Page 3158 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 20 September 1994

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The air-conditioning equipment itself will be very expensive. It will cost tens of thousands of dollars at a minimum. There will be a hefty application fee and there will be the inconvenience of having inspectors. Mr Moore says, "We are making it so difficult that 90 per cent of restaurants will not do it". That may be the case; but, if that is the case, why are we going through this farce of a backdoor ban on smoking in restaurants? Why do we not just take the straightforward approach, the "look the community in the eye" approach and set a lead for Australia? Let us ban smoking in restaurants, let us establish the legal regime that allows us to ban it in other places, and let us engage in a community debate and progressively go down the path of banning it in other places, just as 10 years ago it was banned on international aeroplane flights, then it was banned in aeroplanes domestically, then it was banned in terminals, then it was banned in buses, then it was banned in trains, then it was banned in public service offices, and then it was banned in shopping centres.

The process there has been a progressive one, and the process that Mr Berry was proposing was a progressive one. We should put forward the legislation that allows for the total ban. Do it straightaway, honestly and up-front with restaurants, instead of going through this farce where we have, basically, two classes of restaurants. The expensive places will be able to invest in the equipment and pay the licence fees, and you will be able to smoke there. If you have sufficient funds to go to the expensive restaurant, you will be able to smoke; but there is no way that restaurants in the local shopping centres are going to be able to invest tens of thousands of dollars in additional air-conditioning and all the rest of it; so they will be on a different standard. It is a circuitous way of getting to a ban on smoking in restaurants. If Mr Moore is saying, "I am going to ban smoking in restaurants with these amendments, because we will make it so difficult and so impracticable to get exemptions", would it not be better to look people in the eye and say, "We are going to ban smoking in restaurants."? So there are major practical problems with this.

Madam Speaker, we come back to the fact that the whole edifice of Mr Moore's amendments, where he is allowing certain parts of restaurants or other public areas to have smoking if they can meet certain standards, is premised on the view that you can have a safe standard for passive smoking. It is premised on the view that Australian Standard 1668 makes this a safe course of action. The overwhelming weight of independent advice is that that is just not so. Reputable leading authorities like Brendan Nelson, the Cancer Society and the National Heart Foundation are saying to the Assembly - there was a statement only the other week in which they were specifically addressing themselves to the Independent members - "Do not do it. Think again. Do not set a trend around Australia for this so-called clean air standard to be the basis for anti-smoking legislation". The Government can do no more than point out the folly of your ways, to point out the dangers of this course of action and to point out the overwhelming weight of reputable advice which is, "For heaven's sake, do not do it". It is in the hands of the Assembly.


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