One of the key bits of research that I’ve used is the research that David (Hill) did with John Pierce, which compared the Melbourne and Sydney markets and the responses. That was a long time ago, in 1984.

Terry Slevin: John Pierce[84] and Terry Dwyer[85] were the co-leads of that research based out of the Department of Public Health at Sydney University.

Trish Cotter: And it clearly demonstrates an effect of campaigning. Yes, you were making it up as you went along, but there was a commitment to seeing that we were doing it right.

Simon Chapman: Terry touched on the networking and collaborative spirit in tobacco control communities.

When I look at some other fields of public health such as obesity and diabetes, there appear to be divisions between clinicians and community groups. I supervised a PhD in the alcohol area recently and it was apparent that when it gets down to it people couldn’t agree on what they really wanted and there was a lot of mess.

Those sorts of divisions are less apparent in tobacco control and I think that one of the main factors responsible for that goes back to the very early UICC Green Book seven commandments or whatever it was.[86] It was an unambiguous hymn sheet from which we all sang.

Trish Cotter: There was also the 1962 Royal College of Physicians Report, Smoking and Health, that spelled out objectives for a comprehensive tobacco control program.

Simon Chapman: Mike might dispute this because we’ve had the discussion, but in tobacco control we were coherent about exactly what we wanted. I kiss the ground when I get up every morning that I started working in tobacco control because it is so unambiguous.

Mike Daube: I don’t dispute that at all, other than in relation to some more recent issues. Indeed, Todd and I are getting people together to try to achieve that consensus approach for alcohol.

Trish Cotter: There’s never really been any dispute (in tobacco control) about what we wanted to achieve. It’s been more about how you achieve it.

Tom Roper: Achieving what we wanted in tobacco control has sometimes been quite painful. For instance, getting rid of sponsorship was not a pleasant and easy job. If you went to the races or the opera or wherever, you were tackled at times by the people who were effectively the beneficiaries of the sponsorship.

Really if the Victorian government hadn’t taken the position it did it would have been politically even more difficult.

I can remember one of the discussions I had with one of the groups who were beneficiaries. They said, ‘Well, what are you doing yourself?’ I was able to say, ‘Well we’ve actually taken advertising off all state facilities and foregone that income. So you can’t accuse us of inconsistency.’ So we were able to point to that.

I think people now, looking back, think it was easier to get rid of sponsorship than in fact it was.

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine