being fed, they could have taken action.

Let's be clear about what this suite of measures involves. It doesn't ban all vapes. There are express exceptions to the offences and civil penalty provisions around the personal possession and use of legitimate patient access to therapeutic vapes being used to help you stop smoking or manage nicotine dependence. People will still be able to use vapes. Individuals will be able to access those products as part of smoking cessation treatments. But it is limited to the clinical context, with only therapeutic vaping products available at pharmacies via a prescription. The TGA has already published on its website a list of therapeutic vapes that have been notified as meeting appropriate quality and safety standards. Quality and safety aren't things that have gone with the whole vaping industry—there haven't been standards and there haven't been any quality provisions—but the TGA has determined which ones will be suitable. That list can be accessed by patients, prescribers and pharmacists. Between 1 January and 12 March 2024, so just a bit over two months, the TGA received 68 notifications of compliance with TGA quality and safety standards from sponsors who want to supply therapeutic vapes for smoking cessation or for managing nicotine dependence. The Office of Drug Control granted 19 import licences and 17 import permits in accordance with the new importation controls—so they are available. This ensures that Australians who are legitimately using vaping products to quit smoking will still be able to do so, while taking vapes out of the hands of our kids.

We know that the community is awash with disposable vaping, and that's why we've taken the immediate action that we could, outside of parliament, to stamp out vaping. We've already banned the importation of disposable and non-therapeutic vaping products. Since the start of this year, the Australian Border Force and the TGA have jointly seized more than 360,000 imported vapes in operations across Australia. As these operations happen, we're also seeing reports of the links between vaping sales and supply and organised crime, which uses the easy sales to help fund other illicit operations. The Commonwealth has committed $25 million to the Australian Border Force and nearly $57 million to the Therapeutic Goods Administration over the next two years to work on this.

The reforms to the regulation are supported by a commitment between the Commonwealth and every state and territory to collaborate on compliance and enforcement activities. The National Vaping Working Group was formed in November 2023. It has Commonwealth, state and territory health and police departments; the AFP; and the Australian Border Force. This working group is responsible for developing the national vaping enforcement framework, which will support the collaborative, coordinated, and nationally consistent approach that's going to be needed to enforce the regulatory controls.

For too long nicotine vaping products have been freely available at stores due to a legal loophole, and that has been widely exploited. This bill will close that legal loophole and give authorities the power to take genuine enforcement action. Importers and suppliers of illicit vapes are now on final notice that the changes proposed to the TGA will enhance compliance and enforcement efforts. We know that this bill will help ensure that there's effective detection and seizure, by tightening the controls on the supply chain and removing the regulatory distinction between nicotine and non-nicotine vapes, to counter the existing widespread evasion. Vapes will not be lawfully available outside the pharmaceutical supply chain.

We know that those addicted to smoking and addicted to vaping need additional support to quit, and that's why we've committed an additional $29.5 million in funding to increase vaping and smoking cessation support so the support is therefore the people who need it. The funding will improve access to Quitline services across the country, with a new dedicated online hub and mobile app. It was Labor back in 2012—12 years ago—that introduced the world-first tobacco plain-packaging laws, and now, 12 years on, in order to help a different generation of kids, we have an opportunity to lead the world again with these vaping reforms. I ask this parliament: please, do not miss this opportunity to allow this legislation to pass quickly so we know that there is less chance of kids becoming vapers over the next 12 months. This is something we can do really fast. In their hearts, I think everybody knows this is the right thing to do and this is the time to do it.

Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Many people in this place have spoken on the Therapeutic Goods and Other Legislation Amendment (Vaping Reforms) Bill 2024. We know that this bill will ban the importation, domestic manufacture, supply, commercial possession and advertising—other than therapeutic vapes to health practitioners—of disposable, single-use non-therapeutic vapes. I think the advertising is really important. The Therapeutic Goods Act will be amended to allow for vaping goods to be regulated whether or not they contain nicotine or claim to be therapeutic. The minister will have the power to determine whether or not specified goods are vaping goods to prevent sales of evolving products designed to evade regulatory reach.

There is a huge concern in this place and across the nation with respect to young people vaping. I think that is a given. None of us want to see anyone under 18 either smoking, vaping or taking any illicit drugs at all. We did pass in this place some legislation that banned flavours and menthols and such, and I think that that will go some way with respect to the attractiveness of vapes. We know that, worryingly, one in seven children aged 14 to 17 were believed to have vaped in the month leading up to December last year, with these young people comprising eight per cent of all users. It is a big issue for young people, and I want us to do all we can to address that in this place, but I'm just not entirely sure that this bill will do that.

I'm very conflicted on this legislation, and this is why: if this legislation is passed, I believe it will have a perverse outcome where anybody aged 18 or over can walk into a service station, a corner store, Woolworths or Coles—you name it—and buy themselves a packet of cigarettes, but if they want to vape, they will need to book in with their doctor. In my electorate, that's weeks away, in many parts. They'll have to visit their doctor, ask the doctor for a script—and that is, of course, if the doctor is willing to provide the script—then go to the chemist and get that prescription filled—provided that the chemist has that stock. In my electorate, you will largely be $80 out of pocket for that. It's an expensive thing to do to go and visit the doctor, particularly if you're not on a healthcare card. So this is what I think is going to happen: I think that we will see many people go from using vapes to going to the service station and getting a packet of cigarettes. I think that we will, potentially, see an enlarged black market for illicit vapes. One thing we do know is that banning something doesn't stop it being available—we just need to look at the illicit drug market for that.

I have another concern that is not being considered, I think, in this debate, and that is regarding the effectiveness of vapes as a bridge away from cigarettes, particularly for long-term smokers. The 2022 Australian Journal of General Practice article 'An update on vaping and nicotine prescribing', by Dr Colin Paul Mendelsohn and Carolyn Beaumont, stated:

Vaping … is the most popular quitting method in Australia. It is safer than smoking and more effective than—

patches and other forms of—

nicotine replacement therapy.

Specifically, it was found that even 'long-term vaping is far safer than relapsing to smoking'. I have received many, many emails from constituents who say vapes have been the only way they've been able to get off cigarettes, and I believe requiring a smoker to get a GP prescription to help them quit is counterintuitive when we are also seeing huge costs to visit the doctor and when access to GPs in rural, regional and remote Australia is incredibly difficult.

So, while I understand what the government wants to do and while we absolutely want to limit vaping, we also really want to limit cigarettes. I don't see why, from a public policy point of view, we are treating vapes so differently to cigarettes in this place. I'm sure would-be quitters are scratching their heads about why they're not going to be able to access this yet they can freely, day or night, go and buy a packet of cigarettes over the counter.

We need to treat these the same. I think that we need to regulate vapes. We need to tax vapes. We absolutely need to ban the advertising of them, as we have banned advertising for cigarettes, and we need to regulate them and limit where they can be purchased—perhaps licensed tobacconists and perhaps chemists. There need to be strictly regulated conditions. But what I don't think we should be doing is making one product effectively unavailable or incredibly expensive to get while making cigarettes perhaps even more attractive to many people with a nicotine addiction.

So, while I'm supportive of many of the measures in this bill, I think we need to have a far more measured approach to this. What the government is proposing has not been proposed anywhere else in the world. I think that it's a very radical move, and I think that it will have unintended consequences. So I would urge the government to perhaps have a bit of a rethink. If vapes are so bad that we need to make them available only by prescription—requiring people to go to the doctor and then, obviously, to the pharmacist—why isn't the government doing that with cigarettes as well? It makes no sense. They should be treated the same. Otherwise there will be perverse outcomes

Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If you ask any parent of school-aged children—certainly children in high school and increasingly children in primary school—they'll tell you that they're worried about vaping. If you ask any principal or schoolteacher, they'll tell you the same. They'll tell you that it is fast becoming the biggest behavioural issue in their schools. This is what a New South Wales principal said last year:

They're so desperate to have the next one or get money to have the next one that students have become more aggressive, more agitated, less cooperative, less engaged with their school work.

This is—ask any fair-minded person—becoming a menace in our schools. The companies that make these things are targeting our kids. Evidence of that, if you need it, is the fact that nine out of 10 vape stores are within walking distance of our schools. If the purpose is to target our kids, it's working, because we now know that about one in six young people have used vapes recently. I want them out of our schools, and part of that is getting them out of the corner stores that are across the road from the schools. That's a big part of what this legislation, the Therapeutic Goods and Other Legislation Amendment (Vaping Reforms) Bill 2024, will help us to do.

If you talk to high-school teachers, they will often tell you that they feel like they're becoming de facto police. They can tell when young people are withdrawing from nicotine. They can see the behavioural change in the classroom. They can see which students aren't in the classroom because of the impact of the withdrawal from nicotine. They'll tell you part of their job has become search and seizure, in student's lockers or schoolbags, trying to find vapes which sometimes don't look like vapes; they are disguised to look like a highlighter or a USB. That, plus the flavours they come in—watermelon, bubblegum, cookies and cream—should tell you who the target market is here; it's our kids. The same sorts of companies that were getting kids hooked on cigarettes once upon a time are using the same old marketing playbook with a new millennial twist. Nicotine delivery devices are being pushed on kids by TikTok influencers. And all with one goal in mind: to get another generation hooked on nicotine.

That's why this bill is important. It bans the importation, the manufacture, the supply and the commercial possession of disposable single-use and non-therapeutic vapes. That bit about non-therapeutic vapes is important, too. Vapes were originally conceived or marketed as a therapeutic—something to get people off the smokes. My view is: if they are therapeutic and designed to get people off the smokes, you should get them at the pharmacy. What's being proposed here to the parliament isn't prohibition; it's regulation—akin to what we did with codeine a couple of years ago. If you've got a prescription from a doctor, you'll be able to get it at the pharmacy. What you won't be able to do is go into a corner store opposite the local school and see them sitting there alongside a bottle of Prime.

I congratulate my friend and colleague the Minister for Health and Aged Care for bringing forward this important legislation. I think that, if we do this, it will make a big impact in our local schools. That's why I urge all members to listen to parents and teachers, to what they're saying here, and to back parents, back teachers and back this bill.

Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Link to 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.

Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment and Water) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Kooyong for that excellent contribution. Congratulations, Member for Kooyong.

I'm very proud of the fact that the Albanese government has introduced to parliament world-leading vaping legislation. As well as complimenting the member for Kooyong and the many members who have made excellent contributions, I really want to pay tribute to the Minister for Health and Aged Care, Mark Butler. This is legislation that will save lives. Without question this legislation, if passed by this parliament, will save lives. We know that vaping has already killed people. In the United States there are documented cases of people dying of lung disease. the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have pointed this out. Doctors here are already seeing significant lung problems from vaping, including what is colloquially called 'vaper's cough'. There are plenty of 14-year-olds and 16-year-olds who are turning up with vaper's cough, and with psychological problems. As the member for Kooyong said, there's anxiety when people—kids—can't get their vapes. They're waking up in the middle of the night, with the vape under the pillow, vaping in bed in the middle of the night because they can't get through the night without the nicotine. The Australian panel on tobacco reforms heard that these children were sleeping with vaping devices under their pillows because they are so addicted to nicotine that they can't sleep a night without vaping. It's a public health menace.

We see vapes in stores, right across Australia, next to the chocolates, next to the soft drinks and next to the toys. There is absolutely no question that, in the sale of these products, the presentation of these products—the colours, the flavours, the unicorns—is absolutely designed to appeal to children, and also to fool their parents. We've seen vapes in the shape of highlighter pens or in the shape of computer data sticks that can be popped in the pencil case so you can vape at school without your parents and teachers knowing that you're doing it.

At least 2,000 chemicals can be found in vaping fluid, according to Johns Hopkins University, and as additives in the plastic casings, including chemicals that are used in embalming, in nail polish remover and in weedkiller. How can we possibly know the extent of setting these chemicals on fire and ingesting them into our lungs? As health minister Mark Butler told the House this week, the Dental Association has warned about an alarming rate of increase in black gum disease in 12- to 15-year-olds, which the dentists connect to vaping.

It is extremely disappointing that we have seen reports over the previous weekend that some in the coalition think that it is a good idea to entrench vaping and then milk it for the tax revenue that it can bring in. This is building our tax revenue on the basis of ignoring the impacts on our children's health.

We need strong and decisive action to arrest and reverse the increase in vaping and to prevent the long-term adverse impacts on the health of the population, before it's too late. The latest national data showed that one in six high school students had recently vaped, a fourfold increase since the previous survey in 2017. This new law is not about punishing those young people who are vaping. It's about making sure that those who sell, manufacture and hope to profit from the vapes actually face the consequences.

Of course, this is mostly about the health of our children. We know that people who start vaping are three times more likely to go on to be smokers. And, in fact, from the most recent year, we've got figures to say that, in New South Wales, there were 170 calls to the poisons line about children ingesting the solution in vapes. Seventeen of those calls were about children under the age of one.

We will always act to protect the health of Australians, but I just want to conclude with a few comments about the environmental concerns related to vaping. There is no safe way of dealing with the waste that is created by these single-use vapes. The lithium-ion batteries and the chemical contamination of the devices mean that they can't be recycled. You'd need to manually disassemble them to remove the lithium-ion batteries. You can't do that.

Without banning them, they will continue to end up in landfill. In landfill, the plastic will last for a thousand years. The toxic chemicals leach into the soil and the waterways, the devices degrade and microplastics enter the environment. The average Australian consumes a credit card's worth of microplastics every week.

People 'wishcycle' the vapes into the plastic, thinking that they'll be recycled. Instead what happens is that they're compacted in the recycling equipment, the lithium-ion batteries explode and the recycling facility catches fire. In Canberra in 2022, a fire knocked out the recycling facility for a year—a fire that was caused by a lithium-ion battery. If they go into landfill, they're also under compression; they heat up, they explode and they cause landfill fires. The National Waste and Recycling Industry Council has indicated that an average of three fires per day in Australia are attributed to batteries being incorrectly disposed off. Lithium ion batteries create intense and persistent fires that are difficult and dangerous for firefighters to extinguish.

I will finish by saying this: by 2025, it's estimated that 99 per cent of seabirds will have ingested plastics. In 2050, plastics in the ocean are expected to outweigh fish. When these items enter our environment, they are environmentally catastrophic. I commend the bill to the House.

Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This might come as a surprise, but there was a lot of content in the environment minister's speech with which I heartily agreed. Indeed, the contaminants in those single-use vapes are of danger, not only to the users but to the environment as well. The lithium ion batteries, as she mentioned, and the toxic chemicals contained therein are so harmful to the ground and groundwater. Goodness knows what they are doing to the young people and to the older people—to anyone actually using these vapes. That is why we need to do something about the manufacture of these vapes and do it very fast, because if anyone thinks that our Border Force, our border patrol and our authorities at the docks can in any way, shape or form manage the great influx of these in the containers that are coming in on the various vessels, well, they are just seriously kidding themselves. The minister was right when she said they come in all shapes and forms, such as USBs or highlighter pens, with the various flavours there not to induce but to seduce children, with unicorns and rainbows and all sorts of tropical and exciting-sounding flavours and colours. This is just an attempt to get people hooked on smoking. We know that, after vapes, it'll be nicotine, and it is dangerous. There is absolutely no question.

But, if you suggest that we should then be getting our authorities, be they border control or be they state police, to try to limit the spread of these, I say: well, good luck with that. The genie is out of the bottle—some might say the puff is out of the vape. I went to a wedding not that long ago where just about every person was vaping. We know that currently the estimate is that 1.7 million adults in Australia are believed to vape. It's a big number. Ten per cent of those have a current GP prescription, as required by law, to vape. So that's a very small percentage of the number of people who are, in fact, vaping every day—as the minister said, almost every hour of every day.

Labor has pushed ahead with doubling down on the failed prescription-only approach to vaping. I know former health minister Greg Hunt meant well—the intention was right—in doing what he did at the time. But what we've seen is a massive billion-dollar black market underpinned by more than 100 million illegal vapes every year, and these are being sold to children. Who is running this racket, largely? It's the bikie gangs, and bikie gangs are scum. With the number of molotov cocktails being thrown into legal tobacco shops and the bullyboy tactics that these bikie gangs bring to this, this is the new Underbelly crime series waiting and already unfolding, sadly, in our capital cities and perhaps, some might even suggest, elsewhere.

The hypocrisy of banning a substance in one form while allowing the legal sale of it in a known, more harmful form cannot be overstated. To the Australian public, it just doesn't add up. It simply doesn't.

We do need to address the realities of the current e-cigarette climate and the prevalence of usage in Australia, amongst all age groups but particularly amongst our young people. The minister mentioned schoolchildren and how they were defying their parents and fooling their teachers. Many of us will remember the kids who used to go and have a fag behind the school toilets and get in awful trouble for it. Back when I was at school, you used to get belted for it—not that I've so much as put a cigarette to my lips, I have to say. Some might say I'm very much in the minority there, but I saw the effects that smoking had on my father. It killed him. He went to an early grave because of the effects of smoking. I do not like vaping. I do not like smoking, although people have a legal right to smoke and I acknowledge that. People have a legal right, and it should be a prescriptive right, to vape, and I understand that too. But there are more than a million Australians who are vaping illegally.

I want to commend the work done by the member for Cowper, who has looked into this and who has, I know, been torn, in his own conscience, as to what the best and right outcome is for all Australians. He has worked across the aisle, across the political divide, to try and bring about the best possible resolution. I know members come to the debate on this bill, the Therapeutic Goods and Other Legislation Amendment (Vaping Reforms) Bill 2024, and this motion in good faith. I understand that people have different views and that people are very torn by what those views are. But I do want to commend the member for Cowper, because if anybody in this place, the House of Representatives, understands the significance of it, along with the legal implications, it is the member for Cowper. He's a dad and a former police officer who went undercover to attempt to flush out drug barons and the like. He comes to this place with a world of experience and a world of legal know-how behind him. I have to say that when he speaks on this topic I listen, because I know the time and effort he has put into reaching what he believes is the best conclusion.

I know, too, that the Nationals are in a coalition. I respect that. But, with our individual right to look at policy and determine our position as a party, albeit a party in a coalition, we looked at this very early on because it was a massive issue in regional Australia. We believe the regulation and taxing of government-approved nicotine vapes should follow the same general principles as alcohol and cigarette sales. That includes licensed retail outlets, supply chains and manufacturing.

I say manufacturing because, as even the minister acknowledged, this is an environmental disaster that, I would suggest, is not waiting to happen but happening. I know, having spoken to Jill Ludford and others in the Murrumbidgee Local Health District, in the electorate of Riverina that I represent, that there are tens of thousands of these vapes, many of which have been confiscated but many of which have been put in the recycling bin, in good faith by people who thought they could be recycled, and are now going to end up in landfill. In fact, nobody quite knows what should be done with them. This is a crisis, as I say, that is unfolding as we speak.

There should be strict age verification requirements for vapes as part of what the Nationals believe should be the correct legislation. There should be plain packaging, mandatory health warnings, approved labelling with full ingredients—nicotine content et cetera—restricted flavours approved by the TGA, a subjection to excise, a properly funded and constructed compliance and enforcement regime, and harsh penalties for those who flout the law. But our state police can't be expected to go around and get the prescriptions from everybody who might be puffing away on a vape.

The Nationals are proposing to continue a ban on single-use vapes, because of the availability of disposables presenting a low barrier for young people to enter into vaping, and the waste and environmental implications, as I said before, around the disposal of these units, which is complex, costly and poses risks with, as the environment minister quite correctly pointed out, the lithium battery contained therein. Germany and France have recently banned single-use vapes. That was in December last year. Vaping needs to be viewed in the full context of law enforcement and harm reduction. I do worry earnestly about what we are seeing at the moment with bikie gangs and others. It has become a great cash cow for them and their nefarious activities.

Also, more locally—and politics is local—the environment minister talked about young people having to have a puff in the middle of the night because they couldn't get through the night. These are kids as young as 13, as the member for Kooyong mentioned. I would argue that some are even younger. At Young High School, in the Riverina, in 2022 a student was caught selling vapes to another student. The boy admitted to selling them and said he found them in a park. Police were contacted and a wellbeing nurse was contacted as well, and the student was rightly suspended. At Parkes High School—I don't want to be seen to be picking on these high schools but these are well-known and publicised incidents—a student was recorded as being absent the day he arrived at school to hand another student a vape. He left and returned again with another vape for another student. These are not isolated one-off incidents. It is not just happening at public high schools. It's happening at private high schools. It is probably happening at primary schools. You only need to walk down the main street of any town anywhere and you will see young people—way too young—on their vapes. It is a major, major issue. Vaping has just exploded, with teachers reporting students using classrooms, toilets and playgrounds to sell them. It is beyond belief, really.

We know from good research that vaping is medically harmful, and we also know that people who are vaping are going to have the harmful effects come back at them later in life. I mentioned my father Lance earlier on. At the time he started lighting up in probably the late 40s or early 50s, there wasn't the knowledge. There was certainly the advertising then that told people that it was harmful but, on the other hand, there was all the advertising that was almost encouraging and enticing people by saying that it was the way to live your life—that it was a lifestyle choice that was going to make you more attractive and all the rest. Of course, we know that a number of people who are now in their elderly years are suffering emphysema and other ailments like cancer et cetera—and, dare I say, there are a number of people in cemeteries around the place who ought not be there—because of cigarette smoking and their use of nicotine when they weren't aware of the dangers. These days, people are aware of the dangers of vaping, of the companies selling them and the bikie gangs who are using these as a cash cow.

This needs proper, tight legislation that is going to control the sale and usage and certainly put a thumb down on the bikie gangs' ability to reap rewards, ill-gotten gains, from vaping.

The Nationals have, in good faith and led by the member for Cowper, put forward what we believe is a strong alternative to what the government is proposing to ensure that the manufacture of vapes is regulated, that it is Australian and that it is done with the best possible outcomes in mind. There's no easy answer to this. There's no easy fix. In my final few seconds, I would urge anybody who is considering either taking it up or doing it not to do it. It's not good for you and it will lead to an untimely death.

Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to 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.

Zali Steggall (Warringah, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Therapeutic Goods and Other Legislation Amendment (Vaping Reforms) Bill 2024. As a sportsperson, I make no apology for being strongly against smoking and vaping. It is disappointing to see that the parliament is not united behind this ban and ensuring that it happens, because it is incredibly important.

Vaping has become a real public health threat. I have been urging the government to take decisive action against vaping to reduce the increasing rates of vaping and prevent the long-term harm on population health. Any complacency from government and health officials will see the rate of vaping continue to climb, particularly amongst our young people. In my electorate of Warringah, parents, carers and educators are constantly contacting my office to express serious concern about the ready viability of and easy access to vaping products, particularly for young people. Insidious vape shops are popping up regularly all around Warringah. The appearance of the vape shops and the vapes they sell is truly disgusting, in my opinion; the products look and taste like the sweets and lollies that they sit alongside in these shops. As I've mentioned previously, local media in my electorate, including the Manly Observer and the Northern Beaches Advocate, provide ongoing coverage to this important issue.

Young people do not understand or appreciate, or are not aware of, the insidious nature of vapes—that they are like smoking. We almost eradicated smoking in younger generations through strong public health campaigns and strong reforms. But now the tobacco industry has managed to ensnare children and young people through slick marketing of vaping products, specifically designed to appeal to young people. Make no mistake; it is big tobacco that is behind the vaping industry, and it's probably not surprising that the members in this place that are not supporting and opposing this outright ban are the members of the National Party. They are the one party that accepts donations from tobacco. It is incredibly disappointing that that, I would suggest, influences their position in relation to this legislation. A ban is the only way we protect young people from being at risk of this insidious product. If we fail to act now, the alarming rates of youth vaping will continue to rise. We need strong legislation to ban the importation, marketing and distribution of vapes, and we need public health campaigns to educate and help our youth.

Vapes also pose an environmental harm. Many e-cigarette pods can't be recycled due to potential nicotine content. Discarded pods can also leak, creating contamination and plastic waste that takes centuries to degrade. For all our Clean Up Australia days and all those amazing groups around our communities, it is frightening how much vaping products now make up what is found in the environment. In the United Kingdom, the Guardian reported, in 2023, that disposable vapes are behind a dramatic rise in fires at recycling plants—raising the risk of a major blaze releasing toxic fumes and polluting air, industry experts warn. In fact, when I visited a recycling facility in Western Australia, as a member of the Standing Committee on Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water, they showed just how many vaping products had been collected and the risks they pose.

There are some truly disturbing statistics out there. Children as young as 12 find that vapes are accessible from their friends, siblings and businesses. Eighty-seven per cent of children said that accessing vapes was easy, and the majority said they were attracted to the fruity flavours—which is not surprising, given the strategic marketing of these products to kids. What starts as a social habit can readily become a severe dependency on nicotine. Kids start sacrificing their learning time, sleep and money to use and acquire vapes. It's happening in classrooms, school bathrooms and at home. Vapes have become part of children's lives, and it must be stopped. In Australia, the number of people vaping tripled between 2019 and 2022. Vaping is particularly endemic amongst youth, with one in six high-schoolers currently vaping and one in three having tried it. Ninety-three per cent of teachers are concerned about vaping in schools, and they report that children are distracted, stressed and anxious. These kids are often not aware that they're experiencing withdrawal symptoms and they turn to vaping to counteract those feelings, fuelling an insidious cycle.

There's growing evidence that it poses significant risk to our health. These concerns on the impact of vaping absolutely also include the impact on adolescent brain development, cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease and cancer. It's also linked to anxiety, stress behaviours and mental health issues. The list that justifies why this legislation is absolutely needed and why vapes must be banned is long.

This bill bans the importation, domestic manufacture, supply, commercial possession and advertising of vapes. It's part of the second phase of the vaping regulation. I strongly support it. Following this bill passing, the provisions will regulate vapes, ban advertising and introduce new offences and civil penalty provisions in relation to importation, domestic manufacture, supply, commercial possession and advertising of vapes. It bans the commercial possession of vapes, and all of this better regulates the vaping industry and will help deter the importation and commercial supply of vaping products.

These vaping reforms are designed to protect the health and wellbeing of Australians and are based on extensive public health professional consultation, so I strongly support them. They establish a strong national framework to tackle the endemic levels of vaping in Australia, particularly amongst our youth. We must address this, and I congratulate the government for taking a firm stand. I urge all members in this place to get behind this necessary health measure.

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We are seconds away from a message being in front of us, so, rather than be in a situation where someone starts a speech and then is unable to finish it, what I suggest we do at the moment is that I move that the debate be adjourned. Then we sit here in silence for about 40 seconds, looking at each other, then the message will arrive—that may have happened—and then we will be able to deal with things in an orderly way. I move:

That the debate be adjourned.

Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the manager of government business for moving the motion. With your oratory skills, I'm sure you could entertain the House for 40 seconds, given your time in this place! Maybe share with the House your comprehensive understanding of the standing orders or something—something most diligent!

Question agreed to.