Perin Davey (NSW, National Party, Shadow Minister for Water) Share this | Hansard source

Ours were touted as being the strictest vape rules in the world, whereby a person would only be able to access vapes with a prescription from their doctor. Mind you, good luck seeing a doctor! Now anyone over the age of 18 can access a vape just by walking into their pharmacy. If you're under 18, you can get a vape with a prescription. This reminds me of the seventies, when my mother used to send me toddling off to the corner shop with a note saying I was allowed to buy her cigarettes. That's what it reminds me of. Someone under the age of 18 with a prescription can go and get a vape? I thought we were trying to stop our children getting vapes. And yet Labor are proposing to allow our children to get vapes.

I've got grave concerns about that aspect of this bill. Given the speed of the change in the position of the government, I'm not sure even they know exactly what they've signed up for. But what we do know is that the people they are requiring to be the policemen, the tobacconists and the garbologists for this legislation didn't know what it was about. They didn't know it was coming. The Pharmacy Guild said the first they heard of it was when they read the Greens press release. The health minister did not even have the decency to give them a heads-up—not even a half-hour warning to say: 'Hey-ho, this is coming your way! Be ready to hang up your flashing neon signs saying, "Vapes available at a pharmacy near you!"' The health minister defends this by saying pharmacies already sell vapes. That may be so, but it's under a very, very different model that was negotiated with pharmacists. The health minister says pharmacies can choose whether or not they want to supply vapes. Really? So this is an opt-in for pharmacists? But what if none of them decide to opt in? How will that work for this new model? We know what will happen because we're seeing it now.

We know that, despite the retail sale of nicotine e-cigarettes having only been legal through prescription from pharmacies, people are walking down the street and acquiring them in ever increasing numbers. The black market is thriving. Under the Labor government's proposal, I don't believe we'll be any better off. Organised crime will continue to profit from the illegal black market, and we will be no better off. We know the current prescription-only model has done nothing to limit the use of vaping, especially among young people. In fact we're seeing numbers increase. Evidence to the Senate inquiry from a criminologist suggested that nine out of 10 vapers already reject the prescription-only model and buy their products on the black market. With now 1.5 million Australians vaping and accessing vapes illegally, the bans have created the second-largest illegal drug market in the country. Instead of achieving the health minister's supposed goal of stamping out recreational vaping, the risk is it will do the opposite.

Then you have the problem of these illegal vapes with unknown ingredients being illegally imported into the country. In the Senate inquiry, my colleague Senator Cadell asked the Police Federation of Australia whether they could force the elimination of the illegal vaping black market through prohibition. They said they clearly could not, and this bill doesn't do enough to fix that. This bill will not curtail the estimated $100 billion black market that imports an estimated 100 million illegal vapes each year. This bill will not stop money being funnelled into the hands of organised crime syndicates. I fear this bill does nothing to prevent children accessing illegal vapes, and, because they are illegal, I fear what our children are inhaling through these illegal products.

This bill does not adequately fund enforcement measures. It also does not adequately address enforcement at the border or the point of sale. Rather, it puts the burden on pharmacists to be the point of sale enforcement and still leaves the borders woefully unprotected. Our policy to regulate vapes equivalent to cigarettes and limit point of sale includes significant funding for enforcement. It includes funding to stand up an illegal tobacco and vaping taskforce that would crack down on organised crime at the border and crack down on the import of illegal vapes at the border. So this legislation is at best half baked. We know we have problems with the vape industry. We have a plan to address that through regulation, through quality control, through education and, importantly, through enforcement. And that's what we will do if we have the opportunity from government.