Page 4691 - Week 15 - Thursday, 16 December 1993
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SMOKE-FREE AREAS (ENCLOSED PUBLIC PLACES) BILL 1993
MR BERRY (Minister for Health, Minister for Industrial Relations and Minister for Sport) (11.04): Madam Speaker, I present the Smoke-Free Areas (Enclosed Public Places) Bill 1993.
Title read by Clerk.
MR BERRY: I move:
That this Bill be agreed to in principle.
Madam Speaker, this represents another promise that was made by the Australian Labor Party. This Labor Government is proud to present this Bill to the people of Canberra. It is with a great deal of pleasure that I can table a Bill which, when passed by this Assembly, will lead to significantly cleaner air in enclosed public places. The ACT Government has made a commitment to create smoke-free public places. There are compelling health reasons and strong community support for carrying through with this commitment.
Over the past year or so I have had extensive consultation with business leaders, the public, and health agencies, among others. In October of this year the Labor Government released a discussion paper to invite formal comment on our proposals for smoke-free enclosed public places. The paper stressed that this policy is about where people smoke, not whether they smoke. Nearly 100 submissions have been received in response to the discussion paper. In examining these responses we found that the supporters of the Government's proposals outweighed the detractors by more than five to one. This result matches numerous surveys which have consistently shown between 70 and 80 per cent support for smoke-free enclosed public places.
It is interesting to look at where objections to the Government's proposals came from. Some individuals raised civil liberties arguments, which I will deal with shortly. However, with these few exceptions, the objections were raised by groups with a perceived interest in perpetuating smoking for economic reasons. Some claimed that a smoking ban would have customers leaving their business in droves, there would be civil disobedience, tourists would no longer visit, jobs would be lost, and so on. A number of others were fearful that a complete ban on smoking in licensed premises, if introduced within a short timeframe, would hurt patronage and employment. I want to make it clear that the discussion paper did not include a proposal for an immediate and total prohibition on smoking in pubs, clubs and bars, and I will have a little more to say about this when I talk about the legislation itself.
I have looked carefully at the available evidence about the experience of cities, countries and regions which have declared public places, including restaurants, smoke free. Invariably, there is no significant change in overall trading figures attributable to a smoke-free law. Madam Speaker, I want to dwell on this because the tobacco industry and the Australian Hotels Association have both claimed economic disaster for the ACT if this legislation goes ahead.
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