Vaping

Ms CLANCY (Elder) (15:01): Thank you very much. My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. Can the minister please update the house on what is being done to address the increasing prevalence of vaping in South Australia, particularly in children and young people?

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (15:01): Thank you very much, Mr Speaker, and thank you to the member for Elder. I acknowledge her interest in this very important topic. Sadly, over the past number of years we have seen an increasing prevalence of vaping in our community, particularly amongst younger people. I know from the Minister for Education what an impact this is having in our schools. I have spoken to parents whose young children, sometimes 13, 14 or 15 years old, are becoming addicted to very high levels of nicotine in vaping products that they are obtaining.

This clearly is a critical public health concern right around the country in terms of this level of addiction that we are seeing in young people with vaping. Both myself and all our state and territory health ministers around the country are joining with the federal health minister on the need to take action in this regard and to strengthen the provisions in place around vaping products that we have in Australia.

Critical to that is the work that needs to happen around the border, because clearly if we don't control the entry of these products to Australia then they are going to continue to get through to our communities and particularly to our young people. We have seen over the past five years an increase in the number of young people who are vaping, going from about 1 per cent to about 8 per cent just in the past five years. A significantly higher number of young people have said that they have tried vaping.

People think that it is safe. People think that no harm is caused by it, but we are seeing increasing evidence that that is not the case. We are taking action in terms of state legislation, and we are out for public consultation at the moment in terms of increasing penalties around selling to young people, as well as additionally making sure that we are increasing the areas which are smoke and vape-free areas, to be at the top of the table in terms of looking at what other states and territories have been doing.

This means areas such as around children's education—schools, child care—around entrances to hospitals, swimming facilities and major sports events, and around some of our shopping centres and the like. We are out for public consultation to make these vaping and smoke-free areas.

But I am very pleased that we had a very significant announcement made by the federal health minister, Mark Butler, yesterday of a federal package of initiatives to take this head-on and to make sure that we are stopping the importation of non-prescription vapes; increasing the minimum standards for vapes, including restricting flavours, colours and other ingredients; requiring pharmaceutical-like packaging, which is obviously to be more in line with what we see for tobacco at the moment; reducing the allowed nicotine concentrations and volumes; and banning all single-use and disposable vapes.

This is something where all our state and territory health ministers have met with the federal health minister. We agreed that these actions need to be taken. We are going to be working in a collaborative way, as these regulations are made at a federal level, to now look at the laws that we have at our state levels to make sure that we can update them and make sure that we can tackle this issue head-on because otherwise we are going to continue to face the issue where more and more young people are becoming addicted to the very significant amounts of nicotine that are in these products, a lot of the time people not knowing that that's what they contain. This is a public health imperative that is of the utmost urgency.