Kerrynne Liddle (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Child Protection and the Prevention of Family Violence) Share this | Hansard source

It's always been illegal to sell vapes and e-cigarettes to minors. Vapes are, of course, addictive, and their contents are often a mystery box to their users. The level of nicotine in one vape can equal the nicotine in fifty cigarettes. I'm not going to go over too much why vapes are bad for your health, bad for your pockets, bad for the environment and simply bad—think cancer, think lung scarring, think poisoning and think addiction. My focus is on why the Labor government's response to this product is bad too. It's a typical response from this Labor government and the Australian Greens: a big announcement but with little likely impact.

With a kaleidoscope of colours and flavours such as peach, grape and lemonade, vapes are packaged and marketed to audiences to entice young people. It is shameful but sadly successful. In fact, curiosity was the reason for vaping given by 73 per cent of respondents aged 15 to 24 in the National Drug Strategy Household Survey. The outcome of the increase in vaping and e-cigarettes and the delay by this government in delivering this bill has been significant takeup, more nicotine addiction and, of course, in the last 12 months, a significant increase in organised crime.

It's the story everywhere. In my home state of South Australia, statistics revealed just last week showed that 15 per cent of school-aged students, aged 12 to 17 years old, used an e-cigarette at least once during the past month. That is 2.4 per cent higher than it was in 2017.

Nationally, there has been a sixfold increase in the use of vapes by youth aged 15 to 24 since 2019. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare states that 13 per cent of Australians aged 15 to 24 currently using e-cigarettes were not smoking regular cigarettes in 2022 or 2023. Parents I talk to tell stories, relayed through their children, of kids as young as 11 and 12 hiding out in the school toilets to satisfy what may already be, but will surely eventually be, a vaping addiction. Walk down any stairwell in any Australian CBD and take a closer look at the street gutters; you will see vape cartridges just about everywhere. The illicit trade in South Australia, and no doubt across our nation, is enormous. An eight-week blitz last year took more than 4,000 illegal vapes off South Australian streets, and 12 Adelaide businesses were fined. That was in eight weeks. In January more than 13 tonnes of disposable vapes were seized in Adelaide. That illegal haul was the equivalent of 30 grand pianos.

I'm interested in all Australians being protected equally where it can be done and reducing harm generally, but, as shadow minister for child protection, I think this discussion is of particular importance because of those who are more likely to be disproportionately affected when it fails to deliver the outcomes that the Labor Party and the Australian Greens intended it to deliver. Use of e-cigarettes has increased among priority populations in Australia in recent years, including among low-socioeconomic-status groups, people who haven't finished high school, the unemployed, regional Australians and those who identify as LGBTQIA+. People with a mental health condition are about twice as likely to currently use e-cigarettes—12.3 per cent, compared with 5.8 per cent of people without a mental illness being diagnosed.

The coalition has also been clear from the get-go that our priority is to protect Australian children from the harms of vaping and e-cigarettes. While there are arguments for the therapeutic benefits of vapes, the selling of nicotine vapes through chemists is not an answer to stopping illegal vapes reaching our shores and our children. Last I looked, chemists are not tobacconists. They have been blindsided by this Australian Greens and Labor government coalition. It is under this Albanese Labor government that a thriving and dangerous black market has grown, and with that growth there has been a flourishing criminal element associated with that black market. State and territory governments can definitely do better to apply the law, because clearly it's not being adequately applied right now. Of course, the Commonwealth—that would be the Albanese government—must do more and can do more. It's allocation for law enforcement is nowhere near enough under this model.

It is illegal to buy a nicotine vape without a prescription. That has always been the case—and I have to say it again—yet only around 10 per cent of vapers buy their product legally through prescriptions. That's the reality of this challenge, and it's not addressed in this bill. Labor's prohibition-style approach plays straight into the hands of those organised crime syndicates and triads who are already profiting from this lucrative illegal trade. This bill amends the Therapeutic Goods Act 1989—or the TGA Act, as most people would know it—to ban the importation, domestic manufacture, supply, commercial possession and advertisement of single-use, disposable and non-therapeutic vapes. It preserves patient access to therapeutic vapes for smoking cessation and the management of nicotine dependence where clinically appropriate. However, as Labor senators have admitted, teachers do not want to police vapes in schools, just as chemists have reacted by saying they don't want to sell vapes. You would have known that if you had asked them. Chemists do not want to sell e-cigarettes and vapes beside essential medicines like Panadol and Nurofen. It's just not the right product mix. As my Senate colleague Senator Kovacic said: 'Why wouldn't you put it with other cigarette products and treat it the same?' It's all nicotine. That's the dangerous part. That's the common part in all of this. I don't get why you don't get it.

The coalition won't stand in the way of passing this bill and supports aspects of it, but fundamentally it's a flawed model. Firstly it bans predatory and dangerous single-use disposable vaping products popular with children, because those single-use products specifically target them. That's a good thing. Secondly the bill creates one single framework under the TGA for the regulation of all vaping products, regardless of their nicotine content, and the coalition would do the same in our strictly regulated retail model, if elected.

But there are some really dumb elements of this bill. This government has already failed to establish or fund its promised illicit tobacco and vaping commissioner. But Australians are getting used to broken promises and disappointment under this government. Currently the vaping black market is estimated to be around $1 billion, which is fuelled by the importation of more than 100 million illicit disposable devices each year. We've all seen the firebombings—the extortion tactics targeting tobacco and vaping retailers. It is yet another failure on national security under this Albanese Labor government that that hasn't been addressed. This Albanese government has failed to adequately explain how they will ensure enforcement measures are properly funded, not just at the border but also at the point of sale, and how they will measure the success or the failure of this policy.

Of course, the coalition government approach would be different to this one. It would introduce a strictly regulated retail model for vaping products under the TGA to put a stop to dodgy retailers selling vapes with impunity through the rampant black market to Australian children. A coalition government would provide 10 times more funding towards law enforcement than Labor through a new $250 million law enforcement package. This funding would be used to stand up an illegal tobacco and vaping taskforce, led by the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Border Force, to tackle illegal vapes from the border to the shopfront, because that's what's actually needed. This model would include a licensing scheme, prevention campaigns and strong enforcement efforts as part of a sensible approach to keep money out of the hands of criminals while stopping the sale of vapes to children. Our regulated approach would also address the dangerous and unknown chemicals that are contained in illegal vapes by placing strict requirements on safety and quality.

Naive Australians thinking of taking up vapes might think that, just because it's in a chemist or just because it's in a shop, it must be okay for you, on the basis that it's been allowed into this country. That's why looking more at what's in the vapes is equally important. European and Western countries already know that a regulated model is in the best interests of both public health outcomes and law enforcement, because they're already doing it. We all agree that this needs to be addressed, but this approach by this Labor-Greens coalition just won't work. It does not set up for or do the real work of cracking down on crime that will stop the illegal vapes from crossing our borders and coming into the hands of our children.

Vapes, as I mentioned earlier, should be regulated in the same way as cigarettes. The model is there, and the model has worked to reduce the smoking of cigarettes over decades and decades. I don't suggest that anybody hold their breath for this Labor-Greens alliance approach, because it won't do the job that it could or it should do. Australian parents and children have been sold short by this model. It could be so much better than what has been presented by the Australian Greens and the Albanese Labor government in this bill.