ALI MOORE, HOST: We've been talking about the warnings that will soon be required, not just on the packaging for cigarettes, but on each individual cigarette on the. But I want to know from you whether you think that will make a difference, and also maybe what exactly you think the warning should say. Give me a call 1300222774. But also, what about vaping? The Minister for Health and Aged Care is going to join you in just a tick. There have been a lot of legal changes around the availability of vapes. So how much difference have they made where you are? you still seeing vapes in the shops? Is vaping still an issue at your child's school? The federal government is launching an education campaign aimed at year seven and eight students. Mark Butler, welcome to Drive.
MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGED CARE, MARK BUTLER: Thanks, Ali.
MOORE: If I can go first to the issue around, or the issues around, warnings on cigarette butts. You just heard there, we spoke with Doctor Becky Freeman from the University of Sydney and one of our callers being a little sceptical about whether they will make a difference. Will a little bit of writing on the butt of a cigarette make a difference?
BUTLER: 12 or 14 years ago, I was a junior health minister in the Rudd and Gillard governments, and we put in place plain packaging laws, which were the world's first. Big Tobacco fought them tooth and nail. They took us through a whole range of global courts all around the world fighting them. And we won that legal battle. And since then, dozens of countries have followed suit because they know it works. The research shows that, particularly for young people who might think it's cool to smoke, having these very unattractive packs was effective, but that nothing really happened in the ensuing decade. And true to form, Big Tobacco started to find ways to make cigarettes cool again and attractive, particularly to younger people, by focusing on the stick, the individual cigarettes. So they started marketing cigarettes as things like Vogues. They'd be slim, they would be deliberately designed to look good in an Instagram post. They did a whole lot of Instagram marketing and other social media marketing to promote that. They had things in them like menthol bombs, so three quarters of the way into the cigarette, you'd have a menthol explosion in your mouth. So we found that we needed, on the advice of experts like Doctor Freeman and many others besides, we needed to update our work. We had been a world leader, but as we looked around the world, countries like Canada, which has these dissuasive warnings on their individual cigarettes, the UK, other countries had jumped ahead of us. So we updated our tobacco control legislation last year. We had to do that, because the plain packaging laws were due to sunset, which meant that they would cease to have effect. So we had to update them. We didn't want to just renew old laws which tobacco companies had found ways around, so we updated them and including a new regulation to ensure that individual cigarettes have a warning on them as well. We did some research on this, we found that smokers would find this unattractive and quite off-putting.
MOORE: So is it more about just having a bit of black and white print around the butt than what it actually says?
BUTLER: It's a bit of both, it is around what it says.
MOORE: You know, there's not a lot of space obviously.
BUTLER: Obviously it's got to be short and to the point, I think, is a clear message for us. It's got to be dissuasive, it's got to be the fact that people, as they're putting these cigarettes to their mouth, are just continually reminded of the damage they're doing to their health. And that's, you know, that's not controversial anymore. It might have been decades ago, but we know how deadly this thing is, which is why we did this. At the same time, we were engaged in some world leading reforms around vaping, because that's the new gateway to try and get a new generation into cigarettes. After all the work we did over 50 years to drive down cigarette smoking rates in this country: we're one of the world's best in terms of daily cigarette smoking rates among adults. But we did have to update our cigarette regulations, but they were having less and less effect. The older they got, the more innovative tobacco companies became to get around that and to be able to market cigarettes again as cool to young people. But we also needed to make sure we did that at the same time we were clamping down on vapes.
MOORE: And I want to get to vapes in a minute, but just on the health warnings, I know that I think since around this time last year, you've also been seeking advice around health warnings on bottles of wine and beer. So what we get on alcohol now are pregnancy warnings, but they're not general health warnings. Are you close to making a decision on those?
BUTLER: We're not making a decision any time very soon. And the advice is still relatively preliminary. And that's going through its process right now. But I'm not at the point of making a decision on those. I remember I was the Minister responsible when we introduced the pregnancy labelling, 12 or 13 years ago. There was very clear evidence for that. And, you know, I think that's been shown to be a good decision that we took back then. But we're not making any imminent decision around alcohol labels at this stage.
MOORE: You're listening to Mark Butler, who's the federal Minister for Health and Aged Care. So Mark Butler, if I can look at this education campaign around vaping, and I guess that obviously comes at the same time as there have been big changes to the law regarding availability of vapes. My first question would be: if the changes to the law are working as they were intended, where are the kids getting the vapes from, and why do you need to tell them not to buy them?
BUTLER: I think we've talked about this before, Ali, and I think I've tried to be as honest and frank as I can with your listeners and with other Australians, that this was always going to be hard work. It really exploded over the course of the last five years, the number of high school aged Australians vaping increased by fivefold just in four years. So for every thousand kids who are vaping in 2019, 5,000 were in 2023. And it became a huge behavioural challenge in schools. And parents were beside themselves. So we've essentially let this thing get away from us. We should have been clamping down at the borders earlier. I put a border control regulation in place at the beginning of the year, and that is starting to work. We've seized millions of these things at the border. Vapes are so obviously designed to appeal to kids: they've got cartoon characters on them, they're bubblegum flavoured. They're not for older people seeking to see it, seeking to kick a decades long habit of cigarettes. This is a device designed to recruit a new generation of young people to nicotine. So shutting down supply was our first thing. And we've been very successful at doing that. We know from source countries like China, they're starting to look to other countries, they recognise it's hard to get into Australia now. That's meant the price of vapes has increased quite dramatically and that's good. We don't want them to be cheap for kids to be able to get. But also we've started to see vape stores shut down, because we made it illegal to sell vapes outside of a health care setting. So outside of a pharmacy from the 1st of July. And some of the vape stores that were set up, 9 out of 10 them set up within walking distance of schools, they've started to shut down. And that's a good thing. The problem we are having is convenience stores and tobacco stores around the country are continuing to sell this in flagrant breach of the law, and organised crime is involved in this right around the country. Melbourne in particular was probably the epicentre or the starting point, where organised crime really flexed its muscle around vapes and illicit tobacco because they use the revenue. It's a huge source of revenue for them to use in sex trafficking and drug trafficking.
MOORE: Sure, and I'll get to our new licencing scheme in just a tick. But if the problem is shutting down some of these stores so that you're acknowledging there's still a problem, to what extent has that got to do with boots on the ground being able to walk into these stores, checking what they're selling and shutting them down?
BUTLER: Yeah, it's entirely that, so –
MOORE: But do we have them, because it would seem that we don't have enough of them?
BUTLER: This is slow, hard work. We've conducted since the laws came into effect – they've only been a few months – but we've conducted hundreds of operations around the country. Federal authorities, that I'm responsible for, in partnership with state authorities, including in Victoria, getting around, making sure that tobacconists and convenience stores understand their legal obligations. But it's still happening. I'm not going to pretend it's not. And I want to send the message to those retailers that too often are connected or being pressured by organised criminals: we're deadly serious about the penalties we passed in the federal parliament this year. They are fines of up to $2.2 million. They are jail time of up to seven years for breaching these laws around the sale of vapes. And you know, I'm deadly serious about enforcing them in time. So this is going to be long, hard work. I'm working really closely with state authorities, but we are starting to see an impact. I mean, for the first time in years, Roy Morgan Research showed that significantly fewer Australians are vaping now compared to last year. I mean, year on year, we've seen vaping rates exploding, particularly among young people. And high school principals are starting to tell us that they're noticing a reduction in vaping activity in their schools as well. We are a long way from winning this fight. I'm not going to pretend otherwise, but I'm absolutely determined to keep the fight because, you know, what we are finding as well is that tragically, the objective of Big Tobacco had all the all along, which was to get young people taking up cigarettes via vapes, is starting to happen. It is starting to happen.
MOORE: So what happens with the – we've got a licencing scheme for, well, we're about to have a licencing scheme for tobacco retailers here in Victoria. We're going to have a separate tobacco regulator and inspectors. We're not sure how it's going to work or what resources it's going to have, or how many inspectors it's going to have. But how does that work with the federal sphere of vapes? So do you have federal inspectors going into some shops? Do you have state inspectors going into other shops? Who's funding what? Is there a level of coordination? How will it work in practise?
BUTLER: There's a very high level of coordination. I think I might have talked to you about this before, but late last year we had our first joint meeting of health ministers and police ministers, health department secretaries and police commissioners all came together to understand sort of where we had crossover. Obviously, a lot of this is principally a health activity, so it's about health authorities at a state and federal level enforcing these laws.
MOORE: Well, it won't be under our licencing scheme. It's going to be a separate tobacco regulator that will work inside the same as the liquor regulators with separate inspectors. So it'll be separate to health.
BUTLER: That's right. Well, when I say health I mean some states - my own state of South Australia uses consumer and business affairs - I guess the point I make is: it's not police officers, unless and until we detect an involvement of organised crime. And then the police do want to get involved because they're talking about very serious criminals then. And so we've got a really good level of coordination, not just between federal and state health authorities, but between health – or other non-policing authorities that states might be using, like the one you mentioned – on the one hand and policing authorities on the other, and it's working pretty well. I mean, a lot of the hundreds of inspections I mentioned, a very good number of them are conducted jointly between federal and state authorities. And I've been delighted at the degree of cooperation I've seen between the different authorities. It doesn't always happen, but I think it also reflects the fact that the determination that we've indicated to stamp out recreational vaping, particularly among young people from a federal level, has been supported 100% by state health ministers. It doesn't matter whether they're Liberal or Labor, 100% supported by them, because they know the danger this poses to the decades of action we've taken to drive down smoking rates.
MOORE: You're listening to Mark Butler, who's the federal Minister for Health and Aged Care. Mark Butler, if I can just another question, very different issue. But you are no doubt aware that the ABC is reporting today around hospitals in New South Wales, one in particular that's refusing to offer abortion services. Just two questions for you. I know that abortion is a state issue, but you do help fund state health systems. Should every public hospital in the country have to provide abortion services? They're not able to say, “actually, we don't have the resources”. And secondly, are you concerned that abortion is popping back up on the agenda
BUTLER: First of all, the hospital I think that you're referring to in New South Wales has been the subject of quite a bit of coverage over the last several days. And pretty shortly after the story broke, the New South Wales Health Minister, Ryan Park, intervened and put to rest any suggestion that hospital would not be performing abortion services. It was in Orange, so a fairly big -
MOORE: There's a second one in Queanbeyan Hospital today.
BUTLER: Sorry, I've been travelling all day and I haven't come across that. You know, I think we've made very clear our view to health ministers, that we have a view that all health care services, including abortion services, should be available to Australians no matter where they live. And after we had a very detailed Senate Inquiry about reproductive health generally, including the availability of termination services, we had a special briefing with all state and territory health ministers. They indicated their support broadly for equality of access. Now, you know, there are 750 public hospitals, many of them remote. I can't say, hand on heart, that at any one time, all 750 would have access to the type of healthcare professional needed to do this. But within reason, certainly my view is that should happen. And I think that's the view of state health ministers. But ultimately, it's not just in this area, but in other health care services, they are responsible for operating those hospitals. We help fund them, but we don't have expertise about the operation of hospitals from Canberra. That is the responsibility of state health authorities, and they're accountable to their local electorates for it.
MOORE: Mark Butler, we appreciate your time this afternoon.
BUTLER: Many thanks for joining us.
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