Page 3122 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 17 October 2006
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In investigating this bill, I have come across many issues and I will go through them briefly here. I understand that the legislation is intended to have a deterrent quality. The retailer will, it is hoped, never be certain that a person at their counter who looks young and is seeking tobacco products is not, in fact, an agent of the government. That is the sole way in which this bill will be effective: if more and more outlets refuse to sell tobacco products to people who look young—of course, some of them will be able to produce a form of identity to show that they are not as young as they look—we will somehow have a flow-on effect of reducing smoking amongst young people in the community.
There is little evidence that compliance testing reduces the amount that young people smoke. Compliance with the law on tobacco sales by some retailers will result in most young people who want to buy cigarettes simply going to a different outlet. Consider how young people begin to smoke. Usually, they are offered cigarettes by their peers—peers that they want to emulate the behaviour of. So it is going to be a particular sort of young person that walks into a shop and brazenly seeks to purchase tobacco. They will already have done the work to know that that outlet is likely to sell it to them. We also know that many of them have friends working in these shops and they will hope that peer pressure will ensure that they are sold to them.
I do not know how many of the members here have been to the Woden bus interchange early in the morning as the kids wait for the buses. I believe there is a roaring trade there in cigarettes. This is not anecdotal—I have seen it myself—and my concern is that this trade also puts young people in a position where they are offered other drugs as well as tobacco. So there are other areas that I would like to see the government target here.
Even if it was possible to achieve 100 per cent compliance, most young people do not get their cigarettes over the counter. The ACT secondary school survey in 2002 showed that fewer then 20 per cent of students who smoke bought their last cigarette. I am sorry we had to use the 2002 data set, but it was the most recent available. Cigarettes are more often obtained from friends or by asking someone else to buy them—and, dare I say it, even from parents.
We could presume, however, that the purpose of compliance testing is not to reduce youth smoking rates but to enforce the law. There are still issues with the way this testing is to be carried out. One such issue is that the practice of compliance testing may perpetuate a community view of young people as deceivers. This was raised with me by organisations such as the Youth Coalition of the ACT, which represents the rights of young people. There are many people who continue to see young people as troublemakers, loiterers, graffitists and the like. Creating a situation where a young person can be blamed for the doling out of a hefty fine or loss of licence may not be in the interests of their safety.
Scrutiny report 32 of the Standing Committee on Legal Affairs also examined the Tobacco (Compliance Testing) Amendment Bill with respect to young persons’ safety. The committee revealed that, when reviewed from a rights perspective, a proposal to use children in compliance testing is controversial. The bill’s explanatory statement does not mention the Human Rights Act and there is an argument that the bill may, in fact, contravene the act by the creation of a law that diminishes the child’s right to protection.
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