Vaping inquiry: Coalition agrees to study health effects of e-cigarettes

The health minister Greg Hunt has agreed to an independent inquiry into the health impacts of nicotine e-cigarettes after a concerted push in the Coalition party room over several months to legalise vaping.

Several MPs raised the issue in Tuesday’s party room meeting, saying there was widespread support within the government for making nicotine e-cigarettes legally available.

Tuesday’s discussion was triggered by the New South Wales Liberal Trent Zimmerman, who earlier this year chaired a parliamentary inquiry into the use and marketing of electronic cigarettes and personal vaporisers in Australia.

In a rare event for a committee chair, Zimmerman produced a dissenting report departing from the majority position of the health committee. The majority opposed legalising nicotine e-cigarettes.

Zimmerman argued in his dissenting report that nicotine e-cigarettes be made available as consumer products “in order to assist the millions of smokers struggling to quit tobacco smoking and improve their quality of life”.

“While the evidence base regarding e-cigarettes is still emerging, there are clear indications that e-cigarettes are significantly less harmful to human health than smoking tobacco cigarettes,” he wrote in March.

“If long-term smokers who have been unable to quit smoking tobacco cigarettes switch to e-cigarettes, thousands of lives could be saved.”

Zimmerman raised the issue on Tuesday and his support for vaping was echoed, according to people at the meeting, by Liberals Tim Wilson, Eric Abetz and James Paterson.

David Gillespie, a NSW National and medical specialist, spoke against.

Hunt has opposed the change being sought by Zimmerman, and told the party room it would be strongly opposed by health groups, including the Australian Medical Association.

Guardian Australia understands the health minister also referenced opposition from Donald Trump’s commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Scott Gottlieb, to support his position.

But Paterson proposed a compromise – that the government establish an independent inquiry into the scientific evidence, possibly undertaken by the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University.

Hunt agreed to the suggestion.

Liberal MPs have been trying to raise the issue in the party-room for some months, but the push has been crowded out by the long-running internal debate over the national energy guarantee, and then by the leadership turmoil.