Harley Stanton: And Geoffrey Bible, head of Philip Morris, was on the board of News Limited, right up to the late 1990s.

David Hill: That Age campaign where they ran serious feature articles that were beautifully co-ordinated five days in a row, on what the Cain government was doing to get the Victorian Tobacco Act up, that must be quite unusual.

John Cain: That was in Creighton Burns’[152] time. He was a cut above most of them.

Harley Stanton: Nigel often used to continually talk about the letter, the contact, he had with Archbishop Little[153] which he said was pivotal for the Victorian Act.

Nigel spoke directly to the Archbishop who said, ‘I have taken a course of action.’ That’s all he said.

John Cain: In respect of some member of the Opposition in the Upper House?

Harley Stanton: I’ve got a copy of that letter.

David Hill: Who was it? Who was the member of the Opposition in the Upper House?

John Cain: There were four or five of them, I think, who were teetering and who would not have been violently opposed to what the Archbishop said.

On matters of more current concern, though, I’m not sure about that. (Laughter)

Lyn Roberts: Going back to the National Tobacco Campaign, I think that level of cooperation and commitment across the states was quite extraordinary. We used to have big (national) meetings like this in South Australia, because we had the biggest room that was available.

I was thinking about the ads, Paul, too. Each of us was able to go individually to our own state and territory health ministers or wherever the state funding was coming from. The fact that we were able to negotiate with all of them, to not actually have all those logos at the end and to just have that really simple Quit message, was actually extraordinarily significant.

I can remember going with Melanie and Melanie spending time convincing Michael Armitage[154] that we didn’t actually need to have logos on this, and briefing him on the campaign, and it would be OK.

Melanie Wakefield: I don’t remember that. There were so many meetings.

Lyn Roberts: I do. It was extraordinary that across the whole of the country, everyone said no (to logos). I think there’d been some research done that showed it was a distraction if you had multiple logos and you didn’t want it to look as if the message was coming from government. And they all held back. It was amazing.

Ron Borland: Just having the Quit line number at the end of the ad, we were monitoring that and we discovered with one ad that the rate of calls to the Quit line didn’t go up as it was supposed to.

And we checked the ad. They had trimmed the end, taking it from three seconds to one-and-a-half seconds. So there wasn’t enough time for people to actually get the number down. So we changed it back to three seconds and suddenly the responses came back.

Trish Cotter: That experience of having no logos on the end of ads was one in a million. You’ve got to really appreciate that that was an amazing achievement.

Todd Harper: There‘s been push-back at times over the years. There have been lots of discussions with stakeholders who say, ‘I want my logo on that. Why don’t we?’ And we say, ‘OK you can. But if we do that then we have to go to the Cancer Council, Heart Foundation, and the Government and they’ll all put their logos on it and it’ll be an absolute mess.’

Melanie Wakefield: In a way it’s being a victim of your own success, in that everyone wants in.

Trish Cotter: We really should acknowledge Judith Watt[155] for the phenomenal work that went into achieving that. I don’t think we’d have got half of what we got without her driving that through.

Paul Fishlock: From The Agency perspective, we were incredibly aware and in no small measure surprised that this group was able to achieve that. It was without precedent in similar work that we’d done.

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine