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First of all, thank you, Erin for the introduction, and thank you for pulling this event together.
It’s a terrific gathering of people doing major pieces of work across the Commonwealth with all states and territories in health and policing, criminal intelligence.
It's really reassuring for me, as the Minister, that there's such a level of energy and expertise being brought to this devilishly difficult task that we have in front of us.
I come from the health portfolio.
At the Commonwealth level, we have our particular silos of policy responsibility.
Illicit tobacco, for largely revenue reasons, sits with Treasury.
I'm going to talk to you in particular about vaping, which has been my particular focus over the last couple of years.
As you all know, several years ago now, here in Australia and across the world, a supposedly terrific new product was launched.
It was marketed to help hardened smokers who've been smoking cigarettes for decades finally kick the habit.
A terrific new tool in the toolbox, particularly for people who’d tried the patches, had tried other nicotine replacement therapies but had gotten nowhere.
We were finally going to become free of cigarettes through this new tool.
And it was apparently harmless, e-cigarettes or vapes.
At some point, I'm not sure we can nominate a particular day, but at some point, vaping morphed pretty quickly into a recreational product.
For a number of years, it was really something at the fringes.
A bit weird, something you saw mainly among young people in some parts of our big cities more than others.
It started to attach cultural names: ‘digital durries’, as opposed to ‘analogues’ and all those sorts of things.
It wasn't really until the last few years, particularly under the cover of COVID, this thing exploded.
In 2016 we think about 200,000 people were vaping, overwhelmingly very young adults and teenagers.
But over the course of the following several years, that number exploded by about 700 per cent.
Our last Drug Household Survey in 2023 it had risen from about 200,000 to over one and a half million - about a 700 per cent increase.
When you look at Roy Morgan polling by the end of last year it had exploded with almost 2 million Australians vaping.
About the same numbers as people smoking cigarettes, which had continued to come down albeit less than we were hoping for.
Over those years, certainly in my community in the west of Adelaide and others right across the country, vape stores started opening.
Not tobacconists offering a range of different products, or convenience stores, but vape only stores.
Nine out of 10 of them were opened in walking distance of school because they knew that that was their target market.
There’s no doubt about it, you just have to look at the products.
We had some of them in the next room, ABF was good enough to collect and bring them to us, seized at the border.
They're not the sort of product that's targeted at a middle aged, long-term smoker.
They are products targeted quite openly at kids.
They have cartoon characters on them and with ridiculous flavours.
Bubble gum and all the rest.
All to lure young people into this product.
Meanwhile, the promotion of vapes through social media messages were utterly rife.
Health Authorities right around the world were being told these things were far from harmless.
In and of themselves, they contain about 200 different chemicals, some of which are used to make weed killer, nail polish remover and chemicals used to de-ice runways.
Although this was a recent phenomenon, as you understand already, we're starting to get research pretty regularly now, about the different health harms that vaping is causing.
A reemergence of black gum disease among young people.
Cell DNA damage done in the cheeks that is quite consistent with the sort of cellular DNA damage you see in lung cancer patients and so on and so forth.
Early studies, but studies pretty quickly, started to put to bed this myth that vaping was harmless.
Of course, the real harm is that this is a gateway to cigarettes.
And that was always the intention of Big Tobacco.
That's why they put these things into the marketplace.
The University of Sydney with its Generation Vape program has been producing more and more research to demonstrate quite how wide that gateway has become.
Initially, we thought vaping youngsters were about three times as likely to take up cigarettes.
The most recent research from the University, only in the last couple of months, says that students who vape were about five times as likely to take up cigarettes.
Terrifyingly, 12-year-olds who vape, and there’s a lot of them, are 29 times more likely to take up cigarettes than 12-year-olds who don’t vape.
And that, of course, was the strategy all along for Big Tobacco.
Tragically, it's working.
The only cohort in our community now where cigarette smoking rates are going up are the youngest Australians, very, very young adults.
For parents and for school leaders and school communities, this came out of nowhere.
It's very quickly become the leading behavioural issue in schools.
Teachers are not just being rostered to stand outside school toilets, they're being rostered to stand inside school toilets during lunch to try and police the vaping that has become so rife in high schools.
Increasingly, this is happening in primary schools.
They're spending scarce school funds to install vape detectors in school toilets.
We hear stories at the end of year exams last year and in 2022, HSC exam students were unable to get through a three hour exam without nicotine patches, such was the level of their nicotine addiction now.
I can tell you, as a politician, parents are beside themselves.
They are really angry that we, governments, let this happen.
This just came out of nowhere for parents.
It exploded and they don't quite know how to deal with their teenager who is addicted to nicotine.
The amount of nicotine these kids are ingesting is truly terrifying.
Now I'm not a prohibitionist by nature, and the Prime Minister is not a prohibitionist by nature.
When I came to the portfolio, or back to the portfolio after the 2022 election, I spent a lot of time talking to tobacco control experts in this country.
We have some of the best in the world, we've led the world in this area.
Some of them have been doing this work for 50 years.
They came in and said to me, pretty quickly, you've got to shut this thing down.
You can't just regulate it a bit, or tax it a bit.
You've just got to get rid of it.
It is a public health menace aimed at the hearts and the lungs of young Australians, and the window is closing - so stamp this thing out.
They made the point that if 100 years ago, we knew then, what we know now about cigarettes, maybe governments might have taken a very different view about cigarettes than they did 100 years ago.
I had to chew that over because I was struggling with the question, why do you prohibit vapes, but not prohibit cigarettes.
Over time, we came to the view, we had a lot of discussions as a group of health ministers in every state and territory, and we came to the view that this is a particular menace targeted right at our children.
That it does run the risk of undoing 50 years of hard work to get smoking rates down that has saved literally millions and millions of lives.
That doesn't mean it's going to be easy.
It's not, as you all know.
We are having to implement a whole lot of policy decisions that jurisdictions have made.
We got really strong support from the Prime Minister and the Treasurer who was particularly strong in his support of us bringing package to the to the Budget last year.
He sees it in his community.
He's a parent of young kids, as so many of us are.
We're bringing that sort of personal experience to these jobs as all of you do too, I’m sure.
We were able to put in place a package that reflected the views across jurisdictions and within the federal government.
We were originally advised, we would have to have a piece of legislation in every single parliament, which, as you all know, is not easy to deliver.
It's hard not to get something through our Senate let alone for all of the different houses of parliament that sit at the state territory level.
But we now have a single piece of legislation; The Therapeutic Goods Act, that is able to be enforced by the state authorities, that is really serious about stamping this out.
Very, very serious penalties, fines of over $2 million for individuals, fines of over $20 million for corporations and very serious jail terms.
We put very substantial resources at the Commonwealth level behind that, with TGA and ABF in particular, being resourced to do the Commonwealth’s part of this job, and they've been doing a terrific job.
Today, as Erin indicated, I can announce an additional $107 million for those Commonwealth agencies to double down on our enforcement and interception activities, particularly through the ABFF and the TGA.
With additional resources to Commonwealth DPP so that they can go about their work to bringing these criminals to justice.
Implementing penalties that the Parliament put in place several months ago.
And also looking at how we can keep researching and monitoring, what you know better than me, is a really fast moving area of criminal enterprise.
Something that we need to ensure that we're able to help all of you come up with as the criminal organisations are doing.
I said I knew it wouldn't be easy.
Again when Erin and I just stood up in front of the media just then, I got the questions I get all the time: ”But you can still get a vape, you can still get one can’t you?”
However, we understand this, we knew that this was not going to easy.
We've got 50 years of fighting Big Tobacco.
We know that they're a hard opponent, they’re a hard enemy.
I was a junior health minister, when we put in place plain packaging reforms.
We spent a long time in court, with what were world-leading reforms that have now been adopted by dozens of countries and are saving lots and lots of lives across the planet.
We know they are always a hard-fought win.
But now, we also happen to be dealing with serious organised crime.
This as a really lucrative source of high reward, until now, relatively low risk revenue that they're able to deploy into their other criminal activities like drug trafficking, sex trafficking and the like.
We knew from the start this was going to be hard.
I've tried as the person who does most of the communication on behalf of the Federal Government on this, to be as honest as I can with the Australian people.
This was not a question of switching off the light switch.
This is going to be hard, slow work.
We're never going to get rid of every single vape any more than we've got rid of every single bit of methamphetamine or cocaine in the country.
We have responsibilities to do our hardest, to make it as hard as possible for these things to end up, particularly in the hands of young people.
Step one, as you know, weas to try and choke off supply.
We deliberately staged this in a way where we would start to choke the supply off before we came to regulate or prohibit the sale of these things in recreational settings.
I don't know if they had a particular number in mind, Erin and Tony, but the numbers of disposable vapes that have been seized since the 1st of January certainly has exceeded my expectation.
We know there were millions of these things that were brought into the country in readiness for these new regulations.
But we've seized well over 7 million.
We're constantly seizing more and joint operations between the TGA and officers at state and territory level, means we're still seizing them at the border.
It is having an impact.
We know from the Chinese industry that has its own newsletter, that they think, exports are down more than 90 per cent direct to Australia.
It doesn't mean they're not coming through third countries, but they now recognise Australia as a hard export market because of the resources that we've brought to bear at the border and within our borders.
Step two, which is even harder than step one is enforcement.
Step three is enforcement, and step four is enforcement.
That's the work that all of you are doing, and I'm so grateful for it.
As I said, it's going to be hard work.
In my electorate, there were seven vapes stores.
Every single one of them are now closed.
Now, that doesn't mean every vape store across the country is closed but instead of parents walking their kids past the vape store to and from school, they're walking them past a store that is available for lease or is now something other than a vape store.
And that is an important signal to the community.
But the really hard work now is those general stores.
The tobacconists, the convenience stores that have vapes under the counter, as they have illegal cigarettes.
We know that that's going to be really hard, slow work.
Hundreds of operations have been undertaken either by state or territory authorities themselves, or in partnership with the TGA and other Commonwealth agencies.
I’m really grateful for that work.
It has to continue and at some point we are going to have to have some high-profile prosecutions to send a very clear message that this is no longer a low-risk activity, that this is something that is that this is something that is going to cost you very significant amounts of money and potentially end up in jail time as well.
I'm deadly serious about enforcing these laws.
The rest of our government is deadly serious about enforcing these laws, and we know that you are serious about it too, which is why you're all here today.
I thought I'd say a few words, particularly for those of you not in health about what we are also seeing on the demand side.
Particularly, the demand side, has been focused very much on young people.
We know that's the target market.
We know that is the cohort of community leaders with vaping in vast numbers.
There's a program that's been running now for about 20 years, out of the Matilda Centre at the University of Sydney, called OurFutures.
It targets kids at their really impressionable age, years seven and eight, to teach them behaviours around illicit drugs and alcohol.
It's been running for a long time.
It's subject to quite rigorous evaluation.
It conducts clinical trials in accordance with trial framework overseen by the NHMRC.
It's a very rigorous health medical research-based program.
They did a trial over the course of the last 12 months, adapting their framework to vaping.
It was evaluated in accordance with clinical trials standards and proved highly successful.
It has been allocated funding to roll out next year to all schools and that is going to be terrifically important.
It not only teaches young people about the harms associated with drugs or alcohol, it teaches them behaviours about resisting peer pressure.
It teaches them behaviours about recognising where their mates might be engaging in this and being able to talk to them peer to peer as well.
At the media conference I was asked about the advertising campaigns.
When we came to Government, there hasn't been a population wide advertising campaign around tobacco for a decade, funded by the Commonwealth.
We've been determined to change that.
You will see a whole lot of broad tobacco and vaping campaigns rolling out in the traditional way.
But young people don't just watch free-to-air TV.
We had to go to where they are, which is social media.
We analysed social media, TikTok, Instagram, in particular, and the number of pro-vaping messages from those social media platforms was mind blowing.
It runs to billions on TikTok, very high numbers on Instagram as well.
We had to do some innovative work in this area and, for the first time, we have directly engaged social media influencers to get out there with anti-vaping messages.
A number of them have created 36 pieces of content.
They've been viewed more than 8 million times.
They've been liked 650,000 times, and they've been shared in huge, huge numbers.
It is working.
It's getting messages out to counter what’s been on social media for the last several years.
And we know, as we're evaluating that it's making a real difference.
For the first time ever also, the Commonwealth has advertised on TikTok.
It was a big decision for us to take.
It was a policy previously for us not to do that.
But if you're if you're wanting to get good public health messages out about vapes, about skin cancer, we've got to be where young people are.
We've done that and it’s been highly successful.
We've put in place quit supports that have been really successful in traditional cigarette smoking.
In Victoria, for example, the QuitLine has received twice as many calls around vaping as they did last year.
The MyQuit Buddy App, which has been reformulated to reflect vaping as well, has been downloaded over tens and tens of thousands of times.
Providing users with support to get off the habit as well as a resource for schools and parents
The key question though is, with all the data about number of impressions on social media, and the number of operations that you guys have been conducting on the ground, or the number of vapes seized for the border, is - are vaping rates going down?
It is really early days, but research I've seen indicates that vaping rates are down this year.
That Roy Morgan tracker that has been an important tracker for all of us, as well as the official government trackers, shows that between December and July this year, for the first time, vaping numbers dropped by some hundreds of thousands.
It’s reduced from close to 2 million down to about one and a half million.
That's still a lot of people, but I just remind you that year upon year over the last six or seven years, these numbers have been doubling and doubling and doubling.
Any reduction is to be welcomed.
We’re getting anecdotal evidence that high schools are observing lower rates of vaping in their school communities, but there's a long, long way to go.
I want to thank you for all of the work that you were doing.
Former Commissioner Outram and Susan Pearce who co-chaired this working group brought together not just jurisdictions, which is often hard enough in itself, as we understand, but different portfolio areas across all jurisdictions.
All of you have done terrific work, bringing together your different perspectives, whether yours is public health or organised crime, with a single purpose, and that is to get rid of this public health scourge that is not just hurting young people, but is bank rolling really bad, serious, organised criminal gangs.
The way in which you've done that is just a reflection of the best traditions of public service in Australia, and I want to thank you for it.
I feel sometimes we've just given you one more job to do.
You are all so busy, you all have so many important jobs to do, but this work is just so important.
You should have a sense of pride that within this area we're leading the world again.
Many jurisdictions across the world have looked at what they have done over the course of this year and changed their own approach.
We have a strong public health tradition, particularly in the area of tobacco control.
But this one's a tough one.
This has got characteristics that the traditional fight against cigarettes didn't have over the last 50 years.
That's why this sort of forum, bringing together so many different areas of expertise and experience is just so important.
Thank you all very much for coming today and for the work that you do.