Harley Stanton: It’s interesting. Neil Francey was a crucial person to us during an important part of the era. He brought forward a case to try to bring state and federal (authorities) to join together to litigate against the industry. It’s something that’s still incorporated as part of the WHO FCTC.[173] Some countries are still doing it. I don’t know that we’re in a position to be able to progress that here. Certainly the case involving Sue Meeuwisen was a very important one and there were some other cases as well.

Trish Cotter: There were early ones in the 1980s in Victoria and NSW.

Several voices : Sean Carroll,[174] Myriam Cauvin,[175] Liesel Scholem[176].

Simon Chapman: The bar worker from Wollongong.

Todd Harper: There was another restaurant one in Victoria – with Andrea Bowles.

Terry Slevin: Rather than the individual cases, there’s a broader principle here and that is the extent to which we in the non-government sector have come to appreciate the importance of the legal process and the impact that it can have in accelerating social change. So now we’re seeing more people with legal training in places like Cancer Councils.

As a skill set it’s not one that’s been within our reach until the last five to 10 years. Now people with legal training are becoming more useful, and available and they’re being used in a whole range of areas. We’ve got one in our place (in WA). It’s extraordinary the value they can add to the issue of the day.

But I think there’s another learning out of this development that we haven’t quite captured. It’s the capacity to argue along economic lines, and Michelle (Scollo) is probably the closest to bringing it to the table regularly. While it’s been very a very important issue in tobacco we haven’t similarly captured and translated that skill set to the other issues that we need to tackle. Garry (Egger) was talking earlier about the challenges posed by obesity. That seems to me to be a prime example of where economic literacy as well as legal literacy will be absolutely fundamental to making our way forward.

If we’re talking about this for the purpose of what lessons can be learned, I think those two are really important. We’re reaping the benefits of legal capacity in other spheres, but we haven’t nearly explored or exploited economic capacity to its full extent.

Melanie Wakefield: One of the public health lawyers who I’ve had the good fortune to work with inside government in South Australia is Chris Reynolds.[177] He was important in helping draft some of the relevant (tobacco control) legislation and really did understand a lot of the issues and he could frame things in certain ways. It was fabulous to work alongside someone like that who could bring that thinking to the table.

He’s gone on to do amazing things in the food area as well. He’s someone who’s come from a long way back.

Garry Egger: My main interest in today’s discussion is what I can learn from successes in tobacco for other areas, particularly obesity. It seems like there’s not a lot (of lessons), but there must be some things.

In health promotion, we always use the term, regulate and legislate if you can, educate and motivate if you can’t. This morning we were talking mainly about education and motivation in talking about campaigns and so forth. This afternoon the discussion’s been more about regulation and legislation.

I haven’t been involved in the smoking area for a while and it’s struck me today that we’ve shifted from education and motivation to regulation and legislation in this area. It’s a strategy that’s been very successful. But if you take an area like obesity, regulation and legislation is just not going to work at this phase of the obesity epidemic. It’s very difficult to regulate and legislate against eating.

Kathy Barnsley: But food labelling is rubbish.

Garry Egger: Exactly. That’s what I’m saying. If you’ve sat in on food labelling conferences it’s virtually impossible to do at the moment. So I wonder if there are any lessons from the dynamics of what’s happened in the tobacco area over the last 40 years.

Kate Joel (McAllister): One of the lessons is that you have to have a multi-faceted, coordinated campaign. You’ve got to be working at all levels concurrently, for instance legislatively and in public education. You have to be really strategic about all the different fronts available to you. And do all your mapping really conclusively to understand what all the possible drivers and levers are that you can use to your advantage in different ways. Then you have to work out some alignment between all of those. It’s a fascinating and major challenge.

Terry Slevin: I’d say it’s important not to over-simplify things, Garry. I’d say that the ‘educate and motivate’ approach is as important today as it was in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. I can show you data from campaigns that were run only a few months ago about that still being an important and useful tool in the arsenal. And we’re running campaigns at the moment which will facilitate the next regulatory change as well as influencing people’s behaviour.

So I don’t think it’s wise to separate the approaches used in terms of decades. They are absolutely wrapped together. It’s a really important lesson not to lose.

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine