Page 3120 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 17 November 1992
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Despite all this attention, the man dies. The doctor completes a form saying the cause of death is a smoke-related illness. In the final frame, he urges you to quit before the same thing happens to you. On reflection, don't think about that ad. You will probably be seeing it soon.
The campaign against smoking is old and respectable. Smoking is unhealthy: none of us needs to be told so by a doctor or a really dopey sportsman doing a community-service ad. The trouble is that in the past year or so a campaign has become a crusade. Crusades are different from campaigns. As Peter, the Hermit, liked to say, to win back the Holy Land you are allowed to cheat.
Others lacking imagination point out that smoking is legal, so legal it grosses governments billions in excise. They think it odd that governments hand dirty money collected from smokers back to sporting bodies, rather in the fashion of the Mafia making donations to the Salvos. Anyway, these critics have the wrong Mafia analogy. Cash received from smokers is first taken to a government factory to be laundered free of nicotine and death before being handed on to volley ballers.
Madam Speaker, this little publication is obviously a diatribe and invective against those in this community - including many of us in this place, I might point out - who have made serious attempts in recent years to address the enormous harm done to our community every year by the consumption of tobacco. Unfortunately, this document is published by Philip Morris Ltd. I would have expected some crackpot to be responsible; some subversive; somebody who felt that it was great fun, somebody who felt that they were leading some charge against the new world order or whatever; but, instead, we find here - - -
Mrs Grassby: You thought it came from Mr Stevenson, didn't you?
MR HUMPHRIES: No comment. We find a major company, a major cigarette manufacturer in Australia, publishing this kind of rubbish. Madam Speaker, this is the kind of thing which, unfortunately, is put out by those who continue to believe that the product that they produce, which kills millions in this country and overseas, is in some ways a respectable product which ought to be allowed to wend its evil way throughout our community and our society without any impediment. We do not believe that, Madam Speaker, I do not think. I do not think anybody in this chamber does. I hope that we are able to expose this kind of rubbish in the minds of people who might pick it up and think it is a serious attempt at debate on this important question.
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