John Cain: That was the Fraser Government,[33] David, to which due credit should be given. Tom {Roper} may know what the issues were within the Liberal-Country Party coalition that drove it. That provided a base for us at the state level.

The electronic media, radio and television, were an exclusive Commonwealth power. We had no jurisdiction there.

Within the state Labor party, the political awareness and political concern {about tobacco control} doesn’t really emerge until the late 1970s, in my memory. And I was involved in Labor party policy committees, such as they were, from the late 1950s.

Now the Labor party in Victoria has a better reputation for progressive initiatives than New South Wales for reasons of history I won’t go into. In Victoria there was intense policy development in the late 1970s which provided a very fruitful base for us as a government when we came to power in ’82.

Tom, am I correct in saying that the notion of preventative health care, the broad framework of that, was in that policy work of the late 1970s? And tobacco smoking was a particular instance of preventative health care. So within the political context, I think that’s where it came from.

I’m not surprised to hear the comment about Fred Daly. I mean the Whitlam Government,[34] dynamic and progressive and important as it was, I don’t think got into that area.

Tom Roper: Certainly not in NSW.

Garry Egger: I’d like to add something about one thing I was involved in around 1973.

I was a postgraduate student and had done an economics major in my degree, so I considered I had some expertise in the area. I wrote a cost-benefit analysis on smoking which showed, for the first time I think, that it had more costs than benefits. It was presented to Federal Parliament in ’74. I think it had a significant impact. I shudder now at my level of expertise, but I think it had a political effect.

Paul Grogan:[35] One quick observation. In 2006 I obtained under statute the 1976 briefing that went to the office of Prime Minister Fraser and Cabinet from the then Department of Commerce and Industry. It outlined all the reasons why bans {on broadcasting advertising} would fail: They wouldn’t work, they would be detrimental to the economy and they would be detrimental to the viability of broadcast media. It was very interesting to look at in hindsight, thirty years later.

There was another paper from the {Federal} Health Department saying there was some good evidence for this. So Fraser had to make a judgement call based on those papers.

David Hill: Just to clarify, the Whitlam Government did initiate the broadcast ban phase-in.[36]

John Cain: It started with Whitlam?

David Hill: Yes. We were very relieved when the Fraser Government then decided to continue that three-year phase out. It ramped down until there was no broadcast advertising.

Kathy Barnsley: [37] Frank Crean[38] was influential.

Tom Roper: There were other people who were very much involved in health policy. In Victoria, people like Moss Cass[39], and the accidental Everingham health ministry.[40] So there started to be the policy discussion.

In terms of our {Victorian Labor} involvement, I probably first got involved in discussions with Nigel {Gray} when we were talking about setting up the Cancer Registry, which I eventually did by private members bill. It was really about getting basic information.

We were copying what NSW and the NSW Health Commission was doing. NSW had started to collect a whole lot of information about health and found, among other things, that the chief medical pre-condition for a caesarean section was private health insurance cover.

Our first involvement in talking about smoking policy followed a visit I made to Stockholm in 1980. We saw how they were using tennis players as posters for a healthy lifestyle which was not something that had been used elsewhere.

I was in Stockholm on a sort of semi-sabbatical after an unsuccessful effort to change our leader. (Laughter) I was away for three months and spent a lot of time on health policy and health promotion. I got the idea from the Swedes of using sport and sporting heroes as an educative factor.

The Victorian Health Commission had really not paid much attention to health promotion. So when we became the government we didn’t have any health promotion funds in the Health Commission.

We wanted to run an anti-smoking campaign. And you should all be thankful to the Bush Nursing Association because the funds for that first No Butts campaign were reassigned from the association’s grant of $400,000. We got huge support for the campaign, both from the public and also from Nigel and the Anti-Cancer Council.

That’s how we got the No Butts campaign off the ground. And the reports that our people did on the campaign said that they’d never seen a day’s publicity anything like it. It was a bit like the 1034 campaign[41] of the Herald Sun. It was constantly like going back to the well and bringing up some more water that produces the effective results.

The Anti-Cancer Council was in the field pretty well all the time. That provided the political background that allowed the legislation for VicHealth to come through in 1987. One of the key discussions with Nigel was on sponsorship and he was kind enough to credit me with the suggestion that we buy out tobacco sponsorships of sport and do so in a publicly supported way so politics would be minimised. The community and to some extent the media had already been persuaded of the need for action and therefore action was far more possible.

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine