Radio interview with Minister Butler and Jacqui Felgate, 3AW - 1 October 2024

SUBJECTS: Vape law changes. 
 
JACQUI FELGATE, HOST: On the line is Mark Butler the Federal Health Minister. Minister, appreciate your time today.
 
MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGED CARE, MARK BUTLER: Hi, Jacqui.
 
FELGATE: Look, there is a bit of a mess around this policy, wouldn't you agree? Do you feel like this is actually going to make a difference?
 
BUTLER: I do, but I also have tried to be really honest with people, it's not going to be easy. When I first announced these measures last year this thing had already really got out of control for a lot of communities. School leaders, school principals were telling us this was now the number one behavioural issue in their school communities. And we heard of teachers not only being rostered in lunchtime to stand outside the toilets, but actually to be rostered to stand inside toilets to police vaping. This thing had become a really serious challenge, particularly for kids and young people. We'd been told years ago when this was first introduced that this was a therapeutic good that would help hardened smokers, kick the habit. But what we found out very quickly was that vapes are actually a product that were deliberately targeted at kids to recruit a new generation to nicotine addiction, and the tragedy was particularly under the cover of COVID vaping exploded among young people here in Australia, in many countries overseas, and it was starting to work. We had 1 in 6 high school students vaping, 1 in 4 very young adults vaping. All of the health ministers in states and territories and I sort of had a long discussion about this and we were determined to stamp it out, because we'd started to see those five decades of effort to drive down smoking rates here in Australia. In many cases, we were the leading country in the world, taking the fight up to Big Tobacco, all at risk for a new generation.
 
FELGATE: Can you put the genie back in the bottle when it comes to vape policy?
 
BUTLER: We can do everything we can to take vapes out of the hands of young people and that's what we've been determined to do. The first thing we did was to finally stop the import of these things in the first place. They had been flooding into our country, and so from the 1st of January, we outlawed the importation of disposable vapes, the sort of vapes that we know were targeted at kids. They had pink unicorns on them, bubble gum flavours and the like. And we've resourced the Border Force, which polices our borders to lift their enforcement activities and since the 1st of January, we've seized millions of vapes at the border, taken them out of the hands of our kids. And we know that that's starting to choke off supply in Australia.
 
FELGATE: Our Chief Commissioner, Shane Patton, spoke to me on this program a couple of weeks ago, and he said the number one concern for Victoria Police were these ongoing tobacco shop fires because of the illegal trade in tobacco and vapes.
 
BUTLER: Yeah, absolutely. Which is why health ministers and health bureaucrats, chief bureaucrats, have been working very closely with police ministers and police commissioners because although this is largely a public health challenge in terms of its impact on young people, we also know that it's a market that has been taken over by organised crime. This is a highly lucrative source of revenue for organised criminals to bankroll all of their other terrible activities, like drug trafficking and sex trafficking. Although this is principally a health challenge and the small policing of the retail ban should be enforced by health and consumer affairs authorities at a state level, every now and then, intelligence shows that there's a very clear involvement of organised motorcycle gangs and other organised criminals, and police need to get involved as well. We've got a very clear protocol now between health departments and state and federal policing authorities about when police might have to get involved in something that, as I say, is principally a health challenge, but has started to involve organised crime because they make so much money out of it.
 
FLEGATE: So do you think putting the responsibility of selling vapes on pharmacies will stamp out the black market? And how do people go about getting one now?
 
BUTLER: I've never pretended that these really strong, world leading reforms are going to, make vapes disappear overnight. Illicit drugs have been illegal in this country for a very long time it doesn't mean they don't find their way into Australia from overseas and continue to be traded. The first goal that I had, and other governments had was to take them out of the hands of kids. 9 out of 10 vape stores that opened over the last several years opened up within walking distance of schools, not coincidentally, but deliberately, because they knew that was their target market. Shutting down those vape stores that had enraged parents. Parents talk to me and to other members of Parliament with fury when they found when they saw a vape store open up literally within walking distance, school kids walking past on their way to school and from school in my electorate for example, there were seven vape stores in the western suburbs of Adelaide, every single one of them has shut down since the 1st of July.
 
FELGATE: So are you seeing vapes now disappear from those tobacco stores, or do you think there's still that under-the-counter trade going on?
 
BUTLER: The tobacco and the convenience store is the tougher thing. When you're a vape store and you're only reason for existence is selling vapes, it's pretty hard to hide the fact that you are now in breach of laws. Our challenge now is to get to those convenience stores and convince them that it is not worth continuing to ply this trade. The federal laws that we passed in the Parliament that took effect on the 1st of July really have very serious penalties up to seven years in jail, up to $2.2 million fines for selling vapes now through a retail premise, like a convenience store or tobacco. I've said publicly now we've gone through a process since the 1st of July of trying to inform and educate these stores about the new laws. There is going to come a time soon when we have to start prosecuting people. I'm deadly serious about enforcing these new federal laws because people are making money out of the poor health of young people.
 
FELGATE: Is this the most significant challenge for young people in a generation? Vape addiction, nicotine addiction?
 
BUTLER: Probably right up there with social media. And I think there's been such a really vigorous public discussion over the recent couple of months about the impact that social media and the online world is having on young people. But I think those two things combined, and there is a very strong overlap between them, those two things combine, are posing real dangers to young people and are causing parents and school communities enormous heartache.
 
FELGATE: Is the overlap people wanting to post about vaping on social media?
 
BUTLER: There's so much posting about vaping on social media, which is why we've started to resource campaigns on social media with an anti-vaping message. We've started to pay social media influencers, for example, influencers that we know young people listen to, they might be involved in gaming social media, they might be sporting identities that young people watch. We can't vacate that field because we know there are so many pro-vaping messages on TikTok, on Instagram, on all these other social media channels.
 
There is obviously an overlap but what we're also almost every couple of months, we're finding new research that highlights the health dangers to young people of vaping. The University of Sydney released some research in the last few weeks that showed that high school students who vape are five times more likely to take up cigarettes and staggeringly, a 12-year-old who vapes, and there's unfortunately a number of them 29 times more likely to take up cigarettes.
 
FELGATE: Isn't that just tragic? Isn't that just tragic? I know I'm 42 years old, and I know growing up smoking was something you just would never do because it was drilled into you at such a young age. And isn't it just awful that this generation now of young kids in their teens and 20s think it's cool again?
 
BUTLER: That's the tragedy. We know now this was that this was the objective of Big Tobacco to recruit that new generation. That's why you just had to look at the products. You just had to look at where they were being sold it was so cynically, obviously directed at kids. And I'm older than you, Jacqui. I'm in my 50s. I remember when pretty much all teenagers tried smoking at high school and it took a long time to drive those teenage smoking rates down from where they were in the 70s and 80s down to next to nothing, really, where they were a couple of years ago. The tragedy is that vaping is now a gateway for those smoking rates amongst our youngest citizens, starting to climb again after all the work we've done over 50 years.
 
FELGATE: How many 12-year-olds are vaping? Do you have stats on that?
 
BUTLER: I haven't got stats on 12-year-olds. But I do know if you talk to any primary school principal over the last little while, this has become a really serious challenge in primary schools, not just high schools now. What we thought was a mid and late teen issue has started to creep down the ages into late primary school years as well.
 
FELGATE: Isn't that just an utter tragedy? Mark Butler is the Federal Health Minister, appreciate your time today.
 
BUTLER: Thanks, Jacqui.