"I definitely went to vaping to try and get off cigarettes. That was the trick, and it worked for me!"
Timeline:
27 March 2024:
"I'm not proud of it, but I had my first cigarette in year 6, and about 35 years later I managed to stop smoking. I stopped it by vaping. I don't condone vaping, but I definitely went to vaping to try and get off cigarettes. That was the trick, and it worked for me. I fully acknowledge that some people are vaping and going on to cigarettes."
"it's 57 bucks for a packet of cigarettes. For international cigarettes, it's 15 bucks. So which ones do you think they're buying? When you think you've stopped it and got it under control, that there's none at all—no you haven't, and you're not going to."
"What you have to do is regulate this market. You have to accept that people look at international cigarettes and vapes and say: 'Well, they take them. They can still drive. They're not really intoxicated. They don't go home and beat up their partner, so in the Maslow moral hierarchy of virtue I don't put these down as a huge evil."
"I was just up in the other joint, the Federation Chamber, passing a new excise on roll-your-owns. People who roll their own cigarettes are poor—they have no money—and the reason they roll their own is because it's cheaper than buying a packet of cigarettes. So we're putting up the excise on that. The only people you're now going to get your money off of are the people who legally buy roll-your-own tobacco. All the rest are going to go to chop-chop, and they are. Thirty per cent of the market is chop-chop, and that's what we can determine—it's probably a lot higher than that. About 95 per cent of the vape market is illegal already, and we're not stopping that."
"So we have decided that it is virtuous to go to people who cannot afford their fuel, their groceries or their rent and get $3 billion off them—$3 billion that they otherwise would have spent on milk, on their sanitary products, on fuel and on their rent. And we go: 'That's virtuous. What a good thing we did today.' What a load of rubbish. They're not going to stop smoking. You're just making them poorer. They will say to you, 'If I can't pay my rent, because you, the government, are ripping me off because of my addiction, I'm going to go somewhere else and buy the product.' That's precisely what they will do."
"So, no matter what you do here, I hope you all feel jolly good about it. I hope you all feel like you can walk out the door and think, 'I fought that one hard.' You'll walk out the door and, to be quite frank, forget about it, like most of us. You know what? Out there, nothing is going to change except that the illegal markets are just going to bigger and bigger and bigger."