Page 3317 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 12 October 1993
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The step that the Minister has taken in making and in tabling this statement today, I must admit, is a fairly game one. Mr Berry knows how many people he will antagonise by taking this step. He knows that there are many people who will not see the purpose behind this step, but will rather see the immediate inconvenience that is occasioned to their business, their personal environment, or their own addiction by the decision that he and this Government have made. Mrs Carnell is quite right to say that it is very important to bring people along, to win people's hearts and minds with these changes, as much as it is to challenge the expectations of their lungs, so to speak.
I might say that, in the past, on occasions when the former Government of which I was a member attempted to make some of these changes, we sometimes had to contend with very virulent criticism from Mr Berry about the timing - - -
Mr Berry: Not about this.
MR HUMPHRIES: As I recall, there were some very strong comments by Mr Berry about what he saw as the slow, slow problem of not getting the legislation up fast enough, and he was then concerned about the speed of its passage through the Assembly. He had some concerns about the operation of some of those clauses and asked us to slow down a bit on those, saying that we were going too fast at that point. There are always problems.
I would hope that Mr Berry, and all of us, can strike the right note in this. We will need to stick together in order to convince the community that there is value in going down the path that has been suggested today. I, for one, think we members of the Assembly can do that if we are prepared to undertake the process of talking to each other and talking to the rest of the community, and I suspect that there has not been enough of that in the past. Madam Speaker, I think this is an important first step, and I hope that the goal which is being set by the Government in this respect is a goal which can be met in a reasonable period.
MR BERRY (Minister for Health, Minister for Industrial Relations and Minister for Sport) (3.31), in reply: I thank members opposite for their support in principle on this issue. As Mr Humphries said, this matter has been around for some time, dating back to 1989, in fact, when the first attempts were made to draw up the legislation. I know that Mr Humphries and I had a bit of a contest about who should be introducing the legislation. As I recall, I said that I should be introducing it in private members business and he wanted to introduce it as government business, and I was not able to get legislative drafting arrangements in place, and so on. But it does not matter because the result was a good one. I think anybody who was concerned about the issue of the community's health, as Mr Humphries has said, would have been proud to have been the one who tabled that initial legislation. It has been a difficult period, even within the framework of that legislation, because the power of the tobacco companies is great. We have seen the struggles about advertising that have occurred in relation to the New South Wales Rugby League, and places in this town. There will be, I suspect, more attempts by the tobacco companies to slow down the pace of progress on this very important reform.
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