THE MALEV0LENT MARLBORO MAN

This week’s radical, but inevitable, decision by the Queensland Government to virtually ban smoking in all public places will inevitably turn out to be King Canute for the stubborn and blinkered and cowardly Bracks Government which continues to push against the tide of medical evidence and public opinion.

A spokesman for the increasingly beleaguered and seemingly inept Health Minister, Bronwyn Pike, was quoted as saying that Victoria had adopted some of the most far-reaching smoking restrictions in Australia.

That is not far-reaching. That is far-fetched. The ban on smoking in restaurants came yonks after it was introduced in South Australia and even the start was delayed and delayed as they tried to appease several lobby groups.

Now, after the Beattie initiative, we are lagging well behind Queensland and South Australia. To somehow paint this Government as a trailblazer in the war against passive smoking and smoking in public places is as offensive as an ashtray of smelly butts.

Two years from now people in Queensland will not be allowed to smoke on beaches, in playgrounds, in indoor bars, in outdoor dining areas and sports stadiums.

The new law also targets the desperates who huddle around the entrances to courts and other public buildings making non-smokers (who make a 70-30 majority in this country) run a gauntlet of foul, polluted, air to get in and out.

Tasmania has the second best clean bill of health, so to speak, and Victoria is the worst state just edging out NSW. And eventually these states must come around. It is not a political issue. It is a health issue.

Years ago (decades after banning smoking in my apartment in 1968) I used to say, in only semi-jest, that eventually smoking would become something that would be permitted only in the privacy of your own home.

As Rachel Hunter would say “ It will not huppen overnight, but it will huppen”. (Reminds me of the republic issue. Gough Whitlam told me thirty years ago that Australia would become a republic but it would be “evolutionary not revolutionary”. Well, he always did have a way with words.)

Inexorably, tougher non-smoking decisions will be made by private enterprise for a number of reasons. Shareholders will balk at paying skyrocketing premiums to insurance companies to cover passive smoking illness claims.

And employers and non-smoking employees will get jack of people leaving their desks throughout the day to “ just duck outside for a smoke”. If a drinker told his workmates to answer his phone because he was just going to “duck down the road” he’d eventually be fired.

I once calculated – obviously with nothing better to do – that a person who left his or her desk in an office tower to go down in the lift to have eight cigarettes outside in a day (and many do) would actually work eight weeks less a year in that office than a non-smoker. What other habit would an employer or fellow-employees tolerate to that degree?

Despite what I have written I don’t believe even the Queensland bans go far enough. The exemptions – and we have them here too – are discriminatory and unfair.

High-rollers in casinos in Queensland and at Crown are exempt even though Joe Blow has now been banned from smoking in front of a poker machine. Why the favours? Why are the Big Spenders treated differently?

What if a taxi driver or a limo driver argued that they should be exempt from penalty points because like the gambler who bets more they drive more? They would be howled down.

Ditto the exemption for prisoners in Queensland jails. I suppose that is because they couldn’t be fined and they couldn’t be locked up because they already are.

This may make me sound like a do-gooder but even non-smoking prisoners have a right, while incarcerated, to clean air. What if a prisoner with emphysema is forced to spend hours of lockdown time in the same cell as a heavy smoker? And then sues the government for passive smoking damage to his lungs?

I have had brief, personal experience of that. When I was jailed my first night was sharing a cell in Pentridge. There were two bunks, upper and lower, and the other prisoner told me the bottom one was his. He was in for murder and I wasn’t going to argue.

As a person who had banned smoking in my abode more than thirty years earlier and detest the smell of smoke and smokers’ breath I spent my first night in jail with my pillow over my face trying to use it as a filter.

Having said all this I feel sorry for people locked in the seemingly vice-like grip of nicotine. It is obviously an addiction and an increasingly expensive one at that.

Which raises the smokers’ argument about governments. They make billions of dollars from smokers’ taxes.

I don’t know, as a non-smoker how much of a packet of cigarettes actually goes in various taxes but I would guess that if cigarettes cost $12 a pack at least $8 would be tax.

So how does a government comfortably, morally, take taxes, take billions, from an addictive product that kills people? There is the argument that governments take billions in taxes and excise from smokers and drinkers and that helps pay public hospital costs because those two categories of patients take up more hospital beds at an earlier age than teetotallers and non-smokers.

This is all a quantum leap from the ignorant days when I was a kid. I remember being told by Mum or Dad to “ Hop down to the shop and get me a packet of ciggies”.

Parents smoked in the bathroom, in the toilet and even in the kitchen.

To us, as kids, it was a sign of maturity. It was such an adult thing to do –even though you were in short pants. A lot of people my age have schoolboy memories of a packet of cigarettes hidden in a drawer and lighting up as soon as you left the house.

The Marlboro Man has a lot to answer for. He won’t be tethering his horse outside pubs in Victoria for much longer.

September 12, 2004

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2004