Marielle Smith (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak on Therapeutic Goods and Other Legislation Amendment (Vaping Reforms) Bill 2024. I wholeheartedly support this bill, because fundamentally it is about protecting young Australians from the dangers of nicotine and the harms of addiction. Those harms are real, they are present and they are hurting young people in Australia and their families.

At the outset I want to say to every single member of this chamber: If you had an opportunity today to step back to the 1930s and to regulate tobacco differently, would you do that? If you had a chance to take action that would protect generations of Australians from the devastation and harm of smoking, would you do that? This is our moment. We know the evidence around vaping is trending in a way that shows us it is not safe. We know it is hooking a new generation of young Australians to nicotine addiction. We know the involvement of big tobacco in this industry. We know. So, if your answer is yes, that you would do things differently when it came to tobacco, then you must support the bill before us, because this is our moment to stop generations and generations of further harm.

Vapes were sold to Australians as a therapeutic good to help people quit smoking, and for some people that may have been the case. But we are kidding ourselves in here if we think that's the business model, because when your products are targeted directly at young people—when they are marketed on Instagram and when they are made to look like highlighters, flavoured in things like bubblegum—you cannot honestly say that is about smoking cessation; that is purely about hooking a whole new generation of Australians on a substance that is insanely difficult to break an addiction from. The only demographic which is increasing its smoking rates in our country is young people—why? Because of vaping. It is starting with vaping.

I chaired the inquiry into this bill, and there's a lot of rubbish in some of the additional comments in there. I'm not going to waste my time on them here, but I do want to highlight the evidence. It was overwhelmingly supportive of this bill. We heard one in four young Australians are vaping. We heard one in six high school students are vaping. These are young Australians becoming addicted to nicotine, and, more often than not, they don't even know they're consuming nicotine. They think they're using a product which is nicotine free. How do they find out? They start withdrawing from nicotine, and the impact of that on a young person, not just on their physical health but on their mental health, is extraordinary.

The impact on a young person, when they start going through nicotine withdrawals in the classroom—how do you think they learn at school that day? How do you think their teacher copes at school that day, when they have a young person withdrawing? They've been sold a product full of nicotine, and they don't even know it has nicotine in it. Young people are smart. They know the dangers of cigarette smoking, but when they've been given a product, marketed a product, which is said to be safe and which is targeted and focused at them, then they are making a horrific mistake. It's a mistake which has long-term consequences on their physical health, their mental health, their wellbeing, their education and their families.

We heard, in our committee, that 98 per cent of vapes confiscated from schoolchildren in New South Wales contained nicotine, and it is so easy for young people to get these vapes. But a 14-year-old child on the way home from school should not be able to walk into the corner store, where they buy chocolates, treats and other things, and pick up a vape. That is absurd. These products are deliberately, despicably being marketed to our kids. Allegedly nicotine is designed to look like toys, and nine out of 10 of the vape stores which are selling these products are within walking distance of our schools.

Big tobacco is setting our kids up to become addicted. It's a business model rolled out before, with devastating consequences and devastating harm, and it is not okay. Our committee heard from teachers and principals about the impact of nicotine addiction on their students—how it impacted their learning, how it impacted school harmony—and the burden it was placing on teachers because of the enforcement role required of them and because of having to deal with this in their classrooms. Teachers told us that they were struggling. They didn't want to be policing the schoolyard for these vapes. They didn't want to be experiencing the disharmony in schools.

We heard from health experts about the impact of nicotine addiction on the health of young people, and of how it can manifest in things like aggression, anxiety, sleeplessness and depression. These are terrible consequences being borne by our youngest citizens.

Our party, the Labor Party, has always led on tobacco reform. Plain packaging, under former minister Nicola Roxon, was a game changer. She had a hell of a fight to get there at the time, with the opposition leader calling it a bridge too far, but those reforms worked. They had an impact. Then we had a decade of stagnation under the coalition government. Do you know what happens when governments stagnate on tobacco reform? Big tobacco wins, and we are seeing that now. We are seeing it in smoking rates among young people. We are seeing it in the uptake of vapes. I think it's time that our country returned to its status as a leader on smoking reform and on tobacco reform.

This bill isn't about going after the vapers; so many of them have been sold a lie. It's about stopping the supply of vapes. It's about ensuring that those few Australians who genuinely find value in vaping on their pathway to quitting smoking can do so with support, guidance and care, because giving up nicotine is extremely hard, and you need that help; you need that care. For those genuinely using vapes to help them quit smoking, it is going to be more effective if you have help from a healthcare professional when you're trying to do so.

I ask senators in this chamber again: if you were a regulator holding the role you hold now back in the 1930s, back when cigarettes were first allowed on the market, knowing everything you know about the harm they have caused, the lives they have stolen and the damage they have done to our country, what would you have done then? Would you have let them onto the market? Would you have regulated them differently? If you vote no to this legislation, you are saying you would take exactly the same decision again. If you genuinely believe that we could have done something better back then and you can see the evidence that vaping is trending in the same way as cigarettes were nearly a century ago, you need to support this legislation. We cannot afford to make the same mistakes in Australia that we did with cigarettes. We cannot afford to make those mistakes.

The No. 1 conversation I'm having with parents in South Australia at the moment is about vaping. They are alarmed about the impact of vaping on their kids. They're horrified by it. It's what teachers are telling me too. It's what principals are telling me as well and so are young people who have inadvertently developed a nicotine addiction from using these products. We have seen so much suffering in Australia from tobacco use and nicotine addiction. We have a chance to do something about this growing source of addiction, this growing source of harm. We cannot oversee generations and generations of addiction and mass suffering from a product built by big tobacco again. So I implore all senators to vote for this bill, and I commend it to the Senate.