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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 9 Hansard (2 September) . . Page.. 2852 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

rather than the other, how on earth will that inhibit people from buying tobacco products? I can see us getting into many an argument about this one square metre, which is totally unproductive.

Mr Speaker, I think that simple example is enough to make the point. This Bill is full of similar follies. I cannot often enough reiterate that the Bill is not going to alter by one iota what happens in the real world. Correction. It will make a difference. It will give employment to public servants whose duty it would be to lurk outside small businesses to check whether they can see tobacco displays or hear the sounds of spruikers declaiming the pleasures of using tobacco. It will give them employment in measuring how big the displays are, presumably with a carefully calibrated one-metre long ruler, which of course is going to have to be flexible because it is going to have to bend around curved surfaces. It will give them the job to swoop with righteous indignation on the small business person who has erected a display of product information set in, heaven forbid, a font type with serifs or type that measures 73 points in a display measuring 1.001 square metres. This is at the point of the ridiculous, Mr Speaker.

It will give these public servants jobs inspecting candy stores to see whether they contain sweets that look like cigarettes. They can attend every screening on every one of Canberra's 31 cinema screens in case somebody slips in a tobacco advertisement. They can examine every rental video in every video shop in the Territory in search of surreptitious tobacco ads. They can examine the clothing worn by tobacco sales staff in case one of them is wearing a garment displaying tobacco advertising. Mr Speaker, the nicotine narks are going to be run off their feet. They will need two or three extra smokos every working day to recover their vigour.

The legal profession must be awaiting the Bill with glee. Imagine the flood of cases in which retailers will pay for defence on grounds, for example, that the specifications for the price cards they ordered clearly stated 72 points sans serifs or that the specifications for the display cabinet were clear about the dimensions but the printer or the shopfitter got it wrong. It is not hard to imagine Mr Moore coming back and trying next year to amend the Act to block that kind of defence by making it a crime for a printer to print price cards for tobacco products to specifications exceeding the permitted sizes or for a carpenter to build a cabinet capable of displaying tobacco products with a display area bigger than what is permitted. Mr Moore has demonstrated some foolishness, I suggest, by introducing the Bill, and such additional foolishness is not beyond the bounds of his future actions.

Some of the restrictions imposed by this Bill are really unbelievable. I find them unprecedented in relation to the selling of any other licit product. I just pull a couple out at random. I have talked about the one metre square surface. That is having an unbroken outer display surface, whether or not the surface is flat, with an area of not more than one square metre. That is why I suggest the inspectors are going to have to have flexible rulers so they can measure round curves. This metre is a very important measure. The point of sale must be located so that the lowest point of display is not less than one metre above the floor and, on the seller's side of the point of sale, not less than one metre away from any part of the customer service area in relation to the point of sale. One metre is becoming a very important matter when it comes to selling tobacco products.

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