MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE

Mr HILL (Bruce—Assistant Minister for Citizenship, Customs and Multicultural Affairs and Assistant Minister for International Education) (15:22): I'll give him points for humour, actually, with a bit of a gag at the front about having a go at leadership rivals. But, anyway, it is a bit sad, isn't it? This is the party—or what's left of it—of Menzies and Howard, which was the government of our country for much of the last century.

The chaotic rabble that's left is now surrendering to One Nation, organised crime and big tobacco. I actually admired the member for Canning when he said he would not bend the knee to One Nation and that he'd stand up against the forces of extremism and the populist right, and here he is. Instead of doubling down, he's backing down.

I'll pick up on two words in the motion: 'organised crime'. The opposition are right. The scourge of illicit tobacco is being fuelled by organised criminal syndicates.

It's being driven by two things: a massive surplus of cheap global production right across the world, and organised criminal syndicates that are weaponising and industrialising it. These are like multinational businesses. They're commodity agnostic.

They just want to make money. They don't care whether it's meth, tobacco, Gucci handbags, wildlife or human trafficking. They just want to make money, and they're flooding national borders right across the world.

This is a global issue flooding every nation in the world, regardless of their public health or excise policies. Yet, despite everything being chucked at our country by these organised criminals, I want members to hold on to this really important fact: the gold-standard data released last month by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare shows that smoking rates in our country have continued to fall.

Fewer Australians are smoking than ever, and vaping rates have stabilised. Smoking has reached record lows. The last big measure in 2022-23 was 8.8 per cent; it's fallen to 5.8 per cent amongst adults.

Smoking is the most important public health policy issue in the country. I will pull the previous speaker up on one point—he talked about complications from smoking. Well, death is more than just a complication.

Smoking kills one in two users; every day 66 Australians die of a smoking-related illness; two in three long-term smokers will die of a smoking-related illness. It is the leading cause of preventable disease in Australia and still represents 20 per cent of our nation's cancer burden. For decades we have had a bipartisan policy in Australia that has secured these gains for Australians.

We freed up hospital wards and hospitals right across the country. My grandfather's generation condemned overwhelmingly the scourge of smoking related early disease and death. This has freed up tens of billions of dollars in our health system for other, more productive uses, and extended the lives of countless Australians.

So what has the opposition chosen to do in the face of this? Instead of going after the crooks in a serious way, they've put forward a policy package trying to out-One-Nation One Nation to surrender to organised crime. Instead of doubling down, they're backing down.

If you were sitting down at home, trying to design a package that, genius-like, would drive up smoking rates, kill more Australians, fill up the hospital wards, and divert health funding into dealing with smoking related disease again, it literally would be what the opposition has come up with: a price war that they can't win with organised crime, and let vapes rip.

Australians would be quite within their rights to ask: 'Why is there no modelling with this policy? Why are the opposition not fessing up how many new smokers will be created and how many more Australians will die?' It's a don't ask, don't tell policy. How many people will become sick and die?

How many new hospital wards will we need? How many billions of dollars will we have to divert into the health system if the next generation gets hooked on tobacco? There are two parts to their policy—the bidding war with organised crime to slash excise, and the 'let vapes rip into every corner store and then tax it' bit of the policy.

I'll take them one at a time. On excise, last year I heard them talking about a 30 per cent cut. Then it was a 50 per cent cut.

Then One Nation got up a few weeks ago and said 75 per cent, so now they're saying 80 per cent. By next week it'll be 100 per cent, and the week after they'll be paying people to smoke. It is ridiculous.

Under Labor, since we came to government, excise has risen by just under 40 per cent, and the CPI related indexation, in addition to the post-COVID inflation bump, has kept the price of cigarettes constant with real inflation. Under the coalition it was 215 per cent, and not a single dollar went into public health, nothing was done on enforcement, and no funds were given to the states and territories as they let this monster grow.

There has been credible evidence given to the Senate inquiry that one of the original sins here was letting the vaping crisis emerge under their watch when they were in government, which hardened the supply chains through the borders for the crooks to then bring tobacco in. They did nothing. It's also quite genius that they managed to jack up the cigarette tax, not put it into public health and not put it into enforcement, but still managed to never deliver a surplus, to have a decade of deficits and to double the debt before COVID.

But that's for another time. A few facts: even if you wiped out all of the tobacco excise, the illegal cigarettes would still be cheaper, and you'd still have to go and close the shops. Their modelling doesn't even presume that organised crime, with the profits they keep talking about, would not just lower the cost of the product.

Fact: excise used to be bipartisan. I'll just read into the Hansard how last year Senator Paterson, when he was the coalition election campaign spokesperson, and a journalist asked him, 'Why not just end the sin taxes? No more excises, wipe out the punishment taxes,' said: 'Well, that will be a massive tax cut for Big Tobacco companies.

I'm not sure that would be a big improvement for public health. The member for Casey said in the parliament: Both Labor and coalition governments have consistently raised tobacco excise taxes to reduce affordability and discourage smoking, further demonstrating our bipartisan commitment to addressing this critical public health issue. Oh, how times change!

People may wonder what influenced them. The point I would make is it is not the Labor Party that takes donations from Big Tobacco, and the same cannot be said about the coalition or One Nation. It is not the Labor Party that had secret hearings in the Senate inquiry, shuffling in the witnesses from Big Tobacco—secret identities, secret hearings, secret witnesses—while the public health advocates, who also copped the public abuse, had to come in the front door.

But the second part of the policy—if you thought there might be some economic logic to what they were proposing and took them at face value, 'let vapes rip' betrays the fact that they have abandoned any pretence of caring about public health. They have caved in to the vaping lobby holus-bolus. There's a lie that's being sold here.

I timed it—10 minutes from the previous speaker, and seven seconds he spent acknowledging and admitting that the core of the policy is about vapes. The lie that's being sold is that vaping's not that bad. Vaping is just a way of quitting smoking—you know?

For some very long-term addicts, that's right. I'm not judging addiction. It's a health issue.

It's not a moral issue. For a very small number of very long-term smokers, they can still go to their doctor, they can get a prescription and they can get vapes now, if they see this as a way of quitting smoking. But, the fact is, vapers are five times more likely to take up smoking.

Vaping drives up smoking, not the other way around. The link between vaping and cancer is now as established as it can possibly be without 30 years of body bags and corpses to look back on in the epidemiological studies, which no doubt will come. The Sydney University study, the groundbreaking research earlier this year, established that link.

They're as sure as you can be without lining up the corpses. Don't just believe me. I want to read a couple of quotes—the member for Cook.

I recently had another email from a constituent in Cronulla. She emailed me with dread about one of her young boys in high school who'd become addicted to vaping and nicotine because he was being sold illegal vapes repeatedly in the Cronulla mall. The mums and dads of high-school students at Cronulla, Jannali, Miranda and Caringbah get it.

They are watching their kids get addicted to cut-price vapes. So why is their policy to let vapes rip? Well, Anne Webster, the member for Mallee.

Then there is vaping. Young people who vape are three times more likely to take up smoking. I remember the arguments when vaping came in: it would be an off-ramp.

I don't think so. The government has taken tough action on vaping. I'm proud of the fact that vaping rates have stabilised and have now started to decline amongst young Australians, saving the next generation from the scourge of nicotine addiction and early death.

I'll finish on this point. The government is acting on every front. The previous speaker is right: something needs to be done, and it is being done, to disrupt the organised criminal syndicates pre border, at border and post border.

The best container of illegal tobacco is one that never arrives in Australia. We've had record levels of disruptions offshore. We've had record levels of seizures at the border in the last nine months.

I couldn't be prouder of what the Australian Border Force is doing. But the biggest, most urgent gains now come post border. The Minister for Health is right.

The big states, Victoria and New South Wales, were way too slow to get onto this. Queensland—an LNP government—and South Australia have been leading the way. What we are seeing from the retailers in Queensland, which has gone harder and faster than any jurisdiction, is early evidence that legal sales are rising, that the black market is shrinking and that the price of illegal products is rising.

It's time to double down, not to back down to organised crime, One Nation and big tobacco.