Page 4776 - Week 11 - Thursday, 20 October 2011
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Children who suffer asthma and frequent respiratory disease are likely to miss more time at school than healthier children. Even controlling for SES and parental smoking status, exposure to second-hand smoke has been demonstrated to reduce school attendance and the productivity of parents who need to stay home to care for children. Poor school attendance is a very strong predictor of academic failure.
Exposure to second-hand smoke may still reduce academic performance even when children do not miss out on school. A recent longitudinal analysis of educational achievement in children participating in the British national child development study found that young people exposed to second-hand smoke at home were more likely to fail standardised UK O-level tests. It might be an excuse for my failing my O-level art exam!
It is also important to remember that often children have no choice but to endure smoking around them. Unlike adults, they lack the ability to remove themselves from the area in which smoking is occurring or have the ability to request that smoking does not happen. The continued act of smoking around children leads them to associate smoking as a commonplace pursuit connected with family activities. Smoking as an acceptable habit must be changed, and the only way to do this is with a cultural change and lower numbers of young people taking up smoking.
There is legislation to ban smoking in cars with children in South Australia, Tasmania, New South Wales, Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory. It is also banned in New Zealand, parts of the US and a number of European countries. There would be a hope, given the aim of this legislation, that in some ways this legislation will be self-enforcing. The policy is broadly popular, with a 2004 Cancer Council of Victoria survey showing that 90 per cent of people supported banning smoking in cars with children.
It is important, however, to examine the means by which this legislation will be enforced to ensure that it does not create an unnecessary imposition on individual rights to achieve its aims. This bill is drafted as a strict liability offence. This in itself raises concerns, and I acknowledge the concerns raised by members of the community on the implications of drafting the offence in such a manner.
I wish to briefly take the opportunity to congratulate the Health Directorate staff who drafted the explanatory statement to this bill. The statement is a comprehensive review of the issues and the implications of the strict liability offence. The offence in all the other Australian jurisdictions is a strict liability offence. It is necessary in this offence to do so to allow for the practical enforcement of the offence. It is useless to enact an offence that the police have difficulty in enforcing.
I have received advice on the nature of the penalty that is incurred by a breach of this offence. I think that two matters are important in the consideration of the offence: the burden it will place on the offender and the comparable penalties applied by similar jurisdictions. As is well discussed, smoking is becoming an equality issue. Studies show that significantly higher numbers of people living in lower socioeconomic conditions smoke than those who are tertiary educated. It must be taken into account
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