If you can characterise states as, if you like, ‘vanguard states’ where you have a health minister who’s first to do it, and then you have the ‘early adopters’ who are the ones who follow quite soon, and then the ones that ‘hang out’ for a number of years, are there any examples you can recall or anything you might say about the general principle that might help explain how that process works? Does a Minister come to a meeting and have bragging rights to talk about all the positive things that have happened since they’ve done this? How does it start infecting the rest?

Tom Roper: It varies. I’ll give you a non-smoking example. In the transport area, the transport ministers (of Australasia) used to meet annually. Basically for the road safety discussion, for instance, it’d be the best practice. We’d done a fair bit on road safety in Victoria and I was the chairman of the relevant committee on that. And so we presented all of that to a meeting we had in NZ.

I was then going with my daughter for a drive around NZ, and by the end of the week we started hearing some of our ads because the NZ minister had been so enthusiastic about it. He’d picked it up and run.

In Australia we tend to forget that the states will often lead the Commonwealth. We got rid of lead in petrol through Victorian legislation, I managed to smuggle that through our Upper House. And Kevin Gosper[156] rang me, probably a week later, asking me not to proclaim the legislation quickly because our legislation would destroy the national petrol market. They wouldn’t be able to move stuff in tankers around the edge. He said, give me three months and lead in petrol will be gone, everywhere. If we’d left that to the Commonwealth, we’d probably still have lead in petrol now given the attitude of the Federal transport department to these kinds of things.

We do forget the role that the states can play. When you get Commonwealth co-operation, it’s much better. With the AIDS material we as a state had taken the lead. The Federal (Health) Minister held a summit, as you do, because it was such an urgent issue. The Commonwealth took our material and said, ‘We’ll have a national campaign.’ They were mostly concerned about the 1300 number. But the number they put in the national ad was in fact an officer of the Victorian Health Department. So Linda Stephens started getting hundreds of phone calls. But we got the Commonwealth in and it worked much better.

In this (smoking control) area, it’d be nice for someone to do a timeline of what all the states have done and how they, in the end, built on each other and the often quite informal communications which resulted in getting to a destination much more quickly.

John Cain: Can I say that perhaps the best example of what a maverick state can do is in revenue issues. It occurred in 1975 when both the state and federal probate duties ceased.

Bjelke-Petersen in ’79 or ‘80 decided to phase it out. Within two years all the states had followed. We went to an election in 1982 with a proposal to reintroduce probate duty in Victoria and got nowhere.

Neville Wran said, ‘You can’t do it. Joh’s up there on our border. If you do that, all our wealthy people will be attracted to Queensland.’

That was the end of it. It was a maverick proposal. It’s had huge implications for on-going revenue, and you’re seeing that now. The capacity for governments to attract revenue is so limited as to be disastrous in my view.

Simon Chapman: On a scale of motivation, is a minister, let’s say from South Australia, getting together with his colleagues from the other states and being able to say we are the first to do ‘x’. Is that something you give a moment’s thought to? How can I turn up at a meeting with a bauble?

John Cain: I don’t think so. What do you think, Tom?

Tom Roper: Oh, occasionally. (Laughter)

But also you do look for allies. When the Federal Government was being as slow as a wet week on the Montreal protocol on CFCs[157] and we decided to act in Victoria, we were the first. But I thought, wouldn’t it be better if we weren’t alone. So I rang up Tim Moore who was Nick Greiner’s (NSW state) environment minister and said, ‘We’re thinking of doing this. Are you interested?’

He said, ‘I’ll go and talk to Nick’ because Nick and I had been at university together and he rang back and said, ‘Yeah, we’re in.’ And so I then rang Richo[158] and said ‘We don’t give a --- what you do. Two-thirds of the country won’t have CFCs by Christmas.’ So I think there can be useful communication between the states which actually gets you a better result.

Ann Westmore: And does it help to be aligned politically?

John Cain: No, it helps to be in the same faction. (Laughter)

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine