David Leyonhjelm (NSW, Liberal Democratic Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am a shill. I'm a shill for property rights and I am shill for free choice. I'm also a shill for good policy. I have to say that this plain packaging is not good policy. I wish everybody would quit smoking. It's not good for you. People would be better off, healthier and have more money in their pockets if they didn't smoke. That would be an excellent outcome. The fact is: it is their choice. Policies like this that take property rights away from people who acquired them legally, built them up legally and invested billions of dollars in them doesn't serve any public purpose. It's not good policy at all.

I keep hearing from Labor and from the government—and I heard it from the minister before, although admittedly the minister is new in this job and was reciting what she was told—that the plain packaging policy is working. As I said in my speech on the second reading, it is not. What is the evidence for that? Rates of smoking are not declining. They were declining up until a few years ago. They are no longer declining now. They are declining in countries that don't have plain packaging. Read my lips. They are falling in countries where there isn't plain packaging. They are not falling in Australia, where there is plain packaging.

I think there is something significant that our government policymakers here—and I don't blame the minister—are missing. Just because they thought of plain packaging—or Labor did, and the government, when it became the government, took it over and embraced it—just because we were the first in the world to have invented plain packaging, does not make it a good policy. The evidence shows it is a failed policy. When are we going to reach the stage when we admit that and we start doing something about actually reducing smoking? Smoking is the issue here, not the tobacco companies and not pretty pictures or colours or whatever on the tobacco packets. That's the issue. Getting people to stop smoking is not going to be helped by plain packaging. We should put our efforts into policies that do reduce smoking.