Page 3159 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 20 September 1994
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MRS CARNELL (Leader of the Opposition) (9.19): Madam Speaker, what Mr Connolly said is simply not correct. There is no way that certainly this side of the house - and, I know, the committee - believes that the Australian standard was somehow set at a safe level of tobacco. It was by no means the total answer, and that is the reason that the amendments that will follow allow for smoke-free areas. That does not mean that you can smoke anywhere in a pub, club, tavern or restaurant; you just put in an extraction system, and the extraction system takes it away; you can sit right next to someone and blow smoke on them. That simply is not how it works.
What happens is that we have areas of restaurants, clubs, pubs and taverns that are smoke free; so, you cannot smoke in them at all. Of course it is not the total answer. What it does present, though, is part of the answer. By the way, that is not my view; that is not my comment. I will quote from a letter from Geraldine Spencer, the editor of the ASH magazine, in which she says:
The Code recognises that current technology does not provide a complete solution to the problem of environmental tobacco smoke exposure in workplaces but that the application of accepted standards of ventilation, air conditioning and exposure to airborne contaminants may form part of an overall approach to reducing workplace contaminants and to phasing in a no-smoking policy.
That is exactly what we are saying. This is a letter from probably the most vehement advocates of a smoke-free environment. What she is actually saying, and what they are actually saying, is exactly what we are saying: This is not a complete answer, but it is part of an approach which allows people some form of individual freedom and harm minimisation.
Again, that is the problem that Mr Connolly and Mr Berry have failed to recognise. Mr Connolly continued to talk about there being no safe level of tobacco smoke. The fact is that we simply do not know, and that is the real problem.
Mr Berry: So we err on the side of safety.
MRS CARNELL: That is a silly approach, because if we were going to do that we would not take $30m a year into government coffers on the basis of selling cigarettes in the ACT - or anywhere, for that matter. We would say, "Let us just get rid of it totally". That is the purist approach and, Mr Berry, you are really keen on purist approaches on these things. If we were really keen on this, if we actually meant what we said here, we would just ban it totally.
This approach which suggests that there is a safe level and an unsafe level, or we know what those are, for passive tobacco smoke, environmental tobacco smoke, is simply untrue. Both Mr Moore and I, over a period of time, have asked the Government to come forward with some form of scientific proof or any scientific evidence to show that environmental tobacco smoke - where there are smoke-free areas, where there are ventilation systems - is a significant danger or a danger at all. In fact, one of the
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