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Menthol flavoured cigarettes will be banned and every cigarette will have a health warning emblazoned on it under a federal clampdown on tobacco smoking aimed at driving down smoking rates even further.
The proportion of daily smokers has dropped markedly in recent decades and now sits at 12 per cent, but Health Minister Mark Butler wants this figure to be below 5 per cent by decade’s end.
Health Minister Mark Butler.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Butler has already announced his intent to end the black market for vapes over concerns a generation of children will be pushed into cigarette smoking after encountering e-cigarettes at school.
“I’m not going to raise the white flag on smoking at 12 per cent of adults,” he said.
“I’m particularly not going to raise the white flag when smoking rates amongst our youngest citizens is actually climbing as a result of a deliberate strategy by the industry to create a pathway into smoking, to create a new generation of nicotine addicts.”
“There is sometimes this sort of shibboleth idea, that the current group of smokers are hardened and are never going to be shifted. The research simply does not reflect that.”
Claiming previous Coalition governments did nothing to counter smoking, Butler announced new legislation that he described as the most significant blow to the tobacco industry since the Gillard government’s plain packaging laws.
Butler noted that now Liberal leader Peter Dutton had been sceptical about plain packaging when he was health minister.
Australia will not follow New Zealand’s approach of banning the sale of cigarettes to anyone born after 2008, with Butler saying this proposal was not raised with him by expert bureaucrats.
Butler’s new legislation is designed to achieve the aims of the government’s National Tobacco Strategy, which commits to reducing daily smoking rates to less than 10 per cent by 2025.
It includes changes that get rid of the small ways in which companies differentiate their products to create competitive advantages. This includes standardising pack sizes and getting rid of terms like “cool crush” and “smooth” in product names.
Taglines such as “smoking kills” and images warning of ill health are dated and smokers have become desensitised to them, Butler said. These will be updated.
A new requirement to place warnings on individual cigarette sticks is something no other country has instituted, Butler claimed. It is not yet clear what these warnings will say.
“We intend to standardise the look and the size of filters, in particular, to deal with some of the vogue style cigarettes that the tobacco industry has attempted to market, particularly, to young people,” Butler said.
“We intend to prohibit flavours and additives, some people might be aware of things like the menthol bombs that are now marketed in individual cigarettes to give a burst of menthol flavour, two-thirds or three-quarters of the way through a particular cigarette, those will be stamped out.”
Public consultation on the new bill is open until mid-July.
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