One of the great leaps forward has been that we’ve been able to play one state off against the next. Having worked for an ACT Health Minister and an ACT Chief Minister you’re forever scanning to see what the other jurisdictions are doing, not only copying them but trying to improve on and trump them.

I think the ACOSH/ AMA Scoreboard[74] has had an amazing impact on highlighting what states and territories are doing and not doing, and playing them off against each other to drive improvement.

Even after all these years it’s still proving to be enormously influential.

Kathy Barnsley: Embarrassing Ministers.

Rohan Greenland: And rewarding them too, quite frankly. It’s the stick and carrot approach.

Simon Chapman: Another really good example involves WA and NSW – the first two states to do state-based mass reach campaigns. Garry and his team piloted the one on the north coast under Bernie McKay who went on to become the Federal secretary of health.

Laurie Brereton[75] was the NSW Health Minister at the time and we used to keep similar hours. I used to go up in the lift with him and he displayed some fruity language in saying that we were going to take the campaign around the country. And he did just that. I can’t remember the mechanism of how it happened, whether it was meetings with other health ministers or word of mouth.

Garry Egger: There was one very interesting thing about the north coast campaign that hasn’t come out. People may remember there was a guy called Dr William Whitby, a doctor and lawyer who wrote Smoking Is Good For You.[76]

When we were running the campaign he said, ‘This is all big brother. It’s all terrible stuff.’

We had surveyed people on the north coast, and their minds weren’t made up about smoking. We offered to get Whitby up there to talk to them about smoking being good for them, though we never intended to.

What it did was to make the people who were sitting on the sidelines change their minds. They started to look at the arguments and the argument that Whitby was presenting just wasn’t a useful argument.

There was a huge public reaction to the use of Dr Whitby and we never saw him again.

Simon Chapman: The other thing that happened was that two of the three or four ads from the campaign were banned. The woman who was in charge of the division which was running it was June Heffernan.[77] She was a former reporter from This Day Tonight and a savvy media operator.

She loved it when the ban came in because it allowed the campaign to be politicised. There were lots and lots of headlines about the evil tobacco industry interfering, and Four Corners (an ABC television program) did a whole special on it.

Garry Egger: If you were designing a campaign these days you’d probably invite ‘counter-argument’ like this to get the public more involved.

Harley Stanton : I think at the same time the tobacco companies established the Australian Tobacco Research Foundation. [78]

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine