Stubbed out Down Under

Wednesday July 16, 2008

Joe Jackson first toured Australia in 1983. Recently returned from his latest visit, the musician and writer is appalled by what he discovered

In an earlier article, I made the slightly rash assertion that Britain had become the worst place in the world to be a smoker. Don’t get me wrong, it’s awful, worse even than that Kremlin of the antismoking empire, the USA. But that was before I found myself in the place where bad smokers go when they die. I have been to Hell, and its name was Brisbane.

I first toured Australia in 1983, and liked it. The people were laid-back, with a dry sense of humour, and the culture had a nice mix of American and British influences. Having been back every few years, though, I’ve seen the place increasingly stifled by American-style paranoid health-freakery and a very British-style nanny state.

There’s also a lot of the sort of political correctness – all too familiar in the UK – which calls itself ‘tolerance’ but is in fact just a re-definition of what and who is to be tolerated. Blacks, Asians, and gays are ‘in’. But it’s fine to be intolerant of other peoples’ pleasures, and to be downright nasty to people who are ‘overweight’ or drink ‘too much’ (the definitions of which are constantly adjusted downwards by government diktat), people who don’t go to a gym or adopt approved ‘healthy’ habits, and especially smokers.

Australia is also, to quote a local record company representative, ‘over-policed’. He mentioned this as my manager and I got into his car and he told us to fasten the back-seat seatbelts; we could be fined $200 for not wearing them, on top of which he, as the driver, would be fined a further $200 for each passenger not wearing one.

After a few more anecdotes about growing government surveillance and general bullying, he offered an explanation which he seemed to half-believe: that Australia is, by population, a small country, so everyone has to be very responsible for everyone else. But Australia has 20 million people. Try selling that theory to someone from, say, Iceland, which is thriving with only 300,000.

Dismal

Getting back to smoking, in Brisbane it’s illegal to smoke anywhere food or drink is served or consumed, including at outside tables. Sometimes there’s a dismal area 15 feet away where you can go and have a fag but where it is illegal to take your drink.

There’s a pattern here which I’ve observed in the US: authorities trying to one-up each other in beating up on smokers. The last time I was in Sydney it had fairly tough restrictions but Brisbane was relatively liberal. Now, having ‘lagged behind’ before, it wants to show how ‘tough’ it can be.

Authorities in many countries are now so carried away with this hate campaign that they no longer even bother to pretend that the laws they pass are necessary—to ‘protect’ staff, for instance, from the phantom menace of ‘secondhand smoke’. Likewise, authorities no longer feel the slightest obligation to be honest or truthful about tobacco even on their own terms.

So it is that cigarette packets in Australia (and soon in the UK if antismoking lobbies have their way) are covered with horrific images of black lungs, rotting limbs and teeth, and so on, and dubious if not downright false statements such as SMOKING CAUSES BLINDNESS, SMOKING HARMS UNBORN CHILDREN, or SMOKE IS TOXIC, all presented as plain fact.

Any honest scientist could debunk these claims in a couple of minutes. There’s too much to tackle here, but to briefly address the last one: what they mean is that tobacco smoke contains chemicals which are potentially toxic.

Normal

What they don’t say is that this is true of literally everything you can eat, drink, or inhale, but it’s the amount of the harmful substance that matters, and it is infinitesimal. No matter how the antismokers spin it, it’s a fact that the vast majority of even heavy smokers live to normal old age.

We have a higher statistical chance of getting lung cancer, but if it was indeed ‘the fags what done it,’ then they took anything up to 60 years of over-indulgence to do so – and, incidentally, gave pleasure and comfort in the process. So how ‘toxic’ are they, really?

Australian tobacconists are also obliged to post notices proclaiming that tobacco causes (not ‘may or may not be a contributing factor according to one or two dodgy studies,’ but ‘causes’) not only cancer of the lung but of the stomach, bladder, kidney, pancreas and cervix.

Now, anyone who’s paid attention over the last few years knows that cervical cancer has in fact been proven to be caused by a virus. I don’t have all the evidence about these other claims in front of me, but I’d be astonished if anyone can prove them. Not that proof of anything has been required of the antismoking movement for some time now. Give prohibitionist fanatics an inch, and they’ll take a mile; and antismokers have been given a hundred miles and taken a thousand.

Equally disturbing was the email I received from a journalist from the Melbourne paper The Age, with whom I’d done a telephone interview a couple of weeks earlier. He’d been sympathetic to my views on smoking, and wanted to tell me that his article had been ‘butchered’ by his editor on instructions from their legal department. It seems there are now laws governing what can and can’t be printed about tobacco, and it’s actually illegal to say anything which might be construed as positive.

Censorship

Lies, more lies, and now censorship, but in Australia no one really seems to care. Many people, even smokers, have bought into the idea that it’s ‘all for the best’, because bars now have nice ‘clean air’. No one seems to engage their brain for two minutes to consider that tobacco smoke does not make the air ‘dirty’, or if it does, so do thousands of other things. Or that if smoke bothers some or even most people, it can easily be rendered virtually unnoticeable by a decent modern ventilation system. Or even that we could try separate rooms or separate venues.

No, it has to be all or nothing. This is a kind of fundamentalism which deadens the soul, and which always reminds me of the fictional country in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle, where there is only one punishment for any kind of crime, large or small, and it is to be impaled on a giant hook. Presumably many Australians would think this a fine idea. Or at least ‘all for the best’.

In the interest of balance, I should mention that Sydney and Melbourne are not quite so bad as Brisbane, since there are many places to sit outside and drink and smoke, sometimes in reasonable comfort. Up to a point. They all drag everyone inside by about 10:30 (when some people, including yours truly, are still working).

There are also signs outside pubs nagging smokers to consider that any butts thrown on the ground might get washed out to sea and pollute ‘our beautiful harbour’ (other forms of garbage presumably being acceptable).

So you go home, switch on the TV, and see Hammer-horror antismoking TV ads brought to you by Pfizer. And then a news item about the soon-to-be-enacted ban on smoking in your own car …

Numbed

I was starting to feel numbed by all this by the time we arrived in Perth, our last stop. This was where the bus driver who was to take us from the airport to our hotel announced that no food or drink was allowed on board. Not just no eating or drinking; we were forbidden to have any food or drink in our possession.

My hotel room in Perth turned out, like my rooms everywhere else in Australia, to be a hermetically-sealed, air-conditioned environment. Impossible to open a window to let in fresh air, or to let out the vile stench of my cigarettes (which I only smoke in hotel rooms since I’ve been banned from the bar).

I was getting a bit fed up with this, so I asked the man at the front desk if there were any rooms with windows which opened. No, he said, they are all “sealed for security reasons”. What did that mean? “Well,” he said, “we wouldn’t want anyone falling out the window, would we?”

I asked him if he lived in fear of accidentally falling out of the window in his home, and he gave me a blank stare. That’s when I went from ‘numbed’ to ‘get me out of here’. Our next stop would be Johannesburg, South Africa, and though I’m probably perverse, part of me actually looked forward to being in a place with some real problems.

A last word to Australian antismokers, though: well done. You are succeeding. I am a smoker and you’re making me miserable. Oh, sorry – did you want to make me quit smoking? No, that hasn’t worked. Still, you don’t have to worry about me any more, because I won’t be hurrying back.

Joe Jackson is a musician and writer

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Joe Jackson