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

I didn't have many views on vaping many years ago; I had never vaped myself, and it wasn't something I was that interested in. But I had my views changed considerably a few years ago when the Morrison government, under health minister Greg Hunt, sought to ban the importation of vapes with just three weeks notice. I had many constituents contact my office, concerned by this change, and I met many people that were vapers and spoke to many of them. I distinctly remember meeting a young mother of four children who had, for many years, tried to kick the habit of smoking. It was a terrible, debilitating addiction for her. It wasn't until she tried vaping that she was able to successfully kick the habit, and that completely changed her life. Before that time, she had difficulty keeping up with her children, playing with her children; she would be out of breath. Generally you would go outside to smoke, away from the children. It separates you from your children. It wasn't a good existence for her. Vaping changed her life. That's just one particular story; I heard many more. There are thousands of people across the country, and I've met hundreds of them over the years, who, on this issue, have had their lives changed for good by using vapes.

This idea that I continue to hear that somehow vaping is worse or as bad as smoking is palpably untrue. You just have to speak to people who do it. It's untrue in their own lives, it's untrue in their lived experience and it's untrue in scientific literature. I don't want to spend a lot of time tonight going through Cochrane reviews and reviews of journals, many of which I've read over the years, but the scientific conclusion is very clear: the ingestion of carcinogenic tobacco as a nicotine delivery system is much, much worse than relying on a vaporised gas to deliver nicotine to the human body.

I don't recommend anybody take up vaping. It's probably best to stay away from drugs of all forms, but I myself am probably similarly addicted to caffeine. I need a few cups of coffee every day. Maybe it does help me; maybe it does some long-term health damage to me. I don't really know. The science on these things seems to change every day of the week, but it's my choice. As an adult, as a consenting adult, we should generally allow people to make choices that don't otherwise cause debilitating changes to their lives. We allow people to legally buy cigarettes. We allow people to consume vast quantities of alcohol, which has terrible social impacts from time to time, but we live in a free society which generally allows adults to make those free choices without the government trying to tell us all what to do, and so I think that generally should be our preference. We should generally prefer, if possible, to let adults make their own choices.

Thankfully, that ban a few years ago did not come into effect, but there's also a misconception here that somehow vaping is legal or has been legal until this government acted. It has actually been illegal to sell vapes for many years at the retail level, largely under state legislation, in Australia. That would be probably surprising and shocking to many Australians. When you walk down any street, you'll trip across multiple shops that are selling vapes—sometimes quite openly. For the people I speak to, it's certainly no difficulty for them to acquire vapes from a variety of stores across the country, including since the government has announced crackdowns on this in the last few months.

Clearly, we're not winning this so-called war on vapes. It's not something I think can be won. The government is not in anyway serious about the resources it has put towards this effort. Obviously, we have limited police and law enforcement resources, and they should be devoted to the most serious of crimes. We have a runaway problem in my home state of car theft, of basic burglary and of robbery. Many people feel unsafe in their own homes in Queensland at the moment. I do not want scarce police resources being devoted to running down and policing what adults want to do in terms of vaping or smoking or drinking or eating or anything else that adults like to do with each other from time to time. I don't think there is a role for governments in our bedrooms, in our houses. It's really up to each and every one of us to make those decisions as we see fit, even if sometimes they're not the best decisions for our long-term health.

There is a real issue with the availability of illegal, dangerous, addictive vaping products around our children and in our schools. It's a serious issue, but it must be said that issue has grown in an environment where vaping is illegal. The availability of these products to our children has coincided in a period where the law says that it is illegal to sell vapes anywhere in the country. It's illegal to sell vapes at retail outlets, it's illegal to sell vapes in the street, it's illegal to sell vapes at or around a school—obviously. But that still happened. In effect, what the government has brought to this parliament, despite everything being illegal—they're spinning more laws here because they say they've come up with a real solution to this. The government has had a brainwave: all we need to do is make criminal activity illegal! Why didn't we think of this before? All we have to do is make crime illegal, and then it will all go away! That's the approach of this government—that this is somehow revolutionary. They've got something that's already illegal, and now they're coming in and making federal laws on top of the state laws to make it further illegal, and somehow that will stop people being criminals. I mean, it is so absurd, that this government thinks that if this parliament merely signs a piece of paper, if some media releases are put out, this problem will suddenly vanish, will disappear. Why hadn't anyone thought of this before?

It's clearly not going to have that effect; in fact, it hasn't had that effect, even in the period since the government announced these changes. They announced these changes months ago, and there's been no appreciable change to the availability of vaping products in our community, their availability to our children. It's time to recognise a much more sensible approach, an approach that balances the rights and freedoms of adults to make choices about their own health, about what they consume, and also protects our children by devoting scarce enforcement resources to that issue.

We have in front of us a real-world example of where the approach that the coalition has adopted today has worked; it really has worked, and we used to champion this. We've gone quiet about it for now, because it's inconvenient to the government to admit this. But over the past few decades Australia has achieved enormous success at reducing smoking rates for young Australians by having an environment where it is legal for adults to buy and sell smokes. They're freely and very readily available. Yet at the same time we have significantly reduced the number of young people who smoke. We've done both those things at the same time. And we've done that through no real rocket science but through a very strong education campaign to our children, through enforcing laws on illegal trade in terms of the availability of cigarettes, in reputable stores, supplied by reputable businesses that are law abiding. And these laws don't allow the emergence of a large black market in cigarettes—until recently, and I'll come back to that. That has allowed us to lead the world in reducing smoking rates for the overall adult population and, most importantly, reduce the smoking rates for children.

Now we've got an A/B test, if you like. So, that's the A, and we've got a B test where we've tried to crack down on vaping for everybody, adults and children alike. But we're doing neither. We've got kids vaping more and more—runaway increases in children vaping—and we've got adult vaping skyrocketing, too. On top of that we're funding a massive criminal gang network who are abusing the black market that we've allowed to grow through this short-sighted, impossible target we're trying to reach. That's perhaps the most destructive thing we've done with our approach, because there is no doubt that criminal gangs in this country are making a lot of money selling vapes to all Australians, including children. That is helping fund a variety of criminal activities, probably some of the ones I mentioned earlier that are unrelated to drug crimes per se. It's helping to fund the broader sale of harder and much more serious drugs. It's helping to fund the importation of illegal tobacco—so-called chop-chop, which is the colloquial term for it.

Again, you come into this place and you think: do these people live in the real world? We hear these speeches, and they seem so disconnected. I mean, I just have to go down to my kids' sports and talk to the dads and mums. Some of them smoke. I'd say to other senators here, go and ask those parents where they get their smokes from. Where do they buy them from? Maybe they won't tell you honestly if they know you're a senator, but I think generally people don't care. Almost everyone to a man where I live now doesn't pay 50 bucks a pack; they're not doing that. They go and pay $15 or $20 a pack at different stores. It's all under the table; it's not seen. We see that in the government revenue in tobacco excise, which is falling off a cliff. Smoking rates aren't falling off a cliff anymore; they've somewhat plateaued. But that revenue is falling off a cliff, because everybody's just going to buy the illegal tobacco, because we've allowed this black market to grow, and we think that continuing a failed strategy is somehow going to fix it. It's not. We should look to replicate the success we've clearly achieved with a balanced approach which allows adults to be free in a regulated market and to put all our resources into educating our children—into keeping vapes away from kids and cracking down on anybody who supplies them to young children. That should be a criminal offence—we actually all agree with that, I think—and we should make the penalties very severe.

I welcomed the announcement today that a Liberal-National government will see common sense on this issue and adopt the same types of regulation that almost every other developed country in the world has—countries like us: New Zealand, the UK and some states in the US. The US, of course, has a very different system, with lots of different approaches across their country. But, basically, we need to have a system that replicates the success we've had with smoking rates: one which regulates vape products; makes sure we get rid of these ridiculous flavours and attractions to young children; sells them in reputable shops, behind cabinets and without advertising; and keeping them away from our children. That just seems to be complete common sense here. It's hard to see why we would go any other way.

I suppose there's some hope that we'll end up getting to this environment now, with one side of politics adopting this as our policy. The other side of politics is now descending into a complete shambles on this issue—an absolute shambles. A dog's breakfast has now emerged, with the government saying they want to have a prescription model for vapes. Over the last few months, the last year, they were going to require everyone to go to the doctor to get a prescription, take that to the pharmacy and get their vapes that way. But just this week—overnight, really—they announced that no, they're going to walk away from that model and have some other model that we don't really know too much about yet, but vapes will just be available over the counter from pharmacists. We're now going to have the absurd situation in next few months, over most of winter and a little bit of early spring—from 1 July through to October, I believe—where people will need a prescription to buy vapes from a pharmacy. For those three months you'll need a prescription. You'll have to go to the doctor, get your prescription, go to the pharmacy and fill it. That will be the law of the land for those three months. Then, in October, when late spring and summer hit—over Christmas, when you end up on holidays—you won't need a prescription anymore. You'll be able to go to the pharmacist and get one over the counter. You'll have to have some kind of discussion with the pharmacist, apparently—I'm not sure if you'll have to do that every time or what the situation is; it's not clear. Hopefully, you'll have to show your ID, because schedule 3, which it's going into, is actually available to kids over 16, so they had better fix that issue! It's going to be completely different.

I think the citizens of this country deserve to have a government that can at least clearly explain what the law is so that people can abide by it. That's just the basic expectation you'd think the Australian people have. I think that most of the people who vape—that mum I spoke to years ago and most people who have to do this—want to abide by the law. They don't want to be criminals, but this government is making people into criminals because the government has presided over a complete and utter mess in this policy area—of their own making. It's a complete mess! We're going to vote on this today and they're going to change the law in a few months time through changes they haven't brought to this place—we haven't seen the scheduling changes. This is ridiculous! And how do they expect Australians to be able to comply with the law? Are they going to prosecute people in July, August and September if they don't have a prescription? They might say, 'Hang on, we just saw an announcement from the health minister which said you don't need a prescription.' It will be: 'No, that doesn't start until October; you didn't read the fifth paragraph of the media release. You're in trouble!'

I can't believe we're doing this. Why don't we just drop this right now? This bill is not really needed; it doesn't actually deal with nicotine products, which is what the government seems to be very concerned about. It deals with products that deliver nicotine but which aren't actually related to nicotine. As I said, there are already laws against that. Don't believe the spin we're getting; there are already laws against the availability of liquid nicotine. We're not going to fight this right now because it's completely pointless; this particular policy is not going to last. But why doesn't the government drop this and come up with the commonsense approach to this issue that Australians want? They want to comply with the law, they want to manage their own health issues, including some addictions to smoking, and to make their lives better through their own choices.

Obviously, the government has shown with their chopping and changing in approach over that the last few years that they should never be responsible for the direct health of individual Australians. We should give them the power to look after their own health and make the law clear for everybody to abide by.