CLAIRE CLUTTERHAM, CANDIDATE FOR STURT: Good morning, everyone. My name is Claire Clutterham, I'm the Labor Party candidate for Sturt for the next federal election. We are here this morning on Kaurna land at Charles Campbell College in Paradise, in the heart of the electorate of Sturt. I'm joined this morning by Mark Butler, the Minister for Health and Aged Care; Chris Picton, the State Government Minister for Health; Dana Wortley, the Member for Torrens; Caroline Miller from SAHMRI; the Principal of Charles Campbell College, Kevin O'Neill; and Blair Boyer, the Education Minister in the State Government. And we have two Year 11 students from Charles Campbell, Casey and Jack. Thank you to Charles Campbell for having us. We're here this morning with a positive news story about the effect of the Albanese Labor Government's anti-vaping reforms. I will throw to Minister Butler to give us the good news.
MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGED CARE, MARK BUTLER: Thank you, Claire. We're just so delighted in federal Labor that Claire has decided to stick her hand up and run as a candidate in this terrific community in north-eastern suburbs of Adelaide, in the next federal election. I'm really delighted to be here at Charles Campbell College and thank Kevin and the community here for welcoming us this morning, because Ministers Picton, Boyer and I have some really good news. We know, and school communities like this one know, that vaping has for years now, been a real scourge for young people, that is aimed directly at the heart and the lungs of the youngest Australians. As parents bring their kids back to school for the new school year, they can have confidence, as can teachers and young people themselves, that we have finally turn the corner on the scourge of vaping.
I want to recap the history of the last several years. Vaping, as SAHMRI, the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute, will tell you, has exploded among young people over the last several years. Vaping rates have increased by about a thousand per cent in Australia, and that is heavily concentrated among the youngest Australians. We know these cause very real harms to young Australians. About 200 chemicals are contained in the average vape, many of them deeply, deeply harmful. The sorts of chemicals used to produce weed killer, nail polish remover, used to de-ice runways at airports. Very, very harmful in and of themselves. We also know that it has become a gateway to cigarette smoking, and everyone is familiar with the profound health harms associated with smoking. Over the last couple of years, the only cohort in the Australian community where cigarette rates have been rising has been amongst the youngest Australians. The latest research from the University of Sydney showed that young people who vaped were five times more likely than their contemporaries to take up smoking. Terrifyingly, 12 year olds who vape are 29 times more likely to take up cigarette smoking. That is why Chris Picton and I, and our health minister colleagues right across the country, have been so determined to stamp out this public health scourge, a scourge aimed right at the heart and the lungs of young Australians.
We've choked off supply at the border. Last year, we seized more than 7 million disposable vapes through Border Force and the Therapeutic Goods Administration. We've outlawed the sale of vapes in a recreational or retail setting; you can only legally buy vapes in pharmacies. We've rolled out a series of information campaigns to make sure young people know the facts about vaping, know the harms that are caused by vapes, and know the skills and the methods to just say no, to something that is so harmful to their health.
I'm really delighted to report that we've had a number of surveys that confirm these changes are working. Roy Morgan research shows that vaping rates have declined substantially over the last several months, right across Australia. The University of Sydney released the latest wave of their Generation Vape study, which has been conducted on a six-monthly basis, only over the last couple of weeks. It showed that the latest wave of their research, in the last quarter of 2024, found the number of young people aged 14 to 17, high school students who said they had never vaped, was at record highs. So ‘never vapers’ among high school students, at record highs. Really pleasingly, the number of young people who said they'd never smoked a cigarette was also at record highs. The awareness of the harms of vaping, again, at record highs. The number of young people saying that they've noticed that fewer of their friends are vaping was also at record highs.
We're determined to keep pressing on to stamp out recreational vaping. We're under no illusions around the enormity of this task. We're taking on Big Tobacco on the one hand, which we know is a formidable opponent, and organised crime on the other, which continues to use vapes and illicit tobacco as a ready source of revenue to fund all of their other criminal activities, like drug trafficking and sex trafficking. We know this is not going to be easy, but we're really pleased that our world leading efforts that have been conducted in cooperation between state and federal governments are showing we are finally turning the corner on this public health scourge. I’m very pleased to hand over to my colleague and friend, Chris Picton.
SOUTH AUSTRALIAN MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND WELLBEING, CHRIS PICTON: Thanks very much, Mark. The data that we are releasing from SAHMRI today is incredibly pleasing, and it shows that the reforms that Mark and all the governments across Australia have put in place are making a real difference. We know, sadly, that what we were told about vaping has all turned out to be untrue. We were told, originally, that it was only going to help people who were smokers, and not be attractive to young kids. We were told that vaping itself would not have health impacts, both of which have been found out to be completely untrue. Vapes are incredibly attractive to young kids, and we saw over the past few years, more and more kids taking up vaping and becoming incredibly addicted to nicotine. That was causing huge issues in schools and was causing huge issues in families. I met with many parents who told me about the difficulties that they had with their kids, as young as 13 or 14, who got addicted to nicotine through the huge amounts of nicotine included in vapes, and the difficulties that they had trying to wean their kids off, and having to go on nicotine replacement therapy, for a kid as young as 13. That shouldn't be happening.
This is all happening because Big Tobacco is seeing, unfortunately, so many of their customers dying because of their product. Smoking kills and Big Tobacco is looking for ways to bring in new customers and get them addicted to nicotine. Because of that, we've seen Big Tobacco investing in vapes and trying to hook kids onto nicotine addictions. We need to stamp that out, and I really want to pay credit to Mark and his leadership across the country, in taking this on. It's been a huge challenge. This is world leading stuff, no one is doing anything close to this anywhere around the world. And now we can see, through Mark's leadership, this is making a difference.
We've got world leading research here, through SAHMRI, some of the best research around the country in terms of smoking and vaping prevalence. Today, we're releasing that data, showing for young people aged 15 to 29, the vaping rate has gone from 15.1 per cent down to 10.8 per cent. That's almost a third reduction in just one year. That shows that these changes are making a difference. In fact, the next age bracket, over 30 year olds, is an even higher percentage reduction as well. That's a huge reduction that's come just in the space of the first year of these reforms being rolled out, and we're confident that's going to continue to decrease, as we see the impact of these reforms going forward.
All the states around the country are absolutely committed to working with the federal government to tackle this, and it is world leading stuff that we don't see anywhere in the world. I want to pay credit to Mark for his leadership and taking this on. This is going to save lives. This is going to stop young people getting addicted to nicotine and moving on to smoking. It is going to stop them getting a whole range of diseases, including cancer. It's a credit to the political leadership that we're seeing that it is making a real difference. I'll pass over to Blair Boyer to talk about the impact that this is having in our schools.
SOUTH AUSTRALIAN MINISTER FOR EDUCATION, BLAIR BOYER: Thank you, Chris. One of the very first calls I made upon becoming South Australia's Education Minister was to our Commissioner for Children and Young People, Helen Connolly, and I said to her I had a sense that we weren't doing enough when it came to vaping. I was hearing so much from parents who were concerned about it, but also from young people. I asked if Helen could perhaps do a survey of students in the public, Catholic and independent schooling systems to ask them about how prevalent it was. The data was absolutely shocking. Not only did it show really high rates of people in our schools vaping, but it also showed that a number of those students said they'd been introduced to vaping by their parents, who thought it would be a way of keeping them off traditional cigarette smoking. We knew from that point that we had a real problem. We were also seeing suspensions for vaping-related incidents at schools absolutely skyrocketing, and it was proving a very difficult thing for schools to tackle. We knew that what we needed to do is provide some better information for students at a young age in our schools around the dangers of vaping and that that had really been missing.
As we've heard this morning from Ministers Butler and Picton, the kind of stuff that goes into these vapes is shocking, but what came out from Helen Connolly's survey and the work that the Education Department did with schools is there's no real understanding amongst students of how bad it was for their health. From that, we started an awareness campaign in schools with some very high-profile material that was put up in classrooms and around schools, showing the kind of things, like Mark spoke about, that were found in vapes. They're incredibly dangerous things for young people's health. We also funded a couple of organisations to go out to schools right around South Australia and sit down with young students and explain to them just how dangerous it was.
With the fantastic work that we've seen at a national level from Mark Butler, also at a state level, from Chris Picton, combined with the work that we've done in schools, is we are now seeing some incredible stats in terms of how that suspension related data has dropped. In fact, what we've seen between the start of the 2023 school year and the 2024 school year is a 50 per cent decline in suspensions related to vaping. If I was totally honest with you, I would say it was much more than I could have possibly hoped for. We have seen those suspensions drop from about 388 to about 186 in the space of 12 months.
I think this is a great example of what we can achieve if we work together with a committed national government and a committed minister who are serious about doing something, the Health Minister here, Chris Picton, who understands the danger and is committed to doing things from his portfolio, and an education system which knows that it has to play a role as well, in the education piece, to make sure that young people grow up to be ‘never vapers’ and understand just how dangerous it can be for them. This data is really pleasing. I'm hopeful that the extra work has been done on a national level, here in South Australia, that we can actually see those suspension figures continue to decline even further. I'll pass over now to our representative from SAHMRI.
PROFESSOR CAROLINE MILLER, DIRECTOR OF THE HEALTH POLICY CENTRE, SOUTH AUSTRALIAN HEALTH AND MEDICAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE (SAHMRI): Hello, I'm Professor Caroline Miller from SAHMRI. I'm the Director of the Health Policy Centre at SAHMRI, and I'm a Professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Adelaide. Today, we're releasing Australia's first representative population-based statistics on rates of vaping. We have been studying vaping at SAHMRI for over 10 years. What we've seen over that time is vaping goes from something that almost nobody undertook, to a rapid explosion in recent years, as disposable vapes came onto the market that appealed to kids and were taken up by kids. We saw a doubling and then a quadrupling of vaping rates.
What we're announcing today is our new data that says in our youngest cohort, which is our 15 to 29 year olds, we've had a rapid decline in vaping from over 15 per cent to 10.8 per cent. That's a very large reduction in vaping in that group. In the next age group, we've gone from 7 per cent vaping to 3.5 per cent vaping, which is nearly a halving in vaping.
This is a direct response to public health policy reform. People sometimes said that it was too late to do anything about vaping, which was expanding rapidly amongst our youngest Australians. That was incorrect. What this data shows us is that with evidence-based effective public health policy reform, we can turn this around, the way we have in the past in Australia with other public health issues like smoking. It's a very important message that when we take good public health policy action, we see very dramatic changes as a result, which ensures the future health of our youngest Australians.
JOURNALIST: Is there any qualitative research in this study around why young people are vaping less?
MILLER: At SAHMRI we do a whole raft of different types of research around vaping. Today's study is a population health study, so that tells us about the statistics which are representative for the whole of the community. It's very clear from previous research that SAHMRI has undertaken that supply was really readily available for young people. Vapes were everywhere. They looked and smelled and were marketed in a way that was appealing to young people. We've seen enormous reforms, which have completely stopped the supply of vapes being available to an ordinary child in a school or on the street, and that's what's represented in these data today.
JOURNALIST: A question for Minister Picton. Just wanted to talk a bit about why smoking cigarettes is reducing, and vape use is reducing as well. Do you think that there's a correlation between the increase of the use of nicotine pouches?
PICTON: No, essentially. This has really been about reducing the supply of vaping, as Caroline said, that has led to this reduction. We are nervous about nicotine pouches, and that's why yesterday, we took the action in terms of banning them to begin with, before we see a rapid explosion of them in our communities, amongst our kids. That's probably, in hindsight, what should have happened with vaping 10 to 15 years ago. But that didn't happen. We saw the explosion of vaping in our communities and our schools, and it took this huge amount of effort led by Minister Butler and the federal government, working with state governments, to try to turn that around. We don't want to see the same thing happening with other products, like nicotine pouches, and that's why if we can see other products coming into the market then we should take action early to avoid an explosion of other products. What we've seen with vaping shows early action is so important, and that's why we've done that in terms of nicotine pouches, and we'll continue to take that if there are other nicotine products that come onto the market. Big Tobacco is killing its customers. It needs to find more customers, and it's continuing to develop other ways to try to hook people with nicotine and hook people to their products.
JOURNALIST: It sounds like supply diminishing is part of the solution here, and I understand the messaging is around the safety implications of vaping and using other nicotine products. What's next in terms of those struggles when it comes to young people quitting, because it's not easy to quit using nicotine? What kind of outreach is going on with young people to help that?
PICTON: There has been work on how we can assist kids who are addicted to nicotine, in terms of quitting. All of the Quitlines have made sure that they've got the resources and supports available, not just for adults quitting smoking, but now for kids quitting vaping. As Blair has explained, the schools themselves have been doing a huge amount of work in terms of their education support for teachers, and everyone involved in schools, in terms of supporting kids through that process. Nicotine is an incredibly addictive product. It is very hard to quit, but through the support to quit lines, and the supports through schools, kids have been able to quit, and we're going to keep supporting that. Today's press conference is by no means saying “mission accomplished” to this. There's a long way to go, but we're committed to working through this as long as it takes to get kids off vapes and off nicotine.
BUTLER: In the 2023 Budget, when we funded this comprehensive plan to stamp out vaping and also to redouble our efforts on tobacco, we allocated tens of millions of dollars of additional funding to the quit support services that have served Australia so well for many, many years in relation to cigarettes. That was to expand their workforce to deal with that climb in demand we expected, but also to adapt their services to young people who have not traditionally been users of the quit services, when it was essentially a cigarette addiction service. We've seen in some jurisdictions, a doubling of calls to those Quitline services. We've also made sure that quit support services are put online. The My QuitBuddy app, that is available both for cigarette addiction and also for vaping, has been incredibly popular and has delivered a really good service to people as well.
We've also, at a federal level, supported colleagues like Blair Boyer with lots of materials for school communities and for parents who are struggling with this, with their children or with their students. We're determined to keep pressing on with this. This year, we're expanding the support to secondary schools, in particular, to ensure that they have the tools and the services to educate their students about the harms of vaping and the behaviours in just saying “no”.
If I can supplement Chris’s answer in relation to nicotine pouches, I really applaud the State Government here in South Australia for taking early action in relation to pouches. Minster Picton is spot on to say the best time to deal with these new products that Big Tobacco are trying to spread to encourage a new generation into nicotine addiction is early on.
The former government, at a federal level, just didn't do that. They allowed these vapes to flood into Australia, and when Greg Hunt tried to stop that flood of vapes, to his credit, he was rolled within a matter of days by his own party room, and that flood was able to continue. By contrast, what we've been able to do with strong action of the border is see a huge increase in the number of pouches being seized at the border. In 2023, we probably seized less than 200,000 nicotine pouches at the border. Last year, we seized more than 10 million, an increase of more than 50 fold. We are determined to shut this off at the beginning. We know what Big Tobacco is doing, we've seen them do this before, they have done it with vapes most recently. We're not going to allow them to do it now with pouches, having started to shut off the supply of vapes.
JOURNALIST: Minister Butler, can I ask will there be a national ban on nicotine pouches after South Australia has banned them?
BUTLER: The Therapeutic Goods Administration has already taken action in relation to pouches at a federal level. It's great to see South Australia take action to replicate that. It's important to have jurisdictions aligned on this. We'll obviously be talking to other states about the experience that South Australia has now put before the rest of the country, but the TGA, which is responsible for regulation at a national level, has been very clear that nicotine pouches are not lawful here in Australia.
JOURNALIST: Is this even in a pharmaceutical environment?
BUTLER: They're not approved for a pharmaceutical setting. There's been no application to do that. These are an informal market that we are determined to stamp out before it grows in the way that vapes were allowed to grow under the former government.
JOURNALIST: What's your experiences been with either people who are close to you or people you see in school using nicotine products?
CASEY TAYLOR, STUDENT, CHARLES CAMPBELL COLLEGE: Personally, I have seen far too many for my liking. I've seen too many students in toilets vaping in between classes, and I strongly feel that it's something that should not be happening.
JOURNALIST: Do you see what kind of impact it has on students in the grips of addiction. What does that look like?
JACK BUCHA, STUDENT, CHARLES CAMPBELL COLLEGE: Yes, there's a lot of pressure in these groups, I believe, from people whose peers are also vaping. Because often times these people offer their friends a vape, and this obviously leads to addiction in those who otherwise would not have tried it.
TAYLOR: I'm closer to the sporting community and seeing my fellow athletes using vapes and jeopardising their performance, with shortness of breath and the other side effects of vaping. It disappoints me, because I do see it too much.
JOURNALIST: Do you feel like the health messaging is part of the reason why there is people who are choosing to stop vaping or using other products? Do you think that is a big reason? Or do you hear anything else as to why they don't want to do it anymore?
BUCHA: Definitely, I think the things that we've had in school, l with people coming in with posters, that's definitely raised the awareness of the adverse health effects of that. And also, I feel vaping is a big distraction, especially from learning at school, that's another reason my peers have stopped vaping.
JOURNALIST: What do you think should happen next to help your peers and the next generation coming through to stamp it out?
TAYLOR: A lot of the new generations are being brought up on social media. I think that if more media was pushing as against vapes, it would really help to reduce it more. I know that a lot of people are influenced by social media, and especially people around my age, it's a lot of ‘see it and do it’. If there are more people saying “no to vapes”, then people will think it's not cool, it's not something that I should be doing, and they'll stop.
BUCHA: It may also be useful that in the younger years, maybe Year 6 in primary schools, if they also raise awareness about vapes, because a lot of these students come into Year 7 in high school, and they don't really understand how damaging these vapes can be when they are introduced.