Although it’s always had a total agenda, the fact that it’s been achieving things bit by bit means that it’s seen as pragmatic and easier to deal with. Some lobby groups want everything or you’re the enemy. That’s something where you can ascribe success over the last couple of decades to the fact that the tobacco movement has played that game fairly well.

People were talking before about having a moderate front and a radical front and you all got together, but you knew when not to invite the radical front along to critical meetings. At one level you can say that’s Machiavellian, and a bit manipulative. On the other hand, it’s realistic politics.

Michele Scollo: An example of that, when Harley was mentioning the briefings that the Heart Foundation and the Australian Cancer Society did in Canberra, the first phase of those briefings was prior to the reform of the excise duty on tobacco which led to the ‘per stick system’. I should acknowledge that Andrew led that. He did the first report on that and we were picking up that to the Federal Government.

But after that when the reform had passed and The Agencies were going back into Parliament, briefing ministers about the need for more money for tobacco control, they were armed with the Collins and Lapsley information which was useful. But we were getting the message from Treasury, ‘That’s all very well. We know the costs are huge but we have a three or four year time frame. How much money will your initiatives save us in this term of government?’

That was the genesis of the research that we had done in the VicHealth Centre for Tobacco Control where Susan Hurley[169] did costings of the early returns from tobacco control in terms of reduced expenditure on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, and reduced health care expenditure from the diseases that respond quickly to the reduction in smoking.

So part of that was being responsive to political needs and seeing what was required for policy making.

Mike Daube: Regarding the TAP Act, my recollection was there was logical progress. We’d had the Victorian ban (on tobacco advertising), then in South Australia, WA and the ACT. There was a need to bring it all together (at a federal level) which happened (with the TAP Act) in 1992. And at that time, too, the industry almost lay down over that one. It (banning tobacco advertising and promotion) was happening all around the country but they focussed on some specifics like the Grand Prix and the cricket where they could hold onto some of the treasure for a while.

The TAP Act hasn’t been revised since 1992 and needs a significant overhaul.

Michelle Scollo: We did an enormous amount on that (the TAP Act) in Victoria. Of course we had the model of the Victorian Tobacco Act and we had the buy-out of the Victorian sponsorships. So the issue for Federal politicians was, isn’t this a bit scary? Is this something that’s feasible? We did a lot of work providing material at parliamentary committees and briefing various politicians about how Quit sponsorships had worked in Victoria (providing funds for junior development in sport rather than advertisements for cigarettes) and how it was something that was quite feasible and popular to do.

Trish Cotter: This was happening around the time of the print advertising bans in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was Steve Woodward who was doing all that work. He’s not here for his contribution. I think he was integral to all those advertising ban discussions. It was at the same time in the early 1990s where there was the AFCO versus TIA court case that was really significant around smoking in workplaces as well.

Simon Chapman: I think one of the principles that it’s very important we capture too is the ‘you can’t be half pregnant’ principle. It works in both analysing the progression of second-hand smoke legislation and also in tobacco advertising.

Once we got the broadcast media ban and once politicians started framing that as ‘we don’t want children to see tobacco advertising’, it didn’t take much brainpower to see that children were exposed to every other form of advertising. And if it was bad to be exposed to cigarette smoke in the cinema or in an airline, it was also bad to be exposed in other places. In fact by some reasoning it should have been the other way around, because some of the worst exposure was in bars rather than in some of the ones which went first.

I think that instinctively anyone with a brain understood ‘the half pregnant principle’ without even having to know what its name was. So the argument just progressed. The first bans were the hardest, then the rest of them were relatively easy, although the pubs were really the most difficult.

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine