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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2012-03-01 Daily Xml
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TOBACCO SMOKING

Ms BETTISON (Ramsay) (15:14): My question is to the Minister for Health and Ageing. Can the minister inform the house of the latest rates of cigarette smoking in South Australia?

The Hon. J.D. HILL (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Ageing, Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Minister for the Arts) (15:15): I thank the member for Ramsay for her question. I congratulate her on her appointment as well. I am very happy to tell the house that the most recent data for smoking in South Australia shows a downward trend in all age groups.

The smoking rate in 2011 for people aged 15 years and older is now 17.6 per cent, which is down from 20.5 per cent in 2010 (this is equivalent to 39,545 fewer smokers) and, pleasingly, daily smoking rates are now at 15.2 per cent, down from 17.2 per cent in 2010. Impressively, young people aged between 15 and 29 recorded a significant downward trend over the last year, from 22.9 in 2010 to 17.6 in 2011. In fact, in the last decade, smoking rates among this cohort peaked at 31.7 per cent in 2003. So, in less than 10 years, we have almost halved the smoking rates in that group. The daily smoking rate for young people has decreased from 17.3 per cent to 13.6 per cent, which equates to about 12½ thousand fewer smokers, and these are the largest reductions observed in the past 10 years.

These are huge achievements in our society, driven, I think, in part by the advertising campaign that we have been running to convince people to give up smoking and the support we provide to people who do want to give up smoking, and also the federal government's initiatives, particularly to increase the price of tobacco, but also to move to plain packaging. There has been a lot of debate and interest in the community about tobacco over the last year. We have targets in our state tobacco control strategy for 2011-16 to reduce by 2016 to 16 per cent for the 15 to 29-year-old age group, and we are well on track to reach that target.

I commend the achievements of DASSA, which is part of the organisation of Health which runs all of these initiatives. It has done an absolutely superb job. It is fantastic to see smoking rates declining. We are now at the stage where relatively few young people smoke. We know that the recruitment of smoking occurs in those aged under the age of 18. So, if we have very few people picking it up, we are going to have very few people in the future who smoke. The fact that only 13 to 14 per cent of people of that age group smoke on a daily basis means that the peer pressure that used to be there has very much dissipated, and that is a huge improvement in the way in which our society works.

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