Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Today we are privileged to have, in the student galleries on three sides of this chamber, students who have the opportunity to witness what goes on in this chamber and in the parliament. Deputy President, through you I direct an urgent plea, a request, to each of the three groups of students: do not take up smoking. Do not smoke. During my contribution to the debate on the Excise Tariff Amendment (Tobacco) Bill 2016 and Customs Tariff Amendment (Tobacco) Bill 2016, I will give you a couple of reasons why you should not. I promise you that, by the time you are adults, you will have either saved sufficient money for a deposit on your own home or apartment, to get you started in real estate, or you will have saved enough to be able to go around the world every year on a holiday during your leave. As you become parents, you will have sufficient money to be able to put funds aside for the education of your children. How good is that? If you go away from this place this week with one lesson, with one thing to remember, I urge you: do not take up smoking.

We all know that cancer is a scourge and a curse that affects every family. I had my experience in the last period of the 44th Parliament. It was just before two o'clock when my mobile phone rang. I realised it was my doctor and I stepped out. I had the first question for the government that day, and my doctor was telling me the bad news that a salivary gland problem I had was malignant. I did not really like that very much, and I said to him, 'Dale, I'm sorry I can't talk to you right now, because I have a question in question time.' He said to me, 'Chris, you're not taking this seriously. That huge growth on your thyroid is malignant.' I had had a chat with the surgeon. I am a veterinarian and I had seen the results. I was not quite as pessimistic as he was. Some people had noticed that I had lost weight, and I would very quietly say, 'Yes, I've been on an exercise program. I lost 14 kilos in about five weeks.' It was not an exercise program; it was this jolly cancer. Fortunately, I could hide it by wearing a suit and tie—nobody knew. Even more fortunately, when it was removed it was not malignant. I had that great news: no malignancy.

The message I want to give you is this: that was something over which I could have had no control, yet smoking is a practice that puts cancer-producing elements, called carcinogens, into your lungs, and that may well lead to you getting lung cancer, throat cancer or any of those cancers associated with your respiratory system, and then you will accelerate towards an early death. I say this to you whether you are a parent, a kid or—as is the case for some of us in this chamber—a grandparent. I have to say, when you become a grandparent, you have a really important cause to want to keep living for.

A member of my family is also a veterinarian. He is eight years older than me. My earliest memories of him were as a smoker. And he fits the bill, as read out previously by Senator Smith: a remote area person who worked all his life in stockyards in the bush. Members of our profession saw the pathology in animals that is equivalent to the human pathology—in other words, the disease in the lungs in humans. I used to often say, 'For someone with his knowledge, why the billyo is he smoking?' He turned up to visit his young grandchild in a Western Australian town. They all got crook about three years ago—he did, the child did and the parents did. He came home and he has not smoked since. I see his improvement in health every day and I see the fact that we are going to have him for the next few years, whereas, five years ago, I feared he was not going to see his grandchildren grow up.

The stats you have seen here today say it all. Low socioeconomic groups—in other words, people who cannot afford it—are three times more likely to smoke. If you come from a remote area, you have double the likelihood of smoking. Single parents—usually mums—with dependent children are nearly three times more likely to smoke, and are more likely to smoke than parents in homes where there are two parents. These are the stats. I ask the teachers to ask the children, 'Get your pens out.' And, if you do not, here is a bit of an exercise for when you are back at school. If you are able, have a look at the Hansard of speeches. It does not matter who is giving this one. Next week, go back and have a look at these figures.

The price today of cigarettes is about $25 per packet. If you smoke a packet a day, that is going to cost you $9,000 a year. And to those of us who pay tax—because all of this is what is called after-tax money—if you apply 30 per cent tax, the real cost of that $9,000 is $12,000 a year. That is $1,000 a month. Many of you are probably 12, 13, 14 years of age, so by 24 years of age that 12 grand a year is the $120,000 I was telling you about that you will have as a deposit on a home. But it will not be $120,000. If you have your pens out: within four years the cost of a packet of smokes will go to about $40. At $40 a packet, if you have a packet a day, that is $15,000 a year. And, again, if you apply the 30 per cent tax rate—because all of this is after-tax money; you do not get a tax deduction for helping yourself die early—the actual cost is over $20,000 a year. If you multiply that by the 10 or 12 years, by the time you are young adults there you have $200,000 in the bank earning interest, probably up to about $240,000 or $250,000—if I had the financial capacity of the finance minister, he could probably tell me what the compound interest rate would be. There is the money you have, and you have your health.

The question is often asked: to what extent are we interfering in the privacy of people by imposing taxes that make smoking more difficult? Of itself, if somebody decides to smoke, you would say, 'Well, that's their business; let them do it; let them take on the financial burden,' as I have just suggested. But there is an analogy that has been mentioned by Senator Fawcett, in his experience, of being in the cockpit of an aircraft where he could not see because of his copilot, and so he had to go onto instrument rating. It is a question of the effect on other people, of course. It is the effect of passive smoking. It is the effect on children in a car. It is the effect on other people in a room. When it goes from being something to do with the person to others around that person who can have no influence on the behaviour of that person, it changes dramatically.

I want to give you an example away from smoking. I want to direct this to the experience recently we had as a result of Senator Whish-Wilson, who asked us to participate in a Senate inquiry into marine plastics. I was involved in the committee—not that I necessarily wanted to be, but I thought, 'That's fair enough.' I knew little about this. Probably one of the joys of our work in the Senate is that we are drawn into areas that we normally would not have the opportunity or excuse to examine. I was not aware that all plastics will eventually reduce to microplastics. I was not aware, particularly, that we already had microplastics in things like toothpaste and various other items.