Terry Slevin: In relation to campaigning, this conversation has been very much about targeting the smoker and the smoker’s behaviour. As mentioned earlier, the influence of passive smoking was one of the very powerful drivers when we hit a bit of a plateau in terms of any kind of breakthrough (in reducing tobacco smoking).

And it goes to the question that Todd asked about why we managed to continue making progress. Nailing the evidence about the impact of passive smoking moved it from being something that smokers did to themselves to their behaviour influencing innocent victims, if you like, the people around them.

And it also pushed some of the regulation in relation to smoke-free areas which then reinforced the behaviour of smokers. As a theme it’s something that we’ve talked about for a long time, the gathering together of all that evidence by people like Konrad (Jamrozik) and Alastair Woodward [147] and others, and it also played out in terms of innocent kids’ health. It allowed us to break through some of the barriers after a period of frustration at not being able to see a lot of progress.

Simon Chapman: It’s interesting thinking about passive smoking as an illustration of how long research, advocacy, community change and legislation can take.

My understanding has always been that the first restrictions on smoking were introduced primarily for fire hazard reasons. But then they started wearing a cloak of, ‘Some people don’t like it’. So for example, some of you will remember going to the cinema and the light was bathed in cigarette smoke.

And I can remember in 1982 when I worked on the Quit For Life campaign in NSW we produced 5000 stickers heroically that we took along to restaurants. They said, ‘Non-smoking section provided’ and we only got rid of five of them, all to vegetarian restaurants. They were the only ones willing to take it on. How things have changed since then!

Mike Daube: In fairness, Takeshi Hirayama’s absolutely landmark paper on passive smoking in 1981, was a turning point. Until then, all we could say about passive smoking was that second-hand smoke makes everyone uncomfortable. The solid evidence was only there since 1981. Terry’s absolutely right that things had plateaued in the 1990s.

That and the National Tobacco Campaign, which I think is a model of its kind, started turning things around. You had that linkage between a chairman who knew what he was doing chairing a good committee, a minister who wanted it to happen, a half-decent advertising agency that knew what it was about. We don’t often get that sort of line-up.

Paul Fishlock: It wasn’t designed to be a campaign that could be taken internationally. But as it turned out the fact that you could re-shoot the top and tail, and you could look down the trachea of a Cambodian and you’d see the same thing, meant that it went to 40-something countries.

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine