Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Primary Healthcare) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to welcome World No Tobacco Day this coming Thursday and to reaffirm the coalition's commitment to reducing the incidence of smoking in Australia. For a long time it has been a bipartisan commitment to reduce the rates of smoking in Australia. The Preventative Health Taskforce believes that we can see a smoking rate in Australia below 10 per cent, and I believe that is a very worthy goal. Australia has one of the lowest rates of smoking in the OECD but, despite this, there is no cause for complacency. There is always much more that can be done. We know that there are still wide variations in the incidence of smoking in different groups within society. Smoking rates remain high in our Indigenous population. They remain high in lower socioeconomic groups, higher in the lower educated and higher in those who have a mental health problem. The government's own Preventative Health Taskforce mapped out an approach which focused on looking at these groups which have much higher smoking rates. These are areas we need to focus on. Smoking remains the largest preventable cause of death and disease in Australia. The cost to the community of smoking was $31.5 billion in 2004-05 and is no doubt much higher today. The coalition has always had a strong track record when it comes to tobacco control and will continue to do so. The coalition presided over the biggest decline in smoking rates whilst in government. Under the coalition government the prevalence of smoking for Australians over the age of 14 declined from 21.8 per cent in 1998 to 16.6 per cent by 2007. Now, this is amongst the lowest rates of smoking in the world. Only the United States and Sweden have comparably lower smoking rates.

An important point I want to emphasise is that the decline in smoking rates in Australia, which was a fall of 40 per cent for men and 44 per cent for women between 1989 and 2007, was among the biggest rates in the OECD. The fall in smoking rates amongst women was the largest in the OECD. This is not all one-way traffic and there is not an inevitability to this. If you look at the same time period, in Europe we have seen increases in the female smoking rate in countries like France and Germany and massive increases of the order of 44 per cent in Greece. You only get results with concerted activity from local, state and federal governments.

As I said before, the Liberal Party has a proud history in the area of tobacco control. It was Robert Menzies who first introduced a voluntary tobacco advertising code for television in 1966. The Fraser government, in 1976, first implemented a ban on the advertising of tobacco products on TV and radio. Dr Michael Wooldridge, a previous health minister, in June 1997, announced what at the time was the biggest ever national advertising campaign against smoking with a federal government spend of $7 million over two years. It was the Howard government and Tony Abbott as health minister who introduced the graphic health warnings on tobacco products in 2006. It was the coalition that first proposed an increase in the tobacco excise in 2009, a measure that was later adopted by the government.

I again reiterate that for tobacco control to be successful it needs to be part of a comprehensive tobacco control strategy that draws on a wide range of measures. For example, advertising of any tobacco product is now completely banned. Most states now require all tobacco products to be covered at the point of sale, with the remaining states in the process of implementing this measure. I believe that the increased size of the graphic health warnings on tobacco packaging to be introduced in December this year will have a significant impact on reducing the rates of smoking in Australia as well as increasing the rotation and refreshing the messages. The coalition supported the plain packaging legislation through the House last year. There is no silver bullet when it comes to reducing the rates of smoking but we need to continue to look at new ways to ensure that we get our smoking rates in Australia below 10 per cent.

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