Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration) Share this | Hansard source

The Senate is considering in this second reading debate two bills which the government has introduced in what we are told is an effort to reduce the incidence of smoking in Australia. The first bill is the Tobacco Plain Packaging Bill 2011 and the second is the Trade Marks Amendment (Tobacco Plain Packaging) Bill 2011. So that there can be no question about my position on the issue of smoking, I state for the record that, based on considerable empirical research, I believe that smoking is a health hazard and that smokers who indulge the habit for a period of time are likely to suffer significant health problems, which may result in their early death. Equally, I believe that there is considerable empirical research to show that the passive intake of tobacco smoke by those who come into contact with it is likely to have adverse health implications.

It is clear that the ill effects from smoking and passive smoking harm many of our citizens and impose a massive financial burden on the Australian health system. It is unacceptable to stand by and do nothing when up to 15,000 Australians die of tobacco related causes each year. I therefore support action which will effectively reduce the incidence of smoking in Australia in an effort to improve the health of our citizens and reduce the burden on our health system, which is estimated to be up to $31½ billion each year.

Given the government's stated purpose in relation to these two bills, the question that needs to be asked by the Senate is: does the proposed legislation in its present form achieve the government's stated purpose? Clearly, based on the evidence of numerous published reports and having regard to the submissions that have been made to the various parliamentary committees, the answer to this question is: most unlikely.

Given that the opposition and the government share a common belief that smoking does indeed harm one's health and can indeed cause death and given that the government and the opposition share a common desire to reduce the incidence of smoking in Australia, you would have expected the government to have adopted a bipartisan approach to achieving what is a common policy objective. However, clearly the Minister for Health and Ageing decided that she was the sole expert in the field of smoking and wanted to use the introduction of these bills to try to make out that the only political party in Australia that was interested in reducing the incidence of smoking in Australia was the Australian Labor Party.

What did the minister for health do? Australians were subjected to the minister embarking on a massive campaign to try to denigrate the opposition, notwithstanding the fact that the opposition had a remarkably positive and constructive record of reducing the numbers of smokers in Australia when we were in government. The minister got so carried away with her vilification of the opposition that she suggested that the opposition's position on the bills was influenced by political donations that it may have received at some stage from tobacco companies. The minister, in attacking the opposition, was so adamant in this position—that accepting donations or other support from tobacco companies was so wrong in principle and in practice—that she trumpeted from the rooftops that the Australian Labor Party's policy was not to accept donations from tobacco companies and that Labor maintained the holier-than-thou position that it would return any such donations to tobacco companies, no doubt with a curt note saying, 'The Labor Party is not for sale.'

The minister made it very clear, in her protestations, that Labor was clean and would never knowingly take money from tobacco companies. We have heard speeches from those on that side of the chamber saying that the coalition parties are the only parties in Australia that accept donations from tobacco companies. That is just plain wrong. Not only is it just plain wrong; it is offensive to this side of the chamber. Just as the Prime Minister said, the day before the election, 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead,' the minister pretended to the Australian public that the notion that the tobacco companies could give money to the Labor Party was an offensive one. That was just plain wrong. You can only imagine what the Australian people thought about the credibility of the minister in question when they woke up one morning to find that, notwithstanding her protestations that Labor would never contemplate accepting money from tobacco companies, the minister herself had actually written to tobacco companies soliciting financial support from the tobacco companies to assist her re-election campaign. Let us just say that again for the record. The minister herself had written to tobacco companies and asked them for money, solicited a donation from them, to fund her own election campaign—complete, total and utter Labor Party hypocrisy.

Worse than that, when the minister's hypocrisy was exposed by the media, the Australian published a story that showed that, despite the so-called ban on Labor accepting tobacco money, lo and behold, there were letters circulating that showed that the Australian Labor Party were still asking tobacco companies for political donations. Let us have a look at what the Australian newspaper ran on 18 June 2011:

THE Labor Party has continued to seek political donations of up to $102,000 from a major tobacco company, as recently as this week, despite a ban.

The embarrassing revelation comes in the same week federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon was forced to apologise for sending a fundraising request to the same company in 2005, a year after Labor banned tobacco company donations.

…   …   …

Most of the six newly revealed letters were sent by Sports Minister Mark Arbib when he was secretary of the NSW ALP. They invited a senior tobacco executive to spend up to $15,000 on tickets to fundraising functions.