Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

At the end of the debate before, a number of accusations were made about the National Party, me and others. I just want to reply to those things and to bring people up to speed as to where we're at. Senator Steele-John made a big deal of the National Party taking donations from what he calls big tobacco. I hope we have a debate about the merits, not the motives, of policies. If your arguments are good enough against something, you should be able to argue that what someone is saying is wrong; that what I'm proposing here through this committee stage—creating a legal regulated vaping market—will be bad for people and will be bad for the country. You can make those arguments; that's fine. But whenever we start resorting to saying, 'You've bad motives and you're only doing this because of X, Y and Z,' we can't really have a debate then. We're trying to read people's minds, and that will mean that we'll never have a useful, constructive debate.

Two, of course, can play this game. I could of course—and I don't—make the claim that the Greens political party take millions of dollars in donations from renewable energy. They do; that's a matter of record. They just happen to also support large-scale government subsidies for renewable energy—for the same companies that they take millions of dollars of donations from. I don't say that they do that because of the donations they take. I don't want to engage in debate about their motives, because I'd much prefer to point out how hopeless renewable energy is. It's terrible. It's destroying our country. It's deindustrialising our nation. I don't need to question their motives. I'll debate the merits, not the motives, of what the Greens are proposing.

The very fact that the Greens have not been able to question the merits of my proposals here and have had to resort to personal attacks on people's motives shows that they don't really have good arguments about why we shouldn't create a legal regulated market. If they did, they would make those arguments. But their weakness, their lack of strong points of view here, is shown by them resorting to base personal attacks on people's motives, integrity et cetera rather than actually pointing out the flaws in any process.

Regardless of that, I'll extend a little bit of an olive branch to my colleague Senator Steele-John. I welcome his viewpoint, which I think I recall. I apologise: the debate was now that many hours ago. I'm not recounting it verbatim but I believe that Senator Steele-John did indicate that the Greens political party will be looking at considering issues around vaping in the legislation to come forth next year from this government. I didn't hear Senator Steele-John dismiss any idea that there should be, maybe, some consideration here. We heard earlier from Senator Shoebridge his view that we should have a legal cannabis market, a regulated cannabis market. I'm not going to go through all my views on that, but clearly, if you're going to support that and you think adult Australians should be able to freely purchase cannabis in this country, I find it hard to believe that you would not also similarly support an Australians' right to vape liquid nicotine. It seems completely nonsensical that you would not have a similar arrangement.

As I say, I don't get engaged in personal attacks about the Greens' motives. They are free to put forward whatever policies they like in this place, and of course, I'm free to disagree with them and point out their flaws. I'm happy to have respectful conversations and constructive dialogue about how we can make sure that adult Australians are not turned into criminals in this country just for having an addiction to nicotine and for wanting to choose to assuage that addiction through a product that is much less harmful for them than smoking and much, much cheaper.

I also want to reply to some comments made by Senator Marielle Smith. I generously gave her the call—some Labor senators hadn't had the call for a while—and she proceeded to attack me in response to that generosity, but that's okay. Senator Smith's view was that I'm a bad person because I meet with big tobacco companies. Apparently, we signed some agreement with the WHO that we're not allowed to meet people! I wasn't a signatory to that agreement. I can't remember signing anything, and I'm certainly not going to listen to the WHO on matters, given their record on coronavirus, which was absolutely shocking. Don't forget they originally told us that coronavirus could not be transferred to people by person-to-person transmission. Do you remember that, Senator Roberts? They told us not to close our borders with China. Remember that? That was great from the WHO. So I'm certainly not going to listen to that body. Regardless, I didn't sign that agreement.

It surprised me—I didn't realise—that government officials apparently don't meet with so-called big tobacco companies. But hang on a second—if these people are so bad, if they are selling such a terrible product, why don't we just ban it? If it's so bad, you could ban smoking. You could do that. Instead of this tobacco control, just bring in a tobacco prohibition bill if it's so bad. Apparently, these people are very bad people, but we're going to allow them to sell a legal product. It's a legal product that is allowed. Not only that—we don't finish there—we're going to raise billions of dollars of excise from the sale of these products. In the break, I checked the figures. Apparently, the government says it doesn't have a relationship with big tobacco. It doesn't meet with them. It doesn't recognise them. Yet it will get $12.9 billion from big tobacco this year in excise. That is some relationship, isn't it? That is a pretty big relationship. The government gets $13 billion a year in excise from big tobacco, but it says: 'We can't meet with them. We can't even talk with them.' That money might be why the government doesn't want to ban tobacco. That might be why the government doesn't want to have a legal vaping market. If people are allowed to vape, they won't be paying $13 billion in excise to the government. Maybe this is all just about fleecing Australian people who are addicted to nicotine. It has nothing to do with health issues at all. It's the government that is addicted. It is addicted to massive revenue streams from big tobacco. Maybe it is about that.

We also learned from Senator Smith's contribution why the government can't seem to control the illegal chop-chop market. We have a massive problem with this. Senator Ruston has gone over this in great detail, and I applaud her on her amendment that was just passed to this bill. We have a massive issue with this. This market has grown from something like 10 per cent a few years ago to recent estimates that about a quarter of Australians who are smoking are now getting cigarettes illegally. We don't really know. The government doesn't really know, of course, because it's an illegal market, but certainly there has been significant growth in chop-chop, in criminal activity around this trade, over the past decade.

Maybe one of the reasons this has happened is that, apparently, and I am going to get to a question—I'm going to ask the minister whether the government meets with Philip Morris or any of these companies.

Because if you want to control the illicit market, wouldn't you talk to the people in the legal market about what is going on, what the intelligence is and what's happening? They probably know something about that. I've got no problem saying I talk to them; I do. They're a legal company in this country. I'll talk to anybody. I talk to Green activists, I talk to everybody. I'm happy to—it's my job as a senator. They tell me stuff about the illicit tobacco market—it might be right or it might be wrong but I'm certain they would have some intelligence about what's happening, given that they're the ones operating in this market and their customers have some interactions with these products. I ask the government: if you're not meeting with them, how the hell do you know what's going on with the illicit tobacco market? Are you at all serious about trying to control that market if you're not getting market intelligence from the people that are operating in that market? It's absolutely absurd. It's like saying we want to try to control alcohol consumption but we're not going to talk to pubs or bottle shops—we're just going to operate in some sort of vacuum when nobody knows what's going on. It's ridiculous.

I would like to know what exactly the government is doing to control illicit tobacco, how they find out what's happening in the market and who they talk to, because it seems to me this is a big reason why. We are resting on our laurels here as a country. We keep talking about what a great country we've been in controlling smoking rates, and there's no doubt that's true, but we're living off the legacy of former governments who have done that. The reality is that over the past decade smoking rates have not fallen that much—they've largely plateaued—yet they have fallen significantly in other countries that have allowed a legal vaping market to emerge. We are missing the boat here on what we should be doing to further reduce the terrible habit that is smoking and the terrible diseases and health outcomes that come from smoking tobacco, which is very different from liquid nicotine.

What are the government doing here? Do they actually speak to people in the market? How do they know what's happening with illicit tobacco if they're not talking to the legal entities they tax and raise money from in the market itself?