Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to applaud the Attorney-General for her success in recently being able to implement a policy to put plain packaging on cigarettes. I do not think there are many thinking Australians who are not aware of the problems and costs of disease if you are a heavy smoker or, indeed, if you inhale secondary smoke. But there is another lawful drug which causes even greater health problems and has even more expensive impacts—whether you are talking about domestic violence, accidents at work or on the road or just the general diseases associated with its consumption—and that is alcohol. So I am asking this government to now turn its mind to the labelling of alcohol.

I am concerned in particular about the lack of understanding by many Australians about foetal alcohol spectrum disorder or foetal alcohol syndrome. This is characterised by a group of physical abnormalities of the face, reduced size of newborns and/or poor growth after birth, and problems of behaviour and cognition due to structural and/or functional abnormalities of the central nervous system which come when a child is born to mothers who consume quantities of alcohol during their pregnancy and at key times. We have this problem of FASD or FAS in our society. Unfortunately, as we know from the statistics, we have a number of women who are not informed or who are not aware that consuming alcohol when they are pregnant or when they are breastfeeding is a serious danger.

The majority of Australians—61 per cent, according to recent national data—believe that health information labels should be placed on alcohol products. This support for health information labels on alcohol has been stable between 2011 and 2012, with 61 per cent believing that labels should be placed on alcohol products, 24 per cent thinking they should not and another 14 per cent unsure. I think the time has come when we have to say that, while we have given the alcohol industry time off and they do not have to have labelling mandated at this stage, we need to be moving very quickly towards a mandated stage, with a mandated symbol and text that is government regulated and applied consistently for all alcohol products. These should be applied to the front of the product, with specified sizing.

This should be implemented as part of a comprehensive public education campaign that elaborates on the messages and the symbol, so no-one in the future can say, 'My child was born permanently brain damaged, but I didn't know'; 'I wasn't aware'; 'I didn't understand that the binge drinking I did as a teenager was a problem'; 'I didn't know that, although I was an alcoholic'—a problem that we acknowledge is beyond the mother's ability to immediately change; or 'But I wasn't helped during my pregnancy to have my baby born unharmed.' We have to take more responsibility in our society. We do have a very strong drinking culture but we also have to be responsible for those as yet unborn and those born with this terrible disability.