Ross Cadell (NSW, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As stated earlier by Senator Ruston, the coalition is supporting the Public Health (Tobacco and Other Products) Bill 2023 for what's in it and the harm minimisation scheme, but I want to talk today about what's not in it.

It seems that this government and the minister have decided to, in Douglas Adams's words, paint it pink and put an SEP filter—a somebody else's problem filter—on the problem of harm minimisation for tobacco. This makes it tough for big tobacco—it does. A health warning is going to be printed on every cigarette packet. There's going to be a reduction in flavours, and all sorts of things will be put on it. But what we're forgetting is that up to half of tobacco in Australia now is illegal. It is chop-chop. It's not a couple of guys out of West Wyalong growing a few plants and putting some out in the local market. It is big industry—just as big as big tobacco—in countries such as China and the countries of the Middle East, in tax-free zones. That's how they're looked at. They are producing tobacco, and gangs, not companies, are bringing it into the country and selling it. You can go down to a shop here. I don't smoke. I never smoked. I don't even know where to buy it. I bought Barnaby a pack in a campaign once. I asked for two packs and put 50 bucks on the table, and they laughed at me. So they're pretty expensive. I don't know what they're going for. But it is half the price you pay down at the local stores here.

This is what's going on. They've got this massive thing going on: 'Look at what we're doing to big tobacco. How tough are we? We're stopping this.' But the laws aren't applying to illegal tobacco. We've taxed tobacco to a point now where the profit motive to do this illegally—bring in illegal tobacco and sell it cheaply, or buy a pack from China or buy a pack of illegal stuff at your local thing—is there. We're not getting the statistics. You can't improve what you can't measure. I'm not sure that Mr and Mrs Organised Crime are getting their business activity statements in and putting, 'This is how many packets we sold last week.' I think their biggest problem is trying to deal with the cash—trying to find enough pokies to put the cash through and clean it. We can say all these great things: 'Aren't we good?' But are we doing this to fix a political problem for ourselves or doing it to fix a health problem for the country? I think this bill only does the first. It makes us look tough on what we're doing, without doing the real things.

What is the cost of doing business? If you get caught with a shipment of drugs or anything like that, you go to jail for a long time. Recently in Australia, those involved in importing a container full of illicit nicotine, $9 million worth on the street, got a $5,000 fine. That is the cost of doing business. I'm not sure you can get a speeding fine that high, but you can get a fine like that for many other things. That's just not right. This doesn't touch that. This doesn't touch the fact that there are now copy cigarettes that are so popular that there are copies of copy cigarettes. Fakers and wrong stuff are now being copied. You can go to any store down here. This is just like the movie The Untouchables. We don't want to address it because it's too hard. We have prohibited so much in Australia, but the flow is there and we just don't want to know. We get aspects of it: 'Smoking has reduced in Australia. Tobacco sales are down.'

We've got IGA members and all sorts of shops saying that they're selling less but they see their customers still smoking—smoking more, smoking different, smoking illegal. But what do we say? We say, 'Well done.' We say, 'Big tobacco, we showed you. Print the labels and the other things. Do that.' We have to do more on harm minimisation. It is the same with vaping. It is exactly the same as with nicotine. We don't touch that. We don't go near it in this bill. I have had people come to me and say that their kid would rather get detention for wearing their sports uniform to school all day than get changed in the bathroom, because there are people vaping in there all day, and he cops abuse. He'd rather get detention than cop that. That is where we're at, and what does this bill do about that? Nothing. Not a thing.

Who brings all these illegal vaping products in? Organised crime, again. It's getting to the point where we as a parliament are the protection racket for organised crime in Australia. We are the marketing arm. We make it so hard for the legal business, restricting them—when they have their board meetings and try and make things better—that organised crime is the beneficiary. And we are their enforcement arm. The decisions we make make their business model viable. They make it possible. And what do these people put in their products? We don't know. If any of these big tobacco companies do something wrong—they can't put a flavour bomb in the products now—there is action taken against them in court. Police do things. This parliament takes action. But what if organised crime does it? Nothing. There is no accountability, and we are driving people into the arms of this.

We need Kevin Costner and Sean Connery out there on the field again, finding these bad people, just like The Untouchables, and saying that it has to stop. It is here. When every OECD country in the world other than us and Turkiye say it is legal, it's the same problem they had in Chicago when Canada and Mexico were across the border: you can't stop what goes in. We heard in Queensland that there is arsenic, formaldehyde and all sorts of things in these vapes. What goes into tobacco? Where is it grown? How is it grown? In the countries it comes from, what they do is not illegal. These products are being produced legally and brought here illegally.

But 'How good,' we say, 'we've got a tobacco bill in front of us. We'll show big tobacco who's boss.' Good. Harm minimisation should be there. But what are we doing about the real problem? Half-price smokes are attractive to kids. Cheap vapes are available anywhere. I've made lots of Untouchables references, Acting Deputy President, but remember the scene where the taxidriver says, 'If you want to see alcohol, I'll show you where it is,' and he takes him to a pub, goes in and gets it straightaway? I've never smoked, never vaped, but 10 minutes from here I'm able to buy one with a card at a convenience store. It's the same for Chinese chop-chop.

So let's stop kidding ourselves and pretending that this bill does anything other than tighten things for the people who already obey the rules. With this bill, we're creating a bigger market for the illegal crime gangs. With this bill, we're creating a bigger market for those who prey on our youth and put things in their products that cause them harm. I bet you everything I've got that kids who fall sick with vapes aren't falling sick from things that are prescribed by a doctor and bought from New Zealand. They are falling sick from vapes accessed illegally.

And what about the taxpayer? It is estimated that there could be $6 billion in revenue from tax on the illegal tobacco market. In here, we throw numbers around willy-nilly. Six billion dollars is a lot. How many cops and Border Force security would $6 billion pay for, to make our kids safer? But that's not a concern, because we look tough. This legislation will be supported by us, because it's better than not supporting it, and it's better to make the legal products safer. But this government has to get real on all sorts of nicotine, both tobacco and vapes, and bring forward things that will make our schools safer, our streets safer and our kids safer. It should bring in things that will make a transition from tobacco dependency easier.

In the committee inquiry into this legislation, we spoke to police officers, and their morale is low because they see these things happening and they have very little ability to do anything. They can't police everyone with a vape.

Someone in Western Australia got arrested the other day, and there was an outcry. Step 30 metres either side of this chamber and you'll find people with vapes that were not purchased on prescription, but we pretend and pretend and pretend.

So let's get this done. Let's vote for this as quickly as we can so that we can get onto the real problems of the criminals, the gangs and the crime families that profit off the government being their protection arm and off the government making their business model.

David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to offer a brief contribution to the debate on the Public Health (Tobacco and Other Products) Bill 2023. This is an important bill and, clearly, a very important discussion. I enjoyed Senator Cadell's contribution.

While there's been a downward trend in daily tobacco smoking since 1991, it is still the leading cause of cancer in Australia. It contributes to 44 percent of the cancer burden in Australia and is estimated to cause the deaths of some 20,000 Australians per year. That's a lot of loss. That is a lot of mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, children and friends taken too early, sometimes in the prime of their lives. This amount of loss is devastating, and we rarely talk about it because of the stigma associated with smoking. We need to be doing more, not just to stop new generations from smoking but also to provide people with the support that they may need if they would like to quit. In saying that, I feel we all need to take a non-judgemental, supportive approach to quitting, supported by strong public health measures.

Australia has led the way for decades on tobacco control, and today we can boast one of the lowest smoking rates in the world. To give an example: our nation's plain-packaging reforms were world leading when they were first introduced. According to at least one government study, they led to a huge 25 per cent decline in smoking rates between 2012 and 2015. This bill doesn't just ensure a continuation of the plain-packaging rules, which would otherwise sunset next year; it also completely modernises our public health approach to tobacco. As we heard in the inquiry, this bill takes the best bits from every jurisdiction in the world and combines them into a single instrument aimed at making tobacco less appealing, less attractive and less addictive.

This bill will update and improve health warnings on tobacco products. It will restrict additives that make cigarettes more appealing, more attractive and more addictive. It will curtail the loopholes that allow big tobacco to skirt plain-packaging rules through the use of brand and variant names. It will require tobacco manufacturers to add health inserts into packs. It will improve compliance, and marketing and advertising laws. It will allow the government to require measures that make cigarette sticks unappealing, such as the use of coloured paper or warnings written on the sticks themselves. It will even ban the advertising of e-cigarettes for the first time. It is a comprehensive package of reforms, and I want to commend Minister Butler and the Department of Health and Aged Care for bringing this legislation forward and for prioritising public health. I will note my support for the investments the minister is also making in public health measures to complement this legislation, including the funding that is being provided to re-establish a national tobacco TV campaign.

I want to raise an issue that has troubled me throughout the consideration of this bill, and that is the conduct of witnesses at the inquiry—specifically, the conduct of both the Australian Association of Convenience Stores and Master Grocers Australia. During the inquiry, both the chair and I put questions on notice relating to their financial ties with the tobacco and vaping industries. Australia has international obligations to diminish the political influence of the tobacco industry in the interests of protecting our tobacco control policies from the influence of big tobacco. The questions were highly relevant so that we, as senators and as the Senate, could be vigilant against any disguised motivations from parties with a financial stake in the tobacco industry. Both groups refused to answer these questions.

We have the right to ask these questions, and we are empowered to do so. We also have the right to expect honest answers. Their refusal to answer these basic questions on their financial relationships with the tobacco and vaping industries shows disrespect to this chamber which I believe borders on contempt. I would urge the chamber to take action on this, as failing to do so diminishes the inherent authority of the Senate and its ability to ask questions that others may find inconvenient. We cannot accept hidden influence from the tobacco industry, and we must question it if we suspect that there is this influence.

Shortly I will be moving a second reading amendment that calls on all politicians and political parties to stop accepting donations from tobacco companies and, importantly, to revoke their access to this building. There is obviously no transparency around who holds sponsored passes to access Parliament House, but we know big tobacco do wander these halls, presumably to find choice moments to bump into their mates and to give them copies of the latest talking points. This is why we desperately need transparency around which lobbyists hold access to this building. I bet, if big tobacco knew their names would become public, they would be handing back their passes. They would be doing that because we all know that it is completely outside the public interest for big tobacco to be in this building. If they are, then we should know who is here and how they got access. In 2023 no politician or political party should be accepting donations from big tobacco. I find it disgraceful that an industry that has caused so much despair in our community could be allowed to curry favour with politicians by making donations. I'm certain they don't make these donations with the expectation that they'll get nothing in return. Those donations almost certainly assist with access and therefore assist with influence over people in this chamber and in the other place, in direct conflict with our obligations under the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. This is the only convention that we are party to that covers lobbying. The arrangements, to me, seem pretty loose in Parliament House. I'd urge the major parties to take this more seriously and align it with what I'm hearing are expectations from Australians—from the people that we represent.

Finally, I want to speak briefly on vaping. It's not the subject of this bill, but the two are clearly related. I'm pleased the government is bringing forward reforms. I've heard from too many parents here in the ACT who are concerned about their children, some of them young children, and their friends vaping. They are rightly scared about these extremely addictive products, with some of the disposable vapes reportedly containing levels of nicotine that are dangerous to young lungs, not being regulated and children being addicted in their early teens. I do have questions about the reforms that are coming forward. I want to be sure that we're not leaving people without the support that they may need. I want to be sure there is a plan and there are options for people that would like assistance in moving off nicotine. Again, I would like to acknowledge the work of Minister Butler, his staff and the department in bringing forward this legislation. A package this comprehensive would have been the labour of dozens of public servants working behind the scenes across multiple departments and agencies, so I thank you for all of your work on this.

There are a range of investments that have been made to complement this legislation, and I know there are many advocates and many stakeholders who will be keeping an eye on that funding to ensure programs and campaigns do come to fruition. I hope this will all reach the very worthy goal of cutting daily smoking to five per cent or below by 2030, as stated in the National Tobacco Strategy 2023-2030. We can do it. As we travel this renewed phase in tobacco control, let's keep in mind the need to treat everyone with understanding and with dignity. Stigma is clearly counterproductive to our goals on tobacco control. I commend this bill to the Senate.

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

I'm only seeking to make a brief contribution to this debate and I won't be going through all the measures in the bills that have been well covered by Senator Pocock and other senators before me. I just want to say very clearly here today that the bills before us are about saving lives. Tobacco kills. We have known this fact for so long. The first warning signs of tobacco and its impact emerged in the 1600s and it was around 100 years ago that the link between lung cancer and smoking first emerged. Yet despite all that we have known for so long, tobacco remains our country's leading cause of preventable death and disability, killing an estimated 20,000 Australians each year. Despite all we know, smoking rates remain too high in our community for a range of reasons. They are too high for members of our community who cannot afford the costs and the impacts of tobacco smoking and nicotine addiction. Despite having been regulatory leaders around the world under the previous Labor government, now our regulatory framework for tobacco simply isn't keeping up and, on top of that, the regulatory framework is messy.

Our current tobacco related measures are split across as many as eight different laws, regulations, instruments and court decisions. The government's own legislation prohibiting certain forms of tobacco advertising is now 30 years old. But worst of all, our current framework is lacking in ambition. This bill advances the reform agenda Nicola Roxon championed a decade ago but which was left to fall to the wayside by the former government, a reform agenda that was dubbed by then shadow health minister Mr Peter Dutton as a bridge too far. The reforms weren't a bridge too far; they were courageous and visionary reforms and an example of where bold policy reform cannot only improve lives but save them and where Australia can lead the world.

Since then, 26 countries have followed Australia's example. It is now time to catch up. It is now time to go further. This is a matter of life and death. We must reduce uptake of smoking, particularly among young people. Quitting is bloody hard. I know just how hard it is and I don't want a single young person in our country to ever have to go through that. They shouldn't be going through that given all we know. These reforms matter and, like with any progressive change, there are going to be some loud voices opposing what we want to do. We have already seen it in the committee inquiry into this bill, which I chaired.

The evidence we received as a committee was overwhelmingly clear and obvious. There was a huge support from public health experts, stakeholders and advocates for the measures contained in these bills, because these are no-brainers. The harm caused by tobacco is as obvious as it is devastating and it is this harm that we are trying to address with these bills. But there was some opposition and it came from exactly where you would expect to find it—the tobacco industry and those they work so closely with. At this point I want to make it absolutely clear that the behaviour on display by some witnesses throughout the course of our inquiry was unacceptable to our committee and it was unacceptable to me as chair. Two witnesses in particular showed what I believe to be a blatant disregard for transparency and for the Senate committee process, not to mention a lack of understanding of Australia's obligations under article 5.3 of the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

The Australian Association of Convenience Stores and Master Grocers Australia failed to answer questions put by me and by Senator Pocock regarding their conflicts of interest despite being told that this would be requested of them immediately prior to their attendance at one of our public hearings. As we have outlined in our report, our committee considers the refusal by witnesses to answer these questions in full coupled with their apparent lack of understanding of article 5.3 deeply concerning. Transparency is essential to our work in legislative scrutiny. I can assure such groups that our committee will be taking these issues very, very seriously when it comes to any future legislative review we may be undertaking in this space. I am sure there will be much more work in this space because this is a matter of life and death. Australia has been a world leader in tobacco regulation and reform before. Under the Albanese Labor government we will be world leaders again. I commend these bills to the Senate.

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

I rise to speak on the Public Health (Tobacco and Other Products) Bill 2023. Without addressing the growing black market and the evidence that the sale of illegal products is a significant problem, this bill is significantly and abjectly lacking. The evidence is that smoking is decreasing but e-cigarettes and vapes are increasing. A few weeks ago in Adelaide, I walked into a stairwell in which there were so many discarded vape cartridges that it was difficult not to step on one. We know children are, unfortunately, taking up e-cigarettes or vaping in increasing numbers.

The key purpose of the bill is to consolidate existing Commonwealth tobacco legislation into a single act. This bill updates and improves graphic health warnings on packaging; requires health promotion inserts in packs and pouches; captures e-cigarettes in advertising restrictions; standardises the size of tobacco packets and products; prevents the use of specified ingredients in tobacco products; standardises the design and look of filters in cigarettes; limits the use of appealing brand and variant names that imply reduced harm; introduces reporting requirements for the tobacco industry to disclose tobacco product ingredients, tobacco product sales volumes and promotional activities; and restricts the use of flavours and additives. These are all worthy initiatives, and the coalition supports these initiatives, but we seek to strengthen the penalties for those who participate in the illegal trade in tobacco products. The Labor government believes the black market issue sits outside the bill and this inquiry, yet at the same time it suggests these initiatives will also be a stronger deterrent for illegal tobacco activities. I can't see how that works when the starting point of illegal and black market suppliers is not to play by the rules.

The illegal trade in tobacco not only deprives retailers of business but also undermines public health initiatives put in place by consecutive governments to discourage people from taking up smoking and continuing to smoke. The National Tobacco Strategy 2023-2030 and the minister talk about laws, regulations and instruments being convoluted, outdated and full of loopholes, yet this bill fails to adequately address the illegal tobacco trade. This illegal trade should be at front of mind. The bill seeks to regulate advertising and promotion of e-cigarettes but does not address the issue of availability and supply.

These days we are all aware of the damage to a person's health that smoking causes, as outlined by the World Health Organization. Tobacco smoking remains the leading preventable cause of death and disease in Australia, and it claims the lives of around 24,000 Australians each year. As I'm sure all in the chamber are aware, smoking leads to a wide range of diseases, including many types of cancers, heart disease and stroke, chest and lung illnesses, and stomach ulcers. Yet still more than one in 10 Australians over 18 years of age smoke, and many of these people are in low-socioeconomic demographics.

If you want to close the gap in life expectancy, reducing tobacco in Indigenous communities will go a long way to doing that. Overall, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are almost three times as likely to smoke as non-Indigenous Australians. Tobacco use within this cohort has substantially reduced over a 10-year period, but it still causes 37 per cent of all First Nations deaths, including 50 per cent of deaths among those aged 45 years and over, and is directly responsible for one-third of cancer and cardiovascular disease.

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners tells us that women who smoke are at significantly greater risk of developing smoking related disease than men. Women are also at risk of pregnancy related complications due to smoking and have more difficulty quitting. Supporting women to stop smoking during pregnancy can reduce the adverse outcomes for mothers and their babies.

The rising cost of living is affecting all Australians, but obviously those being impacted hardest are people on limited incomes, and a high proportion of this group of people are cigarette smokers.

With the average cost of a packet of 25 cigarettes today between $50 and $60, there is a heightened incentive for those involved in the illegal trade in tobacco to target people who still want to smoke and are also looking to save money in this cost-of-living crisis. We can all say give it up, which I too would advocate, but many reformed smokers will tell us that it is one of the hardest things to do. That is why it is still so important to continue to have the public health programs and warnings about the impact of smoking. These public programs require taxpayer funds. I am sure that all in this chamber support the aim of this bill to enhance the effectiveness of Australia's tobacco control framework, which is fundamental to the Australian public health. All governments have been proactive in providing support for smoking cessation programs and services, including nicotine replacement therapy and support helplines. This multifaceted approach has been instrumental in reducing tobacco consumption.

I return now to the substantial gap, largely ignored, in this bill. There is rampant and growing illegal tobacco trade in our country. Labor is largely ignoring the black market. In August this year, according to a Financial Review article, the Master Grocers Australia chief executive, David Inall, said illicit tobacco was a significant concern for its 2,700 members, which are mostly independent grocery and liquor stores, including the IGA chain. He was quoted as saying that for his members, 'There is no doubt it is the biggest issue that we are currently facing in terms of downward pressure on store owners nationally.' Recently, it was reported in the Financial Review that the Australian Border Force had 'seized just under a billion illegal cigarettes worth $1.1 billion in forgone tax over the past two years'. In fact, the illicit tobacco taskforce has:

… confiscated more than 1.5 billion cigarettes since it was established in 2018-19. Along with tonnes of illegal loose-leaf tobacco, this has amounted to almost $1.8 billion in evaded duty, according to documents obtained by the Australian Financial Review under freedom of information.

This illegal black market trade poses a serious threat to public health, government revenue and the very objectives that this public health bill seeks to achieve. While the bill focuses on imposing penalties for noncompliance with illegal tobacco regulations, it falls short when it comes to deterring and penalising those involved in the illicit tobacco trade. The penalties for engaging in this illegal activity remain largely unchanged, even in the face of the growing threat that it presents. These illegal networks operate with relative impunity. The availability of cheaper, unregulated tobacco products encourages smokers to continue their habit or entices potential new users, defeating the public health measures and their purpose, such as excise taxes and plain packaging laws.

With the added pressures from the rising cost of living, more people will be tempted to seek out cheap cigarettes. This illicit trade also results in significant revenue losses for the government—funds that could otherwise be directed towards essential public services. This figure, according to various sources, is now in the billions. It continues to grow and it continues to be unacceptable. The illegal tobacco trade often involves organised crime and money laundering, contributing to a broader range of criminal activities. We consider that significantly increasing penalties associated with illegal tobacco trade should be given appropriate consideration. This not only serves as a deterrent but also allows for more effective legal action against those involved in the illicit activity. We are not alone in that and I share some submissions. The Police Federation of Australia held that this bill's intent:

… will be undermined and not achieved unless the government has a concerted effort to attack the proliferation of illicit tobacco and vape products currently readily available to the public.

Philip Morris states, in reference to the black market:

… this simply cannot be achieved if one sizeable component of the tobacco market (illicit) is being ignored and allowed to grow at an exponential rate.

And from the Australian Medical Association:

The AMA supports in-principle strong compliance and enforcement of the Act. All governments should ensure that compliance and enforcement is adequately resourced, noting the scale and complexity of current illicit tobacco and e-cigarette markets.

They all seem to know and recognise that there's a problem with the illegal tobacco market. The Australian Association of Convenience Stores represents some 7,000 convenience stores across the nation, and it has stated:

There have been over 41 illegal-tobacco-related arson attacks and two associated murders in the past year. Nearly one in four cigarettes sold in Australia are from the black market, costing taxpayers more than $4 billion a year. Despite the retail sale of nicotine vaping products being banned for over two years now, the number of adult vapers in Australia has increased by 340 per cent over the past five years to over 1.6 million adults, of which 92 per cent are buying products illegally.

Coordinated efforts between law enforcement agencies, border control and other relevant authorities are essential to dismantle illegal tobacco networks actively. Given the global nature of the illegal tobacco trade, international collaboration with countries where these products are manufactured or trafficked is also crucial. Importantly, comprehensive data and research on the scale of the illegal tobacco trade in Australia is needed to inform policy decisions effectively.

Coalition and Labor governments have consistently raised tobacco excise taxes as a means of reducing the affordability of smoking, therefore creating a practical disincentive and an added reason to stop smoking. Both sides of politics have had commitments to addressing the critical public health issue of reducing smoking in the Australian community. We all want to see smoking reduced in the Australian community. It is, of course, good for the country; it's good for those smoking; and it's even good for those who aren't smoking but are affected by the cost and health impacts of smoking.

This bill talks about consolidating, streamlining and modernising Australia's tobacco control framework, yet it fails to confront the here and now, and that is the illegal tobacco trade that is right in front of us. It was clear in the stairwell there's a problem. It is therefore tinkering with the existing control framework. Tinkering is not good enough. It will not have the necessary significant impact on reducing smoking rates or access to tobacco products. The coalition supports the aim of this legislation, but in not dealing with the issue of the illegal tobacco trade this bill is clearly a missed opportunity by Labor—yet again—to protect Australian families and Australian children from tobacco and the illegal tobacco industry.

Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today's debate is an important opportunity to talk about public health and the harmful impacts that tobacco has on consumers of these products, but I'd like to talk about the environmental impact of the tobacco industry today. I will perhaps start with a question to senators here: do they know what is the most common item of litter on the planet, by individual item? I've probably given a slight clue to that—it's cigarette butts. They are the most common item of litter on the planet. Estimates suggest that up to 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are discarded into the environment every year. They are easily carried in stormwater run-off through drainage systems and eventually to local streams, rivers and waterways. Tobacco producer Philip Morris International acknowledges that it can take up to 15 years for a single cigarette butt to break down. During this process of degradation, thousands of plastic microfibres are created and released into the environment.

I remember when we had a groundbreaking Senate inquiry five or six years ago into marine plastics. The report was titled Toxic tide. We had a demonstration from a scientist, who had a glass of water filled with cigarette butts in various levels of decomposition.

They actually can look like little jellyfish. They have little plastic tendrils in them. People might think cigarette butts themselves don't have plastic in them, but they do. They have a lot of microplastic in them, so they're actually one of the most dangerous items of litter that we find on our beaches and in our oceans.

Believe me, I have done many beach clean-ups and other clean-ups in my time—too many to count, and I have picked up too many cigarette butts to count. So I would believe the current littering rates derived from these clean-ups, and, based on these rates and the average weight of a cigarette butt, it can be estimated that at least 350,000 tonnes of plastic tobacco filters end up in waterways globally each year. Personally, I think that's an underestimate. With 15 years of litter accumulating, up to 5.3 million tonnes of cigarette butts could currently be in Australia's waterways. According to WWF, up to nine billion plastic cigarette butts are discarded and washed into waterways in Australia each year. That's just in Australia. Each year, Clean Up Australia records butts as the single most reported litter item across Australia. In 2020, cigarette butts represented 16 per cent of all litter reported across the Clean Up Australia database around the country.

When littered into the environment, each butt can contaminate up to 40 litres of water. Significant threats that cigarettes pose to the Great Barrier Reef—as has been well noted by Tangaroa Blue and other groups that do fantastic work up there cleaning up plastic—include reduced water quality, marine debris and microplastics, to which cigarette butts are obviously a major contributor. So action on tackling environmental pollution from cigarettes will protect the health of both our people and planet.

The second reading amendment which I understand my excellent colleague Senator Steele-John has foreshadowed that the Greens will be moving asks the Senate and the government to support a ban on single-use plastic film and tear strips in tobacco packaging, which is another significant source of litter from the cigarette industry. It also seeks support to mandate the use of recycled and recyclable cardboard in cigarette packaging. These actions would go some way to tackling the impacts that tobacco products have on our environment, including our waterways, coastlines and oceans. If we look at an average of 25 cigarettes per pack, just under 720 million packs could be bought by Australian consumers annually. With these packs being covered in non-recyclable cardboard and plastic tear strips, they are, of course, totally unrecyclable and give the feeling of something nice and new when you open the cigarette pack. We need to have a solution to dealing with that single-use plastic. There's certainly no regulation around it at all at the moment.

I want to give a special shout-out to the environmental advocacy group No More Butts in the Senate today for all the great work that they do. While I'm on that page, I'd also like to give a shout-out to other groups like the Surfrider Foundation, who also coordinate fantastic beach clean-ups. So does the Sea Shepherd marine debris group. Every day and every weekend around the nation, there's a Sea Shepherd group out there doing clean-ups. I also acknowledge Take 3 for the Sea and a whole range of other fantastic groups that are doing the hard work and providing the data for us. No More Butts estimate that in Australia up to 355 million packs could be littered each and every year, with an additional 300 million ending up in landfill. Think of all that single-use plastic film and non-recyclable cardboard piling up. It truly boggles the mind.

So the fight to end cigarette butt pollution for good will continue, and that work is urgent. But we must take available steps when the opportunity arises, and this bill and the second reading amendment circulated by the Greens present us with an opportunity to progress action on this issue. Cigarette butts, plastic bags and single-use plastic bottles are the three most common types of rubbish found on the Great Barrier Reef. It's time to end the age of single-use plastics. We need to recycle waste in the first place, and this starts at the design phase of packaging. Designing out harmful materials like single-use plastic film and tear strips in cigarette packs, the research that's going into alternatives for cigarette butts, and ensuring cigarette cartons are recycled and recyclable are concrete actions that can be taken at the design stage to eliminate waste in the first place.

But of course, as with any other problematic plastic waste—and, believe me, we have a lot of it in this country—the corporations that actually create this waste then hand over the responsibility for that waste, once those products are sold, to retailers and then on to consumers. No corporation is going to fix this unless they have to.

That's another thing we have learnt from 20 years of failed product-stewardship schemes around packaging in this country. We see, when we look especially at single use plastic packaging, that we've had many aborted attempts, using industry-led volunteer schemes, to reduce that waste that have been a complete failure. The current Albanese government is dealing with this issue right now.

I do applaud the previous government for taking steps towards improving recycling in this country. But—because, of course, the Greens introduced a bill to do this, back in 2020—they wouldn't go so far as to actually mandate required standards for things like recyclable content and the elimination of problematic single-use plastics.

Single-use plastics aren't just problematic because we find them in our oceans, where they kill marine life and break down into trillions of pieces of microplastic—and we are finding microplastic in plankton in the Antarctic right now; it is all through our ecosystem. It's not just that that is the problem. Plastics are a problem because we're also exploring for petroleum products, which are used to make plastic. In fact, plastic is one of the biggest sinks for fossil fuels on this planet, and, as we've forecast a continued rise in plastic production and consumption, of course we're going to see continued efforts and pressures to explore for fossil fuels that we don't need. So there are many reasons we need to remove plastics.

Designing these products is really the key. I've been working on this for years. We had two Senate inquiries into it. The report of the second one, which was great, was called Never waste a crisis. That actually laid the foundation for the Greens' private member's bill—and also for the government's legislation, which is the first time in nearly 15 years that we've had some reform to the waste and recycling industry. Those two inquiries did a lot of work in looking at what we need do. To make it really simple: we need to force corporations to do this. I think most Australians would agree with having government step in and manage the externality—that is, something that is having an external effect—from the production of these products.

Apart from climate change, there is probably no bigger pollution issue on this planet than plastics in our environment. It really comes down to government saying to businesses: 'If you use plastic in your products, it needs to stay in what we call the circular economy. Waste should be eliminated. Things that are in your products should be recyclable.' It makes sense, on so many levels, to recycle these products or reuse them or repair them and so on—the whole waste hierarchy.

It concerns me—may I say, while I have the opportunity today—that there is a big push on around this nation, right now, to simply burn, to incinerate, plastics. We're seeing pressure on local and state governments and the federal government to encourage the use of incinerators. While those incinerators may be slightly higher up the waste hierarchy from landfill, they're not much higher. And, of course, they produce toxic chemicals, which go into the environment. Worse than that, they encourage the consumption and production of more plastic, more waste. Incineration of these kinds of waste products is not recycling; it is surrender to the exact business model that has failed us: letting corporations get away with producing this stuff without redesigning it.

We need to ensure a way forward for the recovery and treatment of existing plastic pollution and put in measured steps around design, awareness, waste management and source reduction, to prevent future mass pollution from occurring in terrestrial and marine environments. We have fantastic technologies out there now, and there are people trying to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, or the plastic gyre in the Pacific Ocean, for example, and we can take a lot of this plastic out. But every day the ocean continues to get filled with plastic from new sources.

Plastic is considered both toxic and unnecessary. It should be phased out at an accelerated rate, with adherence globally and without interference from big business and big tobacco.

Here in Australia, one million tonnes of Australia's annual plastic consumption is single use. There is another reason that we want to get rid of single-use plastics. Go ask the recycling industry what that reason is, and they'll tell you: it contaminates their waste stream and makes it really difficult for them to sort and get products into recycling streams. They have a waste stream at the MRF level, where the sorting occurs. With the kerbside collection, the stuff is put in a truck and then dumped at these sorting areas. Single-use plastic contaminates their waste stream and makes it really difficult and inefficient for them to recycle products that should be recycled, because they're contaminated by these single-use plastics. So there's actually a cost reduction factor for the recycling industry here as well.

It is the same story for mandating the use of recycled and recyclable cardboard for the packaging of cigarettes and tobacco related products. Each year, Australia puts approximately 130,000 tonnes of plastic into the marine environment. Only we, in places like this, can do something about this. That is the conclusion that I've drawn after nearly 20 years working in this area—the last 11 years in this place and a decade prior to that cleaning beaches, working with NGOs on this issue. Governments have a critical role to play here. I know there are some people in this place who aren't big on regulation, but this issue is so pervasive and so difficult to tackle. We have the most important job: telling corporations what they can and can't produce based on the pollution and how we tackle that pollution. Just a reminder for senators: it is estimated that, by 2050, plastic in the ocean will outweigh the biomass of fish. Obviously this is not acceptable. I commend to the Senate the amendment that the Greens will move to the second reading of this legislation:

At the end of the motion, add ", but the Senate:

(a) notes that:

(i) there are environmental, as well as public health, reasons to discourage the use of tobacco products,

(ii) cigarette butts are one of the three most common types of rubbish found in the Great Barrier Reef's marine environment, and

(iii) tobacco-related packaging products, like single-use plastic film and tear strips, pose a significant threat to the health of our oceans and waterways; and

(b) calls on the Government to:

(i) mandate the use of recycled and recyclable cardboard for retail cigarette packaging and cartons, and

(ii) ban the use of single-use plastic film and tear strips used in cigarette and tobacco-related product packaging".

I would love to have added cigarette butts to this. I did have a private member's bill to ban the 10 most common items of pollution that we find on our beaches. That did include cigarette butts. The EU did take some steps towards doing this but found that this is very difficult until we can find an alternative to cigarette butts. While I haven't included that in the second reading amendment, I would encourage the government to continue to put funds into research and development to assist the cooperative research centres and other avenues to make sure that we have alternative products and that corporations are forced by mandated regulations to redesign their products for end of life so they stay in a circular economy, they don't find their way into our oceans, they don't kill marine life and they don't litter our beaches.

Ralph Babet (Victoria, United Australia Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I never thought I would agree with anything that ever came out of the Greens, but I've got to say that I agree with Senator Whish-Wilson. We're going to have to do more to protect our oceans from plastic pollution. I definitely agree with that one. Who would have thought it? Hell must have frozen over. That's what must have happened.

Anyway, I rise here today to speak on yet more tobacco legislation, the Public Health (Tobacco and Other Products) Bill 2023 and the Public Health (Tobacco and Other Products) (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2023—more regulation, more red tape, more complexity, more pressure from unelected globalists. The government says that these reforms are necessary to ensure that Australia meets its obligations under the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. If the WHO asked the government to jump off a cliff, I dare say that the government would probably comply. If they didn't comply, the WHO would just amend their regulations to include a mandate on cliff jumping, and then they would comply; I'm sure of it.

I ask just one simple question to this government: is there an area, just one area, of a grown adult's life that you would be prepared to leave alone? Is there an act, a habit, a private comfort, that this government can allow private citizens without trying to legislate it or control it or just ban it outright?

This continual war on smokers is a classic example of nanny state overreach. That's what it is. Now, it's true that smoking is not good for your health. It's also true that many sensible citizens choose to smoke anyway, knowing full well the risks, and that's their right. They're grown adults. The desire by legislators to continually berate and penalise free people at every turn for making choices about their own lives is antiliberty and, ultimately, counterproductive. The government should be focused on safeguarding people's freedoms, not on monitoring them through every minute of the day lest they do, say or think something untoward. At the rate that we are going, free citizens will soon need permission from the state to get out of bed in the morning.

The more we tax tobacco, the more we regulate tobacco, the more we restrict the advertising of tobacco and the more we treat the community as infants, the more we create disdain for government and drive good people underground. Nowhere in the country is this more obvious than in my home state of Victoria. In Melbourne, as a result of the thriving black market, we've seen dozens of fire bombings in the past year alone. The road to black-market activity and the inevitable rise in crime is paved with good intentions.

The six words that Australians want to hear least from their government are 'but it's for your own good'. Daily smoking rates in Australia are among the lowest in OECD countries. As a nation we have communicated well the inherent risk in smoking and the undesirability of smoking, and as a result the number of smokers has fallen sharply over the past number of decades. According to the ABS, just one in 10 Australians smoke daily. Now, the antismoking message is clear, but in a free nation—if it's still a free nation—people must have the liberty to make their own choices without constant harassment from the government.

Gone are the days of 'more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette'. Today when you buy a packet you're bombarded with messages like, 'Smoking causes lung cancer,' 'Smoking causes mouth cancer,' 'Smoking causes blindness,' and everything else. We all know that smoking kills. We're told this whenever we purchase or consume these products. Cigarette packets must already display a statement and graphic that covers at least 75 per cent of the front; display a statement, graphic and explanatory message that covers at least 90 per cent per cent of the back; display an information message on one side; and use two sets of health warnings on rotation every 12 months.

This bill obviously goes even further: apparently a package insert and warnings on individual cigarettes. That's going to make all the difference! I'm sure that, once someone opens a packet, lights up a cigarette and puts it in their mouth, they're going to glance down and see 'smoking kills' written on that cigarette and immediately get the urge to quit smoking. That's what they're going to do—sure; no worries! I'm sorry to break it to you, guys: if a picture of mouth cancer or lung cancer on the front of a packet does not convince a smoker to quit, a little label on an individual cigarette will not convince them. The Australian people are not stupid. They can read. As adults—I'll keep saying it—they can make their own decisions.

Our nation would be far better off if the government focused attention where it's actually needed. How about this? How about we scrap the proposed IR changes and look to deregulate and loosen the pressure on small businesses and households, who are struggling to make ends meet? How about we drastically reduce the size of government and the bureaucracy which it supports? How about we scrap the unscientific ideology of net zero and unleash Australian coal and gas? Why don't you as a government remove the prohibition on nuclear energy? I'd support that. Why don't you cut all subsidies on so-called renewable energy and let the free market decide what the cheapest form of energy really is?

Why don't you spend less money and focus on reducing taxes, duties and levies? Why don't you implement policies designed to benefit hardworking nuclear families, like income splitting? Why don't you renegotiate bad international agreements that no longer benefit Australia and her interests? Scrap your high-taxing, overregulating agenda and get back to basics. Uphold the inalienable rights of an individual to live their life free of interference from the state.

David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to echo the contribution of my colleague Senator Steele-John on this second reading debate and indicate the Greens will be supporting the Public Health (Tobacco and Other Products) Bill 2023. We have seen extraordinary achievements in reducing tobacco use in Australia through concerted efforts at federal and state government levels, and those collective efforts of regulating in the public interest have saved thousands of Australian lives and extended the healthy lifespan of thousands of other Australians. But there's still more to be done. According to the Cancer Council, there are roughly two million Australians who still smoke regularly. Because of that, we can expect more than 20,000 Australians a year to die from tobacco related illness. Can we stay still when we see that? Obviously we can't. We need to step forward and regulate in the public interest. This is a global industry based around a series of large corporate players who literally profit off the deaths of millions of people across the world. It's one of the most noxious, least ethical industries on the planet, and for centuries it has traded in an addictive product, but for decades it has traded in a product that it knows kills its own customers. When you have an industry that knowingly seeks to expand its market with a product that it knows kills its own customers, of course we need to aggressively regulate that industry in the public interest. The Greens support this legislation, which is largely about consolidating, simplifying and clarifying the way in which federal legislation regulates tobacco.

The Public Health Association of Australia in their submission to this bill said:

It is essential that the Bill be understood as one component of the many-pronged National Tobacco Strategy. The Strategy sets the vision for reducing, and ideally eliminating, the harm caused by tobacco and associated products. The elements of this Strategy, including strong regulation, workplace safety measures, cessation support, information and behaviour change campaigns, revenue measures, approaches for priority populations including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and the protection of policy-making from commercial interference, are all interlocking and mutually supporting. The Strategy should remain a guiding framework for policy work through the current decade.

I think that submission, in a very neat paragraph, highlights the regulatory issues that are faced when any government seeks to move in this space. There is significant attempted commercial interference with policymaking. Companies like British American Tobacco and others have an ugly history of donating to politicians to try and prevent political pressure and to try and prevent regulation—literally buying their way out of regulation. They have an ugly history of producing pseudoscience and paying so-called experts to seek to discredit the public health findings of credible research papers that have clearly shown the link between tobacco, disease and death.

The tobacco industry in many ways wrote the book for how a noxious industry with billions of dollars of revenue can seek to undermine political action and can seek to discredit its opponents. We have seen many of the lessons learned by big tobacco being applied by the fossil fuel industry in its efforts to discredit the science on climate, to discredit the science on energy transition. You could almost see how big tobacco and the fossil fuel industry have come together to work out how to tear down public interest regulation and how to maintain their profits despite their industries causing global scale death and disease. You could put the tobacco and the fossil fuel industries in the same bucket in many instances. You will probably hear in contributions from the right of this chamber links to tobacco regulation and climate, and they will be playing out of the big tobacco playbook. They will try to discredit proponents for regulation. They will try to link—as we heard Senator Babet do—the science on tobacco with the science on climate change. That's what big tobacco has been doing for decades, trying to discredit the public interest science that underpins pretty much everything this bill is doing, which is regulate the use of tobacco to save people's lives.

I want to also acknowledge the work of my colleague Senator Whish-Wilson in identifying the environmental impacts as well as health impacts that come from this industry. The World Wildlife Fund estimates up to 8.9 billion cigarette butts are littered each year, most of them non-biodegradable. If you want to look at what the tobacco industry has traditionally put in filters, you could go back to the 1950s when the tobacco industry excelled itself on trying to come up with new ways of killing its customers by putting asbestos filters in cigarette products. Tobacco wasn't enough; nicotine wasn't not enough; they also wanted to get some cut-price asbestos into the cigarette filters. That's the tobacco industry for you. Of course, that waste stream that still continues to be created through non-bio degradable filters is found throughout our oceans, our waterways. The next round of regulation needs to be more aggressive in regulating that waste stream and standing again up to this toxic, nasty industry.

The Greens have always supported the critical need for a ban on donations from tobacco, alcohol and the pharmaceutical industries to political parties and candidates. This debate again shows why we need to do that. It is not enough for political parties to voluntarily give up tobacco donations. We need cessation support for politicians when it comes to tobacco donations, and the best form of cessation support would be a ban and a prohibition on any political party receiving donations from tobacco, alcohol or pharmaceutical industries, and I see your clear support for that Acting Deputy President Chandler. That of course is a missing link at a federal level. An industry based on killing people—like the tobacco industry—shouldn't be able to donate to politics because it will probably be trying to tear down public interest regulation of that industry. We should be able to unite on that.

The Greens support this model of careful, considered regulation of the industry. Of course, tobacco is one of the most dangerous and lethal drugs. It's right up there at the end of the spectrum of drugs that have a high chance of reducing your life, of increasing mortality and of seriously reducing quality of life.

It's one of the more noxious drugs. Yet we've come up with a compact, not to ban it, because we know that wouldn't work, but to seriously regulate it in the public interest. We also have regulations—probably fewer comprehensive regulations—around alcohol, another highly damaging drug that we know reduces people's life expectancy, creates a significant health burden and is, again, probably on the more dangerous end of the drug spectrum. But we acknowledge that banning alcohol would be a terrible mistake. We've seen examples in the history of the 20th century with the banning of alcohol in the United States and how that drove organised crime, an unregulated industry and an unsafe health response in the 1920s and 1930s in the United States. We've seen how banning these drugs can be dreadfully counterproductive, both on a crime level and on a public health level.

Meanwhile, this parliament seems perfectly content with banning much less harmful drugs, including cannabis. We can see the game plan about how useful it is to have public interest regulations for drugs. Cannabis, of course, is on the less harmful end of the spectrum. Why don't we urgently apply the lessons that we've slowly learned on alcohol and tobacco over the last decades to cannabis? Why don't we legalise cannabis, make a national, well-regulated legal market for cannabis, generate the billions and billions of dollars of public revenue that that would produce, put in place the health benefits that labelling, quality control and national regulation would provide and, at the same time, disempower organised crime and take billions of dollars away from bikie and outlaw motorcycle gangs? Why don't we just get on and do that in 2024, for cannabis? Let's just legalise cannabis, regulate it in the public interest, prohibit the big tobacco, alcohol and pharmaceutical industries from getting their teeth into the industry, and create tens of thousands of sustainable green jobs in this country in 2024? Let's pass this bill on tobacco, but let's get on to important, critical national work next year. Let's make 2024 the year we legalise cannabis as well.

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

The Public Health (Tobacco and Other Products) Bill 2023 and related bill are effectively housekeeping about the tobacco control frameworks in this country that have been widely supported for a number of decades and quite successful in lowering smoking rates across Australia. I certainly recognise how terrible smoking is to your health and how it's something that should not be encouraged. We should seek to minimise the numbers of people taking it up. I do agree, though, with the sentiment of the previous speaker that there's no way that we can really prohibit it. It's just a matter of minimising the harm.

I would say, though, that this bill, while it is housekeeping, is incomplete housekeeping. It's the sort of housekeeping you do when you take all the mess from around your house and chuck it in a few cupboards so that the guests don't notice it but you haven't really cleaned the house. It's going to become very dirty, very quickly with all your cupboards jammed full with your junk. This bill ignores the real issues that are occurring in the real world around the use of tobacco and related products, particularly e-cigarettes. Anybody who walks down the street can see the explosion of vape shops and vaping across the country, but this bill basically does nothing about that, and the government's related measures on vaping will simply double down on failure. I'll come to those in a second.

The other aspect of the bill is that it does nothing, really, to tackle the illicit tobacco trade that has ballooned in recent years—absolutely ballooned. I've seen estimates that a quarter to a third of tobacco smoked in this country is coming through illegal channels, helping to fund criminal gangs, and we are ignoring that effect. I warned about this a few years ago. I opposed the increase in excise on smoking. It's now $50 a pack for people with this habit. Admittedly only a minority of Australians, 11 or 12 per cent, smoke now, but they face an enormous cost with all of the taxes that are imposed on them. It's often poorer Australians who continue to smoke. Australians in Aboriginal communities are smoking. How do they afford this?

What is increasingly happening, of course, is that people are buying illegal tobacco—so-called chop-chop—and that is funding criminal gangs through our country. That's because we've set the price of tobacco far too high now; it's not really acting as a deterrent anymore. Our smoking rates have, effectively, flatlined at the base of the population that just can't get off smokes. So we've forced them into this.

There is another way of smoking which is much better for your health and which is also cheaper, and that's to use e-cigarettes. It's much, much cheaper, and it's much, much better for your health. It doesn't have all the chemicals that are in tobacco, and that's why we've seen a ballooning of the use of e-cigarettes. Most estimates say that a lot of the approximately 1.3 million adult Australians who vape—who use e-cigarettes—were previously smokers who decided to use this product as a cleaner, healthier and cheaper way of dealing with their habit of addiction to nicotine. So the 1.3 million Australians who vape do so in an environment where, notionally, it's illegal to possess liquid nicotine. It's illegal to possess it in this country; it's illegal to carry it. You can import it, but it's very, very restricted. State and federal governments have been trying for years to prohibit, ban or suppress the use of liquid nicotine in e-cigarettes, and they have fundamentally and totally failed.

A few years ago when I first started looking at this issue, there were only a few hundred thousand Australians who were vaping, and that has grown by almost three times in the past few years alone. The government cannot, and will not be able to, get rid of vaping in this country. All the government is doing by continuing to prohibit vaping is funding criminal gangs, who are making an absolute fortune from this trade—something that almost every other country in the world has realised should be legalised and regulated. The government's plan formally announced last week by the Minister for Health and Ageing is to, on 1 January, ban the importation of vapes even under the previously restricted regime of needing a prescription to do so. It will completely ban the importation of vapes, and it will double-down on the state laws. He's been doing this in cooperation with state ministers. It will double-down on the laws that prohibit vaping and liquid nicotine and seek to make 1.3 million adult Australians criminals just after Christmas this year. That's the government's plan. Their plan is to, effectively, make over a million Australians criminals if they want to continue to avoid the dangerous habit of smoking. When he announced those changes at a press conference on Tuesday last week, the minister for health told the nation:

These are not measures targeting users. These are not measures that impose any penalty whatsoever on people that are using vapes. There is no penalty for people who use vapes …

That's what the minister told Australians last week.

Last Friday, in Western Australia, an individual was charged in the WA Magistrates Court with possession of liquid nicotine. Under WA laws, he faces a maximum penalty of a $2,000 fine and/or two years in jail. That's the law. The minister misled the Australian people last week by saying that no-one would be prosecuted. He said: 'We're not going to go after the users.' Three days later, a 50-year-old man charged in Western Australia is facing two years jail for simply having a vape. This is ridiculous. This is absurd. This should change, and the government should realise how hopeless this particular solution is, when the rest of the world has realised that this is ridiculous. If you can legally smoke in this country—you can pretty much legally smoke marijuana now; in the ACT, you can take hard drugs with very little penalty there—why can't we allow adult Australians to decide to use liquid nicotine if they so choose but have appropriate regulations to make sure that the use is done in such a way that it doesn't encourage especially young Australians to take it up?

The government should see the error of its ways. The government is not to be able to prohibit it, and it has no plan to deal with the lack of alternatives for those who use vapes, come 1 January, when 1.3 million Australians will be made criminals. What is the plan that the Australian government has for these 1.3 million Australians, most of whom are addicted to nicotine? It's a terrible thing. I've not regularly smoked, and I think I have vaped once in my life. I'm not addicted, but I do feel a high degree of sympathy for those Australians who find themselves in this position. What does the government say to those 1.3 Australians who are in this position and who find themselves facing a very difficult choice this Christmas? There are only a few options available to these 1.3 million Australians. First, they can try and track down a vape at a pharmacy. Good luck with that. The government is allowing pharmacists to stock a certain level of vapes, but I heard reports that someone scoured Brisbane last week and found that most pharmacies didn't even stock vapes and that the ones who did have these hopeless vapes that no-one likes and no-one wants to buy.

Pharmacists don't want to sell e-cigarettes. They don't want to sell liquid nicotine. That's perfectly understandable. They're in the practice of health and providing pharmaceutical products. They don't want to do this, and they're not doing this. This market has been available to them for years now and hasn't been taken up, so it's not a viable option for the 1.3 million Australians to go to a pharmacy. And they've got to get a prescription before they go to the pharmacy. That's also difficult because a lot of doctors don't want to give prescriptions for it. It's just a dead-end road, that option.

The second option is that they go back to smoking. They could do that. That is legal. As I say, it will cost about $50 a day. The average Australian smoker now spends over $200 a week—I don't know how they afford it—on smokes. In comparison, vapes will cost $40 or $50. So it's almost an increase of $200 to your cost of living to go back to smoking come 1 January. The government doesn't seem to realise that Australians are struggling. Australians are being punished by the home-grown inflation they have presided over. They don't seem to understand there's a cost-of-living crisis out there right now. The Prime Minister certainly doesn't seem to understand how much pain Australians are feeling right now. All Australians, not just those in this category, are feeling that pain, including those 1.3 million Australians who are vaping. As I say, they are generally on lower incomes than those in the rest of our country. They are doing it the most tough in our country, and the government, this Christmas, is going to potentially impose and say, 'If you want to stay a law-abiding citizen, you now have to pay an extra $200 a week.' What's their answer for them? Why are they doing this to poorer people in Australia?

The final option—which, sadly, I'm sure a lot of Australians will take up—is that they stick with vaping but they go to the black market. They can't import them from legalised, regulated shops in New Zealand—it's mainly New Zealand shops that currently use the personal importation scheme. Vaping has been legal there for years. Jacinda Ardern, the Labour Prime Minister there, made it a big part of her agenda to legalise vaping, have a regulated market and encourage smokers to take up vaping because it's much better. Mainly it has been New Zealand shops. That is closed to them, so they'll have to buy from the Chinese triads and the bikie gangs, who are selling these products on the black market. Great job, government!

The Minister for Health and Aged Care, Mark Butler, is Santa Claus for the criminal gangs in this country this Christmas. Their Christmases are all coming at once because they've now got a whole bunch of new customers who will be forced into going to the black market and funding this terrible trade. This will fund the violence that then occurs. There's a lot of crime in North Queensland at the moment where I live. I hear from police that a lot of it is due to vaping. There are turf wars between bikies and triads about who gets to sell products in different locations. Businesses have been blown up and people have been killed because this black market is out of control. This will just make it worse. It will put this criminal trade on steroids. We will have a worse problem next year because of the government's decisions.

There is another way here. We don't need to criminalise 1.3 million Australians. We don't need to help the criminal gangs with this trade. We can do what every other developed country in the world now does and create a legal, regulated e-cigarette vaping market. I will move amendments in the committee stage of this bill to do that very thing. It's very simple. All we need to do is remove liquid nicotine from schedule 4 of the Poisons Standard. My amendments will do that. That would mean that this 50-year-old man in WA wouldn't have been charged, because the state laws refer to the national Poisons Standard. The reason this 50-year-old individual has been charged and is facing, potentially, two years in jail right now over this weekend is that the WA laws says that anything in schedule 4 of the Poisons Standard is a crime with these penalties. We in this parliament can remove liquid nicotine from the Poisons Standard. It shouldn't be classified with other hard drugs; it's ridiculous. Remove that, and my amendment's do that, and we won't charge everyday Australians with these ridiculous crimes.

The second part of my amendment to this bill will give the minister powers to set up a regulated market for vaping products. It will allow the minister to set rules on how vaping products are labelled, how they're packaged, the appearance of them, the descriptions of them and the flavourings of them. It will make sure we outlaw all of these ridiculous flavours that the black market Chinese gangs are selling, with candy cane and fairy floss flavours, so they're not marketed to our children. Restrict all those; change all those. Effectively, allow e-cigarettes to be sold in Australia in the same way cigarettes are: behind cabinets with plain packaging and no advertising—the bill does ban advertising already. Make sure that we regulate the market so we keep them away from our children.

Finally, my amendments would set up an industry funded collection scheme. The retailers who engage in the trade would have to fund a collection scheme for disposable e-cigarettes. It's becoming a big waste issue in this country because all of these disposables coming in, largely through the black market, are just tossed out. They've got some stuff in them that shouldn't go in general waste, so my amendment would introduce a collection scheme that collects and deals with that recycling issue.

I'll be making all of these amendments. I don't know why the government has been sitting on its heels, ignoring the evidence from around the world, letting this trade grow and infect our schoolkids and our children in a way that has got to be stopped. We can't continue allowing these criminal gangs to market this product to our children. We should take our enforcement efforts and focus on keeping them out of our schools.

If adult Australians want to have a vape, have an e-cigarette, it should be a free country in this regard. They can smoke and do much worse than e-cigarettes. Allow them to take out an e-cigarette at the shop. I don't encourage it, and I don't want people to do it, but, if they want to do it, they're adults.

Then we should go after those gangs that are supplying our children. We should go in and make sure to keep them out of our schools. That should be the effort. But what's going to happen is that the government are going to spread themselves too thin. They're not going to have the resources to take on the gangs. They're not going to beat them, just as they haven't in the last few years, and this problem is going to get worse.

Finally, I just want to finish on the evidence. Some people will claim that vaping has health issues or health problems that are worse or as bad as smoking. That is fundamentally wrong, and it's inconsistent with the science. Just last November a new Cochrane review came out. Cochrane reviews are effectively reviews of all the scientific reviews that have been done on issues. They are the gold standard of peer review in the scientific field. This Cochrane review stated:

Because they do not burn tobacco, e-cigarettes do not expose users to the same levels of chemicals that can cause diseases in people who smoke conventional cigarettes.

E-cigarettes are not risk free, and they shouldn't be used by people who don't smoke or who aren't at risk of smoking. However, evidence shows that nicotine e-cigarettes carry only a small fraction of the risk of smoking. That is the scientific conclusion. If we are to make laws here that are based on real evidence, that are based on trying to minimise hurt and pain for people in Australia, we should listen to that science. We would join the rest of the world and have an adult conversation about creating a legal, regulated market for e-cigarettes in this country. Instead we are being led by a minister leading with slogans, who is misleading the Australian people about the effect of his crackdown and who will only benefit criminal gangs in this country, at the cost and pain of average Australians who, unfortunately, find themselves addicted to the terrible substance of nicotine.

Tammy Tyrrell (Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie Network) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Public Health (Tobacco and Other Products) Bill 2023 is designed to consolidate existing tobacco control legislation into a single act. It's designed to introduce new tobacco regulations to discourage smoking. It's designed to stop people from vaping. But basically it's designed this way to do one thing: stop 20,000 Australians from dying. That's how many people are dying from tobacco-use-related conditions every single year. Those are the stakes, so it's worth unpicking a few of the things that this bill does in order to reduce those tobacco deaths.

Pushing up the price of a pack of ciggies is a really good way of stopping people from getting started smoking, and that's not a bad thing. If it can stop people from developing a lifelong addiction that they regret ever developing, then that's a good thing. But price increases are a blunt tool, and they're a harmful one in their own way.

When you're addicted to something, you pay for it, even if you give up everything else. You don't see many heroin addicts with gym memberships, do you? When you're addicted to something, your brain is dependent on it. You will put your everyday essentials to one side in order to keep yourself functioning, and you feel like you can't function without the thing you think you need. The things you give up to feed your addiction are the things that hurt the ones around you. You hear about it with people who are addicted to pokies, who won't give up pokies but will give up socialising. They will give up shopping. They will give up everything in their life that gets in the way of what they can't live without. This is what you're dealing with.

If the price of a smoke goes up by so much that the only people buying them are the ones who are addicted to them, then the ones who pay the toll are the ones who feel like they've got no choice. They are who this bill tries to help. There is a link between tobacco consumption and poverty. Lower income households are particularly vulnerable to the opportunity cost of expenditure on tobacco products. Tobacco may replace food and other essential goods and services for the family. The health impact of tobacco consumption also puts pressure on family budgets and reduces the income-generating potential of family members. That's not me saying it either; that's from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet in 2015.

Making tobacco more expensive will definitely drive smoking down amongst poor people, to some extent, but it will have no effect on rich people, because they wouldn't notice a price increase, would they? So this is really about targeting one socioeconomic group over another. We need strategies that apply to other socioeconomic groups too. Rich people aren't price sensitive.

To date, we haven't really come up with much as an alternative. It's why we need to think creatively. We don't seem to be doing that. We seem to be just amping up the current restrictions and regulations, in the hope that, if we make them strong enough, they'll work even better. That's not how these things work.

It's true that nobody likes paying more than they need to; that's as true for ramen noodles as it is for real estate. And, if you're skint and you're struggling to keep up with the cost of smokes, it's sensible to look around for what else you can do to service your addiction. It's no surprise, then, that, as we've ramped up taxes on tobacco, we've seen a jump in the consumption of illicit tobacco. You have two products that both feed the meter of your addiction. One's cheap; one's not. Guess which one people go for. Illicit tobacco is cheap because it isn't taxed. A pack of cigarettes taxed properly could be $50 or $60. A pack of illicit cigarettes could go for nothing like that—for $15.

Also, every time the tobacco tax rate goes up, the profitability of the illegal black market goes up along with it, because if the price of legal cigarettes goes up by $2 because of tax, then the price of illegal cigarettes can go up by $2 as well, and they're still cheaper than the legal kind. But that extra $2 in tobacco tax isn't going to the government; it's going to organised crime. Nearly one in four cigarettes sold in Australia is from the black market, costing taxpayers more than $4 billion a year. Every time the excise goes up, poor Australians are pushed into funding organised crime.

It doesn't just fuel the black market, either. Stores that don't sell illicit tobacco are paying the price of doing the right thing. People who would come in and buy a basket of bread, milk and eggs are going somewhere else because that's where you buy illicit tobacco. That lost revenue is worth billions every single year.

You see, this is the one thing that we all seem to forget: what got you here won't necessarily get you there. We've had tremendous success in reducing the rate of smoking in Australia. It's a mistake to assume that the more you ramp up what we're doing, the further the rate will fall. You might feel a million times better going to bed at 10 pm instead of 11 pm every night, but you can't assume that you'll feel even better still by going to bed at 9 pm or 8 pm or 7 pm. Things don't work that way.

We should be proud of what we've done so far. We should be proud that we led the world on plain packaging. But, once you've done plain packaging, you can't make packaging more plain. Once you make tobacco too expensive for people to afford to begin smoking in the first place, then the effect of lifting tobacco taxes any further is zero. You've squeezed the juice from that fruit.

Every 10 per cent reduction in the rate of smoking is harder than the 10 per cent reduction before it. It takes new measures, rather than just more aggressive versions of the same measures, to break the back of tobacco deaths—and here is where I think we need to have some sympathy for the poor old smoker looking for a way to get off this train. If they're feeling the pinch from the cost of living, and the price of their addiction is going up, vaping might look like a tempting alternative. The UK's Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience was recently commissioned by the British government's Department of Health and Social Care to do the most comprehensive review of the evidence around the risks of vaping that has ever been done. The lead author of the review summarised its conclusions like this: 'Smoking is uniquely deadly and will kill one in two regular sustained smokers. Two-thirds of adult smokers would really benefit from switching to vaping. They don't because they don't know that vaping is less harmful.' This is not from a tobacco lobbyist; this is from a professor of tobacco harm reduction at the King's College of London.

The evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of encouraging smokers to move to vaping. Getting smokers to switch to vaping would save lives—that is what the evidence suggests. The goal should be to get smokers to switch, and to get non-smokers to not take up smoking or vaping in the meantime.

The public conversation has been focused on the use of vaping as a gateway to smoking, and, if that's what is actually happening, it's a genuine cause for alarm. The question is: is it actually happening, and, if it is, what's causing it? Once you know what's causing it, you can start to figure out what to do about it. So first: is it happening? A major review and meta-analysis funded by the Australian government department of health found that never-smokers who used e-cigarettes had about three times the odds of smoking initiation compared with non-e-cigarette users.

However, we don't know if the people who go from vapes to ciggies are going to ciggies because they use vapes, or if they would have gone straight to ciggies if they didn't have vapes to go through. We just don't know, and we don't have an easy way of knowing. Even the studies that look at this question admit that, while you might be more likely to go from vaping to smoking than if you never started vaping at all, a person who starts on vapes is less likely to become a smoker than a person who starts on cigarettes. I think that's an important thing to note. The government's own evidence says this. If you start smoking cigarettes instead of vaping, you are more likely to become addicted to cigarettes. So, if we want to reduce the rate of smoking, we should be trying to encourage people to do things that divert them away from smoking.

The New Zealand Ministry of Health stated this year:

Despite some experimentation with vaping products amongst never smokers, vaping products are attracting very few people who have never smoked into regular vaping, including young people.

All the measures in the world to make smoking less appealing to people are going to fail unless they also include ways to help people to quit smoking. You can make it hard, but you are dealing with an addiction. If you don't help the addiction get broken, you won't break it. I think we're being ideological in how we get people off smoking, and I think that ideological fervour is driving us to make bad decisions.

A 2022 Cochrane review, which is considered to be the gold standard of scientific reviews, considered 77 different studies and found high-certainty evidence that nicotine e-cigarettes are more effective than traditional gums and patches in helping people quit smoking. We shouldn't be surprised about that, though. The head of the Therapeutic Goods Administration in Australia says that smoking is worse than vaping. He said it to the Senate. He doesn't say vaping is good; he just says it's better than smoking. Cutting back the number of cigarettes you smoke is good, even if you're only going from a pack a day to half a pack. Any reduction is a good thing. So I think making it easier for people to reduce their smoking dependence is a good thing and should be supported.

A report published in medical journal the Lancetin September this year found:

Growing evidence suggests that e-cigarettes can be a catalyst for smoking cessation. Current findings indicate that this may be true even within unstructured and unguided use.

In other words, you don't need to have a doctor supervising your use of a vape product to get a medical benefit from using it if you're using it to come off cigarettes. But our current regulations say you need a doctor's approval to do it. Doctors can't prescribe e-cigarettes unless you're trying to quit smoking. You won't be able to access a vape unless you're attempting to quit smoking. In other words, if you want to vape, you have to start with cigarettes. That's what this policy would do. It makes it so that the only way a nonsmoker can vape legally is to start smoking first. That's our public health initiative to reduce tobacco usage. 'You want vapes? No worries. All you've got to do is smoke these cigarettes.' Authorised by the Australian government, Canberra.

That's not all. We're also banning the consumption of nicotine-free vapes. These could contain none of the harmful chemicals. These are products that have no poisons that require regulation by the TGA. They have no active or controlled substances inside them. These could genuinely save people's lives. But we're banning them too, and the only reason we're banning them is that, if we let them be sold, we couldn't ban other vapes. So we are banning adults who can legally buy cigarettes from every petrol station in Australia from buying a nicotine-free, less hazardous alternative if they want to try and quit smoking, and we are doing this because we want to reduce smoking!

I support the goal of reducing our rates of smoking. It means helping people quit. I support doing that. I think we should be sensible, not ideological, about how we do it, though. Professor Nicholas Zwar, who chaired the expert advisory group that compiled the RACGP's smoking cessation guidelines, says that vaping can help people quit. I don't smoke. I'm actually reformed. I don't vape. I just think that there are a lot of people in this debate who have fixed and firm ideological views about what other people should and should not be allowed to do, and it's those views that are, ironically, sabotaging us from achieving success. There is solid and peer-reviewed research that says that e-cigarettes can be a tool to help people quit smoking and reduce the rate of unnecessary death and disease that comes from smoking.

If you're serious about preventing the harm from tobacco, you will be focused on doing whatever you can do to prevent it. That means making access to e-cigarettes legal and making e-cigarettes at least as available as cigarettes are. Hiding a safer alternative to cigarettes behind a doctor's prescription but allowing anybody with an ID to buy cigarettes without a prescription is going to make people buy more cigarettes.

Think about the benefits of a regulated legal access scheme. You could regulate what's in vapes. There'd be no more stories about supposedly nicotine-free vapes being tested and found to contain nicotine or any other hidden nasties. You could regulate the price of vapes through taxation. You could apply an excise to vapes sold in a retail environment or reduce the excise for people with a valid prescription. The excise would mean there was no cheap option to get your nicotine fix. You could raise money to support anti-smoking campaigns or fund the health system instead of funding the profits of organised crime gangs, which is what the prohibition model we are pursuing will do. You could license retailers so you know who's selling vapes and how many they're selling. This would give us real-time data on what's being sold and in what quantity. This would help researchers measure the effectiveness of antismoking campaigns and prevent retailers from selling under the counter. It would also mean that anybody found to be selling under the counter would face charges and fines. You could restrict access based on a person's age. There's no penalty in a prohibition model for selling a vape to an underage person, because you're not supposed to sell them—full stop. Young people won't ever be carded in an environment where they're trying to buy an illegal product. You could reduce the marketing appeal of them. You could regulate what products could be imported if you provided importers with a legal channel to import their products. You could insist that they conformed to the plain-packaging guidelines. We can't do that when everything that is captured is seized.

People worry that a regulated retail access model will send a message that e-cigarettes are safe. For the record: they are not safe; they are simply less dangerous than cigarettes. That's not just my view. The United States government Centres for Disease Control and Prevention says they are. But I don't agree with the argument that being sold means being safe. Cigarettes are legal and regulated. I do not think that anybody gets the impression that they are safe because of that. Alcohol is legal and regulated as well. You can legally buy a gun in Australia. Does that mean we're sending a pro-gun message? We can have legal products in Australia that don't make their way into the hands of kids. It doesn't follow that regulating a product makes it available for kids.

To stop tobacco, the Labor Party is making it harder to access alternatives to tobacco. How? With bans. Is there a single example in history of banning a drug being successful in stopping people from using that drug? Cocaine is banned. Cannabis is banned. Ecstasy, speed, ketamine and crystal meth are banned. Bans don't work. We know this. But we keep trying to impose bans because we have ministers wanting to look tough to win votes. Ironically, looking tough is easy; actually reducing deaths from smoking is hard. We can't do that by doing more of what we're doing. We should support ways to reduce unnecessary harm from tobacco. Instead, we're banning them.

Malarndirri McCarthy (NT, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Indigenous Australians) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank senators for their contributions to debate on the Public Health (Tobacco and Other Products) Bill 2023 and the Public Health (Tobacco and Other Products) (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2023. The bills build on the pioneering tobacco control reforms introduced by past Labor governments, including Australia's world-leading tobacco plain-packaging reforms. That was bold policy, achieved in the face of some often savage legal and rhetorical assault. It was imaginative policy and it was world-leading policy. We know that because 26 countries since then have followed Australia's example. It's a policy that has saved lives and will continue to save lives.

When the Hon. Nicola Roxon introduced plain packaging, around 16 per cent of Australians smoked. Today, that rate is down to just under 11 per cent, the equivalent of one million fewer Australians smoking. But the gains of those world-leading reforms have been squandered. We were a world leader in 2011, and we are way behind today. Tobacco use remains the leading cause of preventable death and disability among Australians. It is estimated to kill more than 20,000 Australians each year. It is also the risk factor that is the greatest contributor to the health gap between First Nations people and other Australians.

The main bill consolidates the existing Commonwealth tobacco control framework into one act with associated regulations, streamlining the operation of the laws. It modernises and simplifies the existing provisions and introduces new measures to discourage smoking and prevent the promotion of vaping and e-cigarette products.

The bill reflects the Australian government's ongoing commitment to improving the health of all Australians by reducing the prevalence of tobacco use—the leading cause of preventable death and disability amongst Australians—as well as its associated health, social and environmental costs and the inequalities it causes. This commitment is consistent with Australia's obligations as a party to the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the FCTC. The international treaty aims to protect present and future generations from the harms of tobacco use and exposure to tobacco smoke.

Among other things, this bill will provide: updated and improved health warnings on tobacco products to better inform consumers about the effects of tobacco use; expanded advertising prohibitions to reduce the public's exposure to the advertising and promotion of e-cigarettes and other novel and emerging products, particularly among youth and young adults; restrictions on the use of additives that enhance the attractiveness and palatability of tobacco products; better regulation of product design features that are known to make tobacco products more attractive to consumers, including crush balls and novel filters; restrictions on the use of brand and variant names that falsely imply reduced harm; the inclusion of health promotion inserts that encourage and empower people who smoke to quit; the mandatory disclosure of sales volume and pricing data in advertising, promotion and sponsorship expenditure; dissuasive measures on factory made cigarettes to help increase knowledge of the health harms of smoking and reduce the appeal of smoking; and improved coverage, enforcement and compliance for tobacco control through updated provisions and the introduction of a civil penalties regime.

I conclude by saying that the government is determined to do all we can to tackle the harms caused by smoking. We know that the tobacco industry continues to have deep pockets and very powerful friends. This government is up for the fight, because we fight on behalf of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged in our society, who bear the brunt of these tobacco company profits. We're going to bring the same spirit of courage, the same spirit of action, the same clarity of thought and, I hope, the same conviction that Nicola Roxon brought to plain-packaging reforms 12 years ago. We're going to reaffirm Australia's reputation as a world leader in tobacco control. I commend the bill.

Sue Lines (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the second reading amendment moved by Senator Ruston be agreed to.

David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—Please could my support of paragraph (b) of that amendment moved by Senator Ruston be noted.

Sue Lines (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes. Now there are two other foreshadowed amendments. If the movers are not going to move them, I will move on. Senator David Pocock.

David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

At the end of the motion, add ", but the Senate:

(a) commits to diminishing the political influence of the tobacco industry, in the interests of protecting Australians and the nation's tobacco control policies from industry influence, in line with Australia's obligations under the World Health Organisation Framework Convention on Tobacco Control; and

(b) calls on all politicians and all political parties to stop accepting political donations from the tobacco industry and revoke any passes that they have sponsored for members of the tobacco industry, and their agents, to access Parliament House".

Sue Lines (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the second reading amendment as moved by Senator David Pocock be agreed to.

Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

At the end of the motion, add ", but the Senate:

(a) notes that:

(i) there are environmental, as well as public health, reasons to discourage the use of tobacco products,

(ii) cigarette butts are one of the three most common types of rubbish found in the Great Barrier Reef's marine environment, and

(iii) tobacco-related packaging products, like single-use plastic film and tear strips, pose a significant threat to the health of our oceans and waterways; and

(b) calls on the Government to:

(i) mandate the use of recycled and recyclable cardboard for retail cigarette packaging and cartons, and

(ii) ban the use of single-use plastic film and tear strips used in cigarette and tobacco-related product packaging".

Question agreed to.

Malarndirri McCarthy (NT, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Indigenous Australians) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I table an addendum to the explanatory memorandum relating to the Public Health (Tobacco and Other Products) Bill 2023. The addendum responds to matters raised by the Scrutiny of Bills Committee.

Original question, as amended, agreed to.

Bills read a second time.