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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2023-09-12 Daily Xml
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Vaping

Ms PRATT (Frome) (14:22): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. Does the government have a strategy to limit the supply of vapes in South Australia and, if so, what is it? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Ms PRATT: It was reported on 11 September that Chief Public Health Officer Professor Nicola Spurrier said, 'We have been able to get more intel about where things are coming from, so there is a particular supplier interstate that we are concerned about.'

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:22): I am not going to go through the detail in terms of specific investigations that may be underway between SA Health and SA Police for obvious reasons. I think it is fair to say that we are obviously very concerned about what we are seeing in terms of vaping in our community, the impact that it is having particularly on children and particularly on our schools. I know the Minister for Education is particularly concerned about that as well. So we are doing everything we possibly can, working in conjunction with the federal government, to address this issue.

We do need the supply to be cut off to make sure that this works. What we have seen up until now is that we haven't seen the border patrols. We haven't seen the border protection measures that would cut off supply because it has been a product that hasn't had significant restrictions in place. But working together with the federal government and Mark Butler, what we are putting in place across the country, and this is agreed by all health ministers, including the Liberal health minister in Tasmania as well, is to put in place measures around vaping where they will only be sold through prescriptions in pharmacies.

We won't have single-use vapes being sold in the same way that they are now. There will be proper border protection measures in place to stop the supply coming into the country, and there will be measures that the federal government will be putting in place to prevent the manufacture of vapes in Australia as well. All of those measures are needed to make sure we can address this.

What we have seen over the past five years is the number of kids who are regularly vaping going up and up and up. Some of these vapes contain very, very high levels of nicotine. In fact, one of the vapes that we recently seized in a blitz contained the equivalent of the level of nicotine in three packets of cigarettes, in one vape. What we heard a number of years ago, when we were first looking at this as a parliament, was that advocates of vaping were saying, 'There's no need to worry about kids because kids aren't going to take up these products. It's only going to be sold to people who are quitting smoking.' Well, that has not turned out to be the case. We are seeing more and more kids taking them up.

I have sat in my electorate office with parents and grandparents of kids—and I'm sure that's a scene that has been repeated by other members of parliament as well, in their contacts—where you're talking about parents who are dealing with their 14 and 15 year olds who are addicted to nicotine and are having to go on nicotine replacement therapy and patches to try to address that. We can't let that stand. We need to do something about this. So, between the commonwealth and all states and territories, there will be a very significant regulatory scheme that will be put in place.

In the meantime, of course, we're doing everything we possibly can within the current legislative provisions that we have. That's why we have done this blitz, but later this year we will also be bringing to the parliament legislation which will toughen our existing laws around penalties that we can put in place for some of these suppliers. There is obviously a level at which some of these matters become a police matter, in which Health will work with police in terms of enforcement as they do at the moment when it comes to illicit tobacco, particularly where there are criminal elements involved in the sale, manufacture, supply and distribution of those products as well.

This is being taken really seriously by all levels of government. There is a lot more work to do, but if we don't do this work, then I fear in five years' time we are going to be in a much worse situation, and that's going to be impacting thousands and thousands of South Australian kids.

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