25 June 2024: 

Therapeutic Goods and Other Legislation Amendment (Vaping Reforms) Bill 2024

Second Reading

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Key Statements:

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"I distinctly remember meeting a young mother of four children who had, for many years, tried to kick the habit of smoking. It was a terrible, debilitating addiction for her. It wasn't until she tried vaping that she was able to successfully kick the habit, and that completely changed her life. Before that time, she had difficulty keeping up with her children, playing with her children; she would be out of breath. Generally you would go outside to smoke, away from the children. It separates you from your children. It wasn't a good existence for her. Vaping changed her life. That's just one particular story; I heard many more. There are thousands of people across the country, and I've met hundreds of them over the years, who, on this issue, have had their lives changed for good by using vapes."

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"This idea that I continue to hear that somehow vaping is worse or as bad as smoking is palpably untrue. You just have to speak to people who do it. It's untrue in their own lives, it's untrue in their lived experience and it's untrue in scientific literature"

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"the scientific conclusion is very clear: the ingestion of carcinogenic tobacco as a nicotine delivery system is much, much worse than relying on a vaporised gas to deliver nicotine to the human body."

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"As an adult, as a consenting adult, we should generally allow people to make choices that don't otherwise cause debilitating changes to their lives. We allow people to legally buy cigarettes. We allow people to consume vast quantities of alcohol, which has terrible social impacts from time to time, but we live in a free society which generally allows adults to make those free choices without the government trying to tell us all what to do, and so I think that generally should be our preference. We should generally prefer, if possible, to let adults make their own choices."

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"The government has had a brainwave: all we need to do is make criminal activity illegal! Why didn't we think of this before? All we have to do is make crime illegal, and then it will all go away! That's the approach of this government—that this is somehow revolutionary. They've got something that's already illegal, and now they're coming in and making federal laws on top of the state laws to make it further illegal, and somehow that will stop people being criminals. It is so absurd that this government thinks that if this parliament merely signs a piece of paper, if some media releases are put out, this problem will suddenly vanish, will disappear. Why hadn't anyone thought of this before!"

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"you come into this place, and you think: do these people live in the real world? We hear these speeches, and they seem so disconnected."

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". We see that in the government revenue in tobacco excise, which is falling off a cliff. Smoking rates aren't falling off a cliff anymore; they've somewhat plateaued. But that revenue is falling off a cliff because everybody's just going to buy the illegal tobacco because we've allowed this black market to grow, and we think that continuing a failed strategy is somehow going to fix it. It's not. We should look to replicate the success we've clearly achieved with a balanced approach which allows adults to be free in a regulated market and to put all our resources into educating our children—into keeping vapes away from kids and cracking down on anybody who supplies them to young children."

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"I welcomed the announcement today that a Liberal-National government will see common sense on this issue and adopt the same types of regulation that almost every other developed country in the world has—countries like us: New Zealand, the UK and some states in the US."

 

"I can't believe we're doing this. Why don't we just drop this right now? This bill is not really needed"

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More here>>

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