The second point I want to make is about having five minutes with a politician. Thinking back to WA, a colleague who can’t be here, Maurice Swanson,[69] was a young public servant working with the WA Health Department. Back in the early ‘80s he went to see the then opposition health spokesperson, Barry Hodge,[70] and talked with him about prevention and tobacco. And Barry got interested in that.

And when the Burke government was elected, Barry became the Health Minister. He was a very strong supporter of tobacco control and in an early Cabinet meeting he insisted on action against tobacco or he would resign. That was a very gutsy thing to do in the early days of a new government.

Very shortly after that the WA government put $2 million, then a further amount of money, into the first major state Quit Campaign. There had been 'Quit for Life' in NSW, but not consistent, substantial funding for a state campaign. And that comes back to having the money for strong media campaigns with strong ads on television that paved the way for public support.

Legislation for WA, like the VicHealth legislation, followed.

Thinking back to the 1980s, and the interaction between the states, I remember sitting on the side benches during the Drug Summit. It had been called by the then Prime Minister Bob Hawke,[71] because of concern about heroin. Premiers Bjelke -Petersen and Wran[72] were very strong on heroin.

Other premiers said, ‘Hang on, this is not just about heroin. It’s about other issues as well.’ They ensured that tobacco, and to a lesser extent alcohol, were seen as part of a national approach. Again, it’s the impact of some jurisdictions on others and what can be learned from that.

Kate Joel:[73] I want to pick up on the importance of having a longer-term strategy, which touches on a number of things others have said. Tom used the word constancy.

It all started to come together in the mid-1980s when WA raised that excise on tobacco and raised an extra $26 million that went into the state coffers each year. But what was really significant was that the WA Government committed to funding over a three year period. It was really the first time in the history of health education, not just tobacco, that there was a campaign over three years. That enabled a campaign that started with two years of really solid research before a public awareness campaign was started.

Figure 2

Four former directors of Quit Victoria, L-R: Todd Harper, Michelle Scollo, Dorothy Reading, Kate Joel (McAllister), 29 May 2015, Carlton, Vic. Image courtesy of VicHealth.

I was obviously involved in that in WA before bringing that model with me to Victoria to start the Quit Campaign here in 1985. That was a tripartite initiative between the State Government, the Cancer Council and the Heart Foundation. Again that was a long term strategy. You then had the benefit of three years solid research behind the WA campaign.

And that model was employed successfully. We really used the same model for a whole range of health areas, including food and nutrition, and AIDS. So it is about having a longer term strategy. Up to that point there had been various initiatives that had been successful in their own way but they’d all been short term. And we can look at various initiatives in the health arena. It’s all about keeping ahead of the curve. You might think the job is done but then you have developments like e-cigarettes that start to normalise that sort of behaviour again.

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine