Luke Simpkins (Cowan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It certainly was not my intention to approach this with any form of political advantage or spin, but given the comments of the member for Blair I would also remind the House that when we were being lectured to with great sanctimony by the previous Minister for Health and Ageing she did so knowing full well that she had accepted the hospitality of a tobacco company at the Australian Open tennis.

But I will go back to the areas of consistency. I would say that Australia has come a long way in the last 30 years with regard to reductions in the use of tobacco. There was a time when our TVs and radio stations were littered with the advertising of tobacco products. There was a time where even our sporting venues, as covered on TV, were also subject to the terrible influence of tobacco advertising. There has been a lot of progress in recent times. As has previously been mentioned, back in 1976 it was the Fraser government that implemented a ban on the advertising of tobacco products on TV and radio, and that was a step forward. There have been a number of other initiatives, which others have spoken about. One of the classic ones was in 2006, when the now Leader of the Opposition and former health minister, Tony Abbott, introduced the graphic health warnings on tobacco products. So there have been a lot of good things done. Again, we all applaud and look forward to the plain paper packaging of cigarettes being finally implemented, hopefully by the end of this year. I think that is something like the time frame that we are hoping for now. So there has been a lot done, and we certainly support that. It has always been done in a bipartisan manner. We all know that no good can come of this terrible use of tobacco.

I was walking around the Hillarys marina in the northern suburbs of Perth on a couple of occasions over the weekend, and I noted at the time that someone was smoking in front of me as we were walking along. This is an area where there are literally a couple of thousand people in the restaurants, on the little beach there or at the other entertainment facilities at Hillarys. The smell of the cigarette being smoked by that one person seemed so odd and so foreign to me, and I think that really does say something about the way this country has changed: smoking is not cool. Smoking is just a very marginalised activity these days with the majority of the country. As we know, with smoking rates down, I believe, under 17 per cent now, it seems quite a rare event.

What concerns me, though, is the way that the higher smoking rates in the lower socioeconomic strata of our society remain a problem—not as much of a problem as they used to be, but this is the big challenge that we obviously need to deal with now. The people that are least able to afford the high cost of cigarettes and the health costs of cigarettes are the ones that continue to smoke. When I am in the electorate of Cowan, out the front of the shopping centre where my office is located, there are very few people who smoke—a couple of people out the front at the most throughout the day—and that is a pretty good thing. But I do note that when I am over at the Summerfield Shopping Centre, not far from Girrawheen Senior High School, the number of young people that are smoking before school in the morning is quite disturbing: 10 to 15 is a fairly normal number over there. Again, this is an area of lower socioeconomic standing—an area where young people should be concentrating on better use of their money and better use of their long-term health than the smoking of cigarettes. So the reality is that, through efforts like World No Tobacco Day, we are continuing to focus—and we must continue to focus, particularly in this country—on the challenges for people of lower socioeconomic standing and lower education, because these are the people that need to get these messages most of all.

Debate adjourned.

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