Page 3899 - Week 13 - Thursday, 17 October 1991
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The penalty for that is $5,000. I must say, and I was party to this amendment, that maybe we need to look at that penalty and see whether there is a problem. Perhaps the penalty should be $5m to have some impact. Granted, we have to be realistic, but we also have to remember what we are dealing with. Section 10(3) states:
The Minister may, by notice published in the Gazette, exempt specified tobacco advertising from the operation of subsection (1).
It then explains how to go about it. That is what the Minister has done in this case. Why did we allow this exemption at the time? We all remember that the example given was the Winfield Cup. We had very little control over what would happen as far as the Winfield Cup was concerned, because we had players in Canberra who would be excluded from playing rugby league if we did not allow this exemption.
The critical part of this is that, with the Prime Minister's XI playing in Canberra on 17 December, this is not a situation of protecting local cricket players. The way cricket sponsoring works is that the Australian Cricket Board has as a subsidiary New South Wales country, which covers the ACT. The sponsorship provided to the Australian Cricket Board by these tobacco companies is in the millions of dollars.
The question for us is how we can compete with that sort of sponsorship. The real question we are going to have to ask ourselves is: Should we compete or should we simply say that we are not prepared to tolerate cricket at this price? What is the price? It is 368 deaths in Canberra per year, and that is something we have to take very seriously.
It is very important for me to take this point, having advocated only two days ago, as chair of the committee, a more lenient approach to the drug marijuana. My position is totally consistent. It is to seek harm reduction in both cases. If we are going to reduce the harm associated with the way people use tobacco, we have to start in the obvious area of attacking the advertising. The sponsorship provided by the cigarette firms is not simply out of the goodness of their hearts to sponsor a wonderful sport. After all, smoking is anti-sport; it takes away from people's ability to perform. We need to be able to stop the harm associated with smoking. They are sponsoring sport so that they can have their advertising across television screens on the ABC and commercial television in particular.
I understand that the greatest difficulty we have with this motion I have put is that it may be challengeable under section 92 of the Constitution. We have certainly seen a huge number of challenges under section 92 of the Constitution. Going right back to the 1920s, I think it was a South Australian sultana farmer who originally raised
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