Mary Moran (Labour)

I thank the Minister of State for coming into the House again today. I spoke at length during the debate last Thursday on the reasons I propose to support this Bill, which Members have agreed has cross-party support. I do not intend to repeat myself, rather I would like to refer, as did Senator Mooney, to the report from the World Health Organization, which coincidentally was published last Thursday on the same day we spoke on it here. That report highly recommends the use of graphic descriptions. As Members said and as I said last week, a picture speaks a thousand words. We all know how effective the photographs have been in the road safety ads on television.

This report is the third in a series of WHO reports on the status of global tobacco control policy implementation. It examines in detail the two primary strategies to provide health warnings - the labels on the tobacco product packaging and the anti-tobacco mass media campaigns. It is an excellent report which provides a comprehensive overview of the evidence base for warning people about the harms of tobacco use as well as country specific information on the status of these measures.

The report indicates that more than 1 billion people in 19 countries are now covered by the laws requiring large graphic health warnings on packages, nearly double the number of two years ago when only about 547 million people were covered in 16 countries. The latest countries to add these warnings on packages are Mexico, Peru and the United States. These large graphic warnings have proven to motivate people to stop either using tobacco or to reduce the appeal for people to initiate smoking.

This year the tobacco epidemic will kill almost 6 million people, more than 5 million will be users and ex-users of smoking and smokeless tobacco and more than 600,000 will be non-smokers who were exposed to tobacco smoke. This brings me back to the point Senator Crown made about the number of people affected by passive smoking.

By 2030, tobacco could kill up to 8 million people a year. Tobacco use is one of the biggest contributors to the non-communicable diseases epidemic, which includes heart disease, stroke, cancers and emphysema and accounts for 63% of all deaths. Of the world's more than 1 billion tobacco smokers, more than 80% live in low and middle income countries and up to half will eventually die of a tobacco-related disease.

The WHO report recommends six measures, to which Senator Mooney referred, the first being the large graphic health warnings, which is exactly what we are proposing here and on what I am commenting. Other measures include: the importance of monitoring tobacco use; protecting people from tobacco smoke; helping the users to quit; reinforcing bans on tobacco, advertising, promoting and sponsorship; and raising the taxes, which was another issue that was mentioned during the debate last Thursday.

More than half the world's population, or 3.8 billion people, are now covered by at least one of the above mentioned demand reduction measures. There have been gains in each area because of the effective action taken by countries in 2009 and 2010. The WHO report confirms that large graphic health warnings of the sort introduced by Uruguay, Canada and a handful of other countries are an effective means of reducing the appeal of tobacco.

Australia, as was mentioned, has proposed legislation to require that tobacco be sold in plain packaging in order to appear less tempting and which will also ensure that fewer people will fall into the trap of smoking. I read today that Iceland proposes to introduce legislation in the near future which will require a person to have a doctor's prescription to purchase cigarettes.