Page 1738 - Week 06 - Thursday, 19 May 1994
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If anything, the work of this committee has given me a great deal more respect for the effort and contribution by Ms Ellis. At the end of her dissenting report she quotes some remarks by Brendan Nelson, the president of the AMA. He said:
The ACT is in a position to lead Australia with landmark public health legislation ... smokers can choose not to smoke but non smokers can't give up breathing ... The whole Assembly now needs to back this sensible, practical and crucial public health measure.
I believe that our recommendations will have the support of the majority of members of this Assembly. We are proposing a sensible, practical and crucial public health measure; a public measure that does not ignore the hard areas and does not provide a simplistic solution, but one that takes on the full range of areas, particularly where the public health or population health question is most critical, and that is with young people taking up smoking. It is the young people, in particular, who circulate in the areas that Mr Berry was prepared to ignore.
Mr Berry: Like what?
MR MOORE: He interjects, "Like what?". He does not even realise which areas they are. They are areas like the taverns, the pubs and the nightclubs. We take in a full range of solutions.
Mr Berry: You know that that is not true.
MR MOORE: Mr Berry's interjection about what I know and what I do not know indicates quite clearly the difficulty that he has in grappling with this problem. Yes, we know the same things. I presume that he has read the same evidence. He has come up with a simplistic solution and it does not work. Mr Deputy Speaker, having wrestled with these very difficult issues, having sorted the information provided, which often was, if not absolutely false, considerably exaggerated on both sides of the equation, we have tried to take a long-term view and to put into place a long-term strategy rather than a short-term strategy. With those few words, Mr Deputy Speaker, I commend the report to the Assembly.
MS ELLIS (11.20): This morning Mr Moore has made somewhat strident comments on some of the evidence given to the committee. He said that some was true, and some was false or misleading. Keeping that in mind, members may understand the length of our deliberations and the need for the care that the committee exercised before presenting our report to the Assembly this morning. The processes through which the committee put itself were exhaustive, including some very long and late into the night meetings and some very early morning meetings.
Quite simply, we are looking at a question of public health. There have been times in the past - I am sure that there will be such times in the future - when people in positions like ours have had to make decisions in the broad public interest. Those decisions never have pleased everyone, and I believe that they probably never will; but with this job comes a responsibility, after looking at all of the available evidence, to make sometimes very difficult decisions. I recall very long and very strident debate, quite a number of years ago
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