Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

If you are concerned about the stabilisation of tobacco cessation, you really should look at why—why it is that life-long smokers struggle to get off such an insidious product and why it is that they are addicted. You should also ask: what are the alternatives? This is where the false outrage of the member for Ballarat falls short, because, in the end, she already rules out and discounts alternatives that can help people to reduce their consumption, to engage in harm minimisation and, in the context, improve their health overall. I will remind other members of the choices that people have.

At the moment, if you are addicted to nicotine and you smoke tobacco products, your choice is to continue smoking or to give up, and, yes, there are some cessation aids, but they do not work for everyone. And yet there are harm minimisation pathways denied by those on both sides of the chamber—of which I am not one. In the end, having sat on committees inquiring into the legal access towards vaping, I cannot, in good conscience, oppose legalisation—my view has been on the public record, so this is not new—even more so after I went to the UK on a parliamentary delegation and met with officials from the National Health Service, who took a similar view to me. That's because what they saw was, amongst many of their patient groups, particularly in parts of Manchester, people who simply couldn't quit, and they saw the consequences, the harm and the damage that was done to people's health from enduring tobacco consumption.

They then looked at the alternatives and said that vaping provided a harm minimisation pathway that they could not ignore. When it was raised with them, 'Should Australia follow the same pathway,' of course they rightly said it was up to us, but they acknowledged that it was enormously beneficial to the people they were there to serve. That is my view, and it is a view I am very comfortable expressing in public because what we know, as somebody who had three out of their four grandparents die prematurely as a consequence of tobacco consumption, is that tobacco causes enormous harm. Tobacco is responsible for tremendous damage to the lives of Australians, our community and, if you want to count it up in dollars and cents, our economy as well. Of Australians aged 14 years or older, 12.8 per cent still smoke daily. Every year smoking kills or is a contributing factor to an estimated 19,000 Australian deaths. And, in addition to the morbidity and mortality, $31.5 billion is drained from the economy annually for something that provides, let's say, little benefit beyond the choices that people have.

This bill appropriately allows more flexibility to noncompliance with the tobacco plain-packaging legislation, and any improvements that allow for the adherence, respect and implementation of the rule of law as a principle, I will always support. But we also should take account of our obligation to the Australian people seriously and have effective policy measures to combat smoking rates, as I addressed at the start of my speech. With this in mind, we do have to look seriously at the efficacy of plain packaging from 2013 to 2016. Let's remember what happened: the Gillard government introduced plain packaging and contestably there was an influence on smoking rates, so they banged a massive tax on top of it to make sure the rates went down—I never disputed that increasing taxes can have an influence on reducing smoking rates. But even then, from 2013 to 2016, Australia's smoking rate fell by a dismal 0.6 per cent despite an increase in tobacco excise and the introduction of plain packaging. Expenditure on cigarettes increased in Australia while smoking rates sharply declined in the United States and in the United Kingdom.

Plain packaging has failed to reduce smoking significantly. Instead, what it has actually done, and this is the bit that the opposition never likes to pay attention to, is it has driven tobacco sales underground, because this is what the policy actually does. It takes a product with a brand and makes it generic, and then, as the tax rates increase, the consumer surplus goes up, so the cost increases, and it is a generic product.

So what happens? Criminal gangs move in. They, not just the tobacco companies, see the economic benefit and the potential to take advantage of Australians who are addicted—and some who aren't, to get them there—and to make huge profits. Those profits are then used not just to deny the taxpayer the money they need to deal with the consequences of tobacco consumption—the costs that are passed through to the health system—but also of course to fund and finance their nefarious agenda. So, rather than looking at this policy simply on the basis of its intent, perhaps we should look also at its consequences.

As branding has been lost, competition now focuses predominantly on price, boosting sales of cheaper products. KPMG has found that illicit tobacco consumption has grown from 11.5 per cent to 14 per cent in Australia since plain packaging was introduced. Illicit tobacco is immune from taxation, immune from regulation and immune from oversight—kind of like other illicit products in the marketplace. Not only is there a revenue loss for the government but it also deprives hardworking Australian small businesses of revenue, because of cheap, unbranded, illegal competition.

I think we should stand up against criminal gangs. I don't think we should fuel their business models, because of what they will do with the revenue as a consequence—and of course the human toll they put on Australians by engaging in their nefarious agenda. This revenue is then diverted to organised crime syndicates and serves to line the pockets of those undertaking illegal behaviour. Let's just say that it is putting the incentives around the wrong way. This encourages other criminal actions associated with organised crime, such as smuggling, violence and gang activity.

We must focus on assisting people who are motivated to quit smoking through education, support services, harm minimisation and—I will say, resolutely—preferably cessation. When people are allowed to exercise their free will, they are still better off choosing a healthy life. If they struggle with that, I would have thought the job of the people in this place is to provide them with the clearest and simplest pathway to do so. It's time to empower those who want to quit and to help reduce the stagnant smoking rates in this country by properly looking at not just the intent but also the consequences of the policies and the legislation we are passing through this parliament.

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