Page 194 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 23 February 1994
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happened is that we would have had a tremendous fuss about cigarette advertising. We would have had a different attitude to the sort of thing that we have been seeing sent around now about the Winfield Cup competition and the Prime Minister's XI match being supported by the tobacco industry and so forth. Every time I see one of those things I feel frustrated. We know - you know and I know - that the real problem is that young people begin smoking. That is our biggest problem. That comes about through sport advertising. Nobody can take away from this Minister the fact that he has taken a series of actions about advertising in sport, and I made that very clear by not moving disallowance of his exemption the last couple of times. I recognised that, in fact, he has worked very hard on this issue.
When we look at the issues before us, I have real doubts about whether the Carnell amendment can achieve what it wants to achieve. Perhaps we should be measuring the particulates in the air to see whether that can happen. Then we have issues such as determining what is an acceptable level.
Mr Berry: You are squirming, Michael.
MR MOORE: One of your officers, I presume with your consent, was kind enough to put me in contact with an authority on this issue from the Washington Environmental Protection Agency who has written widely on the problems with ventilation. I said to him, "What is your acceptable level of risk?". You refer to acceptable levels in your speech, so you do accept the notion of acceptable levels.
Mr Berry: No, no.
MR MOORE: It is in your presentation speech. He said, "We work on an acceptable level of one death per lifetime per one million people". He defined that as an adult lifetime of 40 years. That is the acceptable level he worked on when he looked at work ventilation. If you are talking about that kind of level in Canberra, with a population of some 300,000, you are talking about one death in 120 years as the acceptable risk from passive smoking.
Mr Berry: That is silly. That is a silly notion.
MR MOORE: The Minister says that that is a silly notion. He does not want this Bill to go to a committee because he sees it in such a simplistic way. He does not have the intellectual capacity to realise that there is more than one way to look at these things.
Mr Berry: You are squirming, Michael. You are squirming, and everybody knows that you have sold out. You have sold out.
MR MOORE: If you just try to open your mind and listen to what happened when I spoke to an individual that your department put me onto, you will begin to understand what this is about. When you talk about that risk level you are probably talking about the same sort of risk level for passive bystanders of rollerblading or skateboarding. Probably one person in Canberra in 120 years is going to get hit by a skateboard and die.
Mr Berry: I never thought I would hear you use tobacco-speak. You do it pretty well.
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