He saidcigarette-type regulations involving accredited retailers and age restrictions were the common-sense way forward and this would also simplify police enforcement of the black market.
“I get the ideology of the AMA and the Cancer Council,but there’s a practical reality of this. We’ve got to be big enough to say we got it wrong and we’ve got to move forward,” Littleproud said.
“And we have to get ahead of this because children are the ones that are the victims.”
But in his strongest comments yet,Butler rejected the Nationals’ approach,which is also being advocated by the Australian Association of Convenience Stores that counts Philip Morris,British American Tobacco and Imperial Brands among its members.
“The Nationals have a blatant conflict of interest in this debate,they are still the only major party that excepts donations from tobacco companies. The tobacco industry has found a new way to develop a generation of nicotine addicts and we will not stand for it,” Butler said.
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“We’re not going to give into this open slather approach that the Nationals and big tobacco want.”
Butler emphasised that all options were on the table ahead of the TGA review,but told Labor MPs at a caucus meeting on Tuesday he was already working on a suite of measures with state health ministers.
The Coalition has not made public its position in the debate. A party spokesman said backbench MPs raised their concerns at a joint party meeting on Tuesday but did not present a position,and health spokeswoman Anne Ruston did not comment.
Public Health Association of Australia chief executive Terry Slevin said the Nationals’ views were “worse than irrelevant” given they had received more than $275,000 in donations from tobacco company Philip Morris since 2015.
Head of the convenience store lobby Theo Foukkare,also a former British American Tobacco executive,said a consumer model based on cigarette sales would stop teens from vaping while giving smokers greater access to products that were better for their health.
“We know that smoking is the leading cause of preventable death. For everyone who stops smoking and starts vaping,there is a saving to the health system of managing that person long term,” he said.
But AMA president Steve Robson on Tuesday repeated the organisation’s view that nicotine vaping products were a last resort when it comes to smoking cessation and called for a greater crackdown.
“We still need to do even more to restrict access to nicotine vaping products,including banning the importation of nicotine vaping products through the personal importation scheme and reducing concentration limits,” he said.
Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis from Jacqueline Maley.Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter here.