David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to echo the contribution of my colleague Senator Steele-John on this second reading debate and indicate the Greens will be supporting the Public Health (Tobacco and Other Products) Bill 2023. We have seen extraordinary achievements in reducing tobacco use in Australia through concerted efforts at federal and state government levels, and those collective efforts of regulating in the public interest have saved thousands of Australian lives and extended the healthy lifespan of thousands of other Australians. But there's still more to be done. According to the Cancer Council, there are roughly two million Australians who still smoke regularly. Because of that, we can expect more than 20,000 Australians a year to die from tobacco related illness. Can we stay still when we see that? Obviously we can't. We need to step forward and regulate in the public interest. This is a global industry based around a series of large corporate players who literally profit off the deaths of millions of people across the world. It's one of the most noxious, least ethical industries on the planet, and for centuries it has traded in an addictive product, but for decades it has traded in a product that it knows kills its own customers. When you have an industry that knowingly seeks to expand its market with a product that it knows kills its own customers, of course we need to aggressively regulate that industry in the public interest. The Greens support this legislation, which is largely about consolidating, simplifying and clarifying the way in which federal legislation regulates tobacco.

The Public Health Association of Australia in their submission to this bill said:

It is essential that the Bill be understood as one component of the many-pronged National Tobacco Strategy. The Strategy sets the vision for reducing, and ideally eliminating, the harm caused by tobacco and associated products. The elements of this Strategy, including strong regulation, workplace safety measures, cessation support, information and behaviour change campaigns, revenue measures, approaches for priority populations including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and the protection of policy-making from commercial interference, are all interlocking and mutually supporting. The Strategy should remain a guiding framework for policy work through the current decade.

I think that submission, in a very neat paragraph, highlights the regulatory issues that are faced when any government seeks to move in this space. There is significant attempted commercial interference with policymaking. Companies like British American Tobacco and others have an ugly history of donating to politicians to try and prevent political pressure and to try and prevent regulation—literally buying their way out of regulation. They have an ugly history of producing pseudoscience and paying so-called experts to seek to discredit the public health findings of credible research papers that have clearly shown the link between tobacco, disease and death.

The tobacco industry in many ways wrote the book for how a noxious industry with billions of dollars of revenue can seek to undermine political action and can seek to discredit its opponents. We have seen many of the lessons learned by big tobacco being applied by the fossil fuel industry in its efforts to discredit the science on climate, to discredit the science on energy transition. You could almost see how big tobacco and the fossil fuel industry have come together to work out how to tear down public interest regulation and how to maintain their profits despite their industries causing global scale death and disease. You could put the tobacco and the fossil fuel industries in the same bucket in many instances. You will probably hear in contributions from the right of this chamber links to tobacco regulation and climate, and they will be playing out of the big tobacco playbook. They will try to discredit proponents for regulation. They will try to link—as we heard Senator Babet do—the science on tobacco with the science on climate change. That's what big tobacco has been doing for decades, trying to discredit the public interest science that underpins pretty much everything this bill is doing, which is regulate the use of tobacco to save people's lives.

I want to also acknowledge the work of my colleague Senator Whish-Wilson in identifying the environmental impacts as well as health impacts that come from this industry. The World Wildlife Fund estimates up to 8.9 billion cigarette butts are littered each year, most of them non-biodegradable. If you want to look at what the tobacco industry has traditionally put in filters, you could go back to the 1950s when the tobacco industry excelled itself on trying to come up with new ways of killing its customers by putting asbestos filters in cigarette products. Tobacco wasn't enough; nicotine wasn't not enough; they also wanted to get some cut-price asbestos into the cigarette filters. That's the tobacco industry for you. Of course, that waste stream that still continues to be created through non-bio degradable filters is found throughout our oceans, our waterways. The next round of regulation needs to be more aggressive in regulating that waste stream and standing again up to this toxic, nasty industry.

The Greens have always supported the critical need for a ban on donations from tobacco, alcohol and the pharmaceutical industries to political parties and candidates. This debate again shows why we need to do that. It is not enough for political parties to voluntarily give up tobacco donations. We need cessation support for politicians when it comes to tobacco donations, and the best form of cessation support would be a ban and a prohibition on any political party receiving donations from tobacco, alcohol or pharmaceutical industries, and I see your clear support for that Acting Deputy President Chandler. That of course is a missing link at a federal level. An industry based on killing people—like the tobacco industry—shouldn't be able to donate to politics because it will probably be trying to tear down public interest regulation of that industry. We should be able to unite on that.

The Greens support this model of careful, considered regulation of the industry. Of course, tobacco is one of the most dangerous and lethal drugs. It's right up there at the end of the spectrum of drugs that have a high chance of reducing your life, of increasing mortality and of seriously reducing quality of life.

It's one of the more noxious drugs. Yet we've come up with a compact, not to ban it, because we know that wouldn't work, but to seriously regulate it in the public interest. We also have regulations—probably fewer comprehensive regulations—around alcohol, another highly damaging drug that we know reduces people's life expectancy, creates a significant health burden and is, again, probably on the more dangerous end of the drug spectrum. But we acknowledge that banning alcohol would be a terrible mistake. We've seen examples in the history of the 20th century with the banning of alcohol in the United States and how that drove organised crime, an unregulated industry and an unsafe health response in the 1920s and 1930s in the United States. We've seen how banning these drugs can be dreadfully counterproductive, both on a crime level and on a public health level.

Meanwhile, this parliament seems perfectly content with banning much less harmful drugs, including cannabis. We can see the game plan about how useful it is to have public interest regulations for drugs. Cannabis, of course, is on the less harmful end of the spectrum. Why don't we urgently apply the lessons that we've slowly learned on alcohol and tobacco over the last decades to cannabis? Why don't we legalise cannabis, make a national, well-regulated legal market for cannabis, generate the billions and billions of dollars of public revenue that that would produce, put in place the health benefits that labelling, quality control and national regulation would provide and, at the same time, disempower organised crime and take billions of dollars away from bikie and outlaw motorcycle gangs? Why don't we just get on and do that in 2024, for cannabis? Let's just legalise cannabis, regulate it in the public interest, prohibit the big tobacco, alcohol and pharmaceutical industries from getting their teeth into the industry, and create tens of thousands of sustainable green jobs in this country in 2024? Let's pass this bill on tobacco, but let's get on to important, critical national work next year. Let's make 2024 the year we legalise cannabis as well.