Wednesday, 30 October 2024

Public Accounts and Estimates Committee

Inquiry into Vaping and Tobacco Controls

David LIMBRICK (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (17:30): I rise to speak on the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee report on vaping and tobacco controls. I am quite critical of some of the findings and recommendations of this report, but I want to be very clear before I speak that this is not a reflection of the work of the committee staff.

This is a very strange report. It seems to exist in some kind of parallel universe where the United Kingdom, New Zealand and any other jurisdiction that has something approximating sensible policies on vaping just do not exist. Indeed the word ‘England’ does not appear in the report at all, despite Public Health England conducting regular reviews on the evidence of vaping. It is maybe not surprising then that finding 15 states that:

There is no scientific evidence to show that e-cigarette use is healthier than smoking tobacco.

None – no evidence at all, apparently. It is quite odd then when you go to vapingfacts.health.nz, an official website of the New Zealand health department, that there is a range of evidence cited. When you click through the tab on ‘The facts of vaping’ the first point states:

Vaping can give nicotine in a less harmful way than cigarettes.

They also cite a lot of research, including a 2021 Cochrane review and an evidence review of e-cigarettes and heated tobacco products by Public Health England, amongst others.

But according to this committee, none of this actually exists. Apparently the previous and current New Zealand and United Kingdom governments are basing their public policy on, well, absolutely nothing, because no evidence exists, apparently, that vaping is less harmful than smoking.

Finding 8 states that the overall tobacco market in Victoria is estimated at $6 billion, with estimates of between 6.1 per cent and 40 per cent of that being illicit tobacco. It also states that the vape market is estimated to be worth between $332 million and $545.8 million. I would suggest that both of these are an underestimate.

One thing that I think we can all agree on is that we are seeing a slow-rolling policy disaster. Where we disagree is on some of the causes and most certainly on the solutions. The causes are obvious, or at least they should be. The surging and increasingly violent and dangerous illicit tobacco market is clearly driven by excessive tobacco excise taxes supported, at least until very recently, by all major parties. These have created an incentive for organised crime to make huge profits from illicit tobacco smuggling. With vaping, there has been a complete failure to establish a reasonably regulated industry for adults to allow them to quit smoking by what is clearly a less harmful alternative.

One other area in which I would at least partially agree with the findings of the committee is that youth vaping is an issue. For smokers who are struggling to quit, vaping is a great alternative, as acknowledged and promoted by the New Zealand health department. But for teenagers who have never smoked it is a habit worth avoiding, as it is clearly more harmful than breathing fresh air and nicotine dependence is worth avoiding. However, the way that we have approached this, in particular organisations like VicHealth, has been completely wrongheaded. In 2019 in this chamber I referenced the work of Dr Stephen Bright, a senior lecturer in addiction studies at Edith Cowan University. In 2013 he was the lead author in a study that looked at drug moral panics in the media and how they interacted with consumer behaviour. The key finding of this work was that moral panics like the one we have seen with youth vaping tend to lead to an increase in curiosity and experimentation rather than discouraging use. In short, much of the nonsense we have seen from public health has simply been advertising the exact behaviour they are trying to address. I warned about this very phenomenon in 2019, and that is exactly what we have seen play out.

But I have some good news. It does, however, require looking outside the bubble of Australia and learning about what has happened overseas. The news is that after a similar panic about youth vaping in the United States, vaping rates among young people have fallen dramatically in recent times. It was just a fad. It was trendy for a while and then it became lame and cringe, as often happens with periods of youth experimentation, and this would likely happen here too. What would speed up this process is embracing adult vaping – indeed embracing tobacco harm reduction overall. If it is a boring thing recommended by the government to help your granddad quit the cigarettes, it will hardly be an edgy and cool thing for teenagers to do. We need to cut the tobacco excise and legalise vaping for adults. This is how we will get organised crime under control and respect the choices of adults.