Health committee  Yes.

Health committee  I don't think there's been specific advertising targeting youth smoking in Australia. I don't recall. The state governments run anti-tobacco advertising on national television and they generally speaking focus on all the smokers and on health effects. If you have a look at the ra

Health committee  If I could add to that, though, there was a very unfortunate by-product of some of the graphic health warnings here in Australia. Some of the warnings were along the lines of “Smoking makes your baby smaller”. There was a sociologist at the Australian National University who disc

Health committee  No, I have not. My university has a ban on tobacco funding, and for decades we have had a ban on smoking on our campus. I think it was in the 1990s that we actually banned smoking in buildings and in vehicles, long before it became fashionable.

Health committee  I read on my tobacco control page that the IPA took funding from the tobacco industry, with evidence relating back to 1993. It turns out that in 1993 I wasn't even in Australia, so I don't know how this would affect me. The other thing to bear in mind is that tobacco advertising

Health committee  Plain packaging was implemented in December, 2010. There was a phase-in period in September. If I recall correctly, it was about a three-month phase-in period. The national household drug strategy survey is conducted every three years. The data came out in 2013, and then most re

Health committee  I haven't done those studies myself, no. What has happened in Australia is that the market share of cheap cigarettes—what we call “cheapies”—has quite dramatically surged. The data that I have shows that the share of the market for cheapies increased 135%. Smokers are now going

Health committee  Can I respond?

Health committee  Yes. First of all, on the study in the tobacco control issue of 2016, my colleague and I did an extensive analysis of those papers, and the Cancer Council Victoria, which undertook the original research, responded with a press release saying that the survey was “quite explicitly

Health committee  When looking at smoking prevalence, two things stand out. First of all, in developed countries, smoking prevalence has been falling for decades. What really stands out is that price increases through excise taxation and public education about the harms of smoking have probably ha

Health committee  The point to understand is that this actually becomes a subsidy to criminality, which of course, in and of itself, is always bad policy. I like to make the point that criminality itself is a gateway drug to further criminality because criminals do not pay taxes, they do not pay

Health committee  Thank you.

Health committee  No legal tobacco is grown in Australia. There used to be tobacco licences for farming here in Victoria, where I live, and I think over the last 10 years the governments have been buying back the licences, so there is no legal tobacco produced in Australia. Any tobacco produced in

Health committee  I have some familiarity with it, and that was the other point I wanted to make. Our native title here in Australia is very different from native title in North America. We can't actually have situations where Australian aboriginal people grow tobacco on their lands and then sell

Health committee  Yes, I am.