Holy smokes! What will they ban next?
ONE of my all-time favourite comedians, American legend Bob Newhart, has a wonderful routine in which he envisages a phone call from Sir Walter Raleigh back to his bosses in London, at a time when the Americas were being first explored by Europeans.
To quote the great man himself, it goes something like this ...
Yeah? Who is it, Frank? Sir Walter Raleigh? Yeah, put him on, will you.
Hey, Harry... you wanna pick up the extension?... yeah, it’s nutty Walter again!
Hi, Walter baby, how are you, guy? How’s everything going?
Did we get the what?
Oh, the boatload of turkeys, yeah, they arrived fine Walt. As a matter of fact they’re still here, they’re wandering all over London.
What you got for us this time, Walt, you got another winner for us?
Tob-acco... er, what’s tob-acco Walt?
It’s a kind of leaf, huh?
And you bought eighty tonnes of it! Let me get this straight, Walt, you’ve bought eighty tonnes of leaves? This may come as a kind of a surprise to you Walt but come fall in England, we’re kinda up to our necks in leaves. It isn’t that kind of leaf, huh?
Oh, it has a lot of different uses, like, what are some of the uses, Walt? Are you saying ‘snuff’, Walt? What’s snuff?
You take a pinch of tobacco... and you shove it up your nose. Ha, ha!... and it makes you sneeze? Ha ha ha! Yeah, I imagine it would, Walt.
It has other uses though, huh? You can chew it! Or put it in a pipe! Or you can shred it up ... and put it in a piece of paper. Ha ha ha. And roll it up! Ha ha ha ... Don’t tell me, Walt, don’t tell me, ha ha ha, you stick it in your ear, right? Ha ha ha.
Oh! Between your lips.
Then what do you do, Walt? Ha ha ha...
You set fire to it!
When Bob Newhart first used this routine back in 1960, part of what made it so funny was that close to everyone smoked.
How times have changed. Again. I don’t smoke, but I sometimes feel a sympathy for those who do.
It’s almost comical to see smokers huddled behind small squares painted on tarmac, heads bowed in shame as they suck furtively on their cancer-sticks, banished like plague victims to areas otherwise only used for rubbish bins and backdoor deliveries.
Passing children point and stare, quickly hurried away by concerned parents, their eyes shielded lest they might witness the pestilence.
It’s reached a level that if passersby spat at the huddled ciggie-suckers it probably wouldn’t be too much of a surprise.
The jihad on smoking has been highly effective in other ways too. To maintain a serious smoking habit these days is to commit to shelling out the equivalent of a second mortgage. Illicit drugs are more reasonably priced.
But for the health police, this is not yet enough.
The humble smoko is now under fire – perhaps as much because of its name as anything else.
A study from Monash University last week suggested that smokers could be costing the economy a remarkable $388 billion over their working lives.
I’m at a loss to imagine how they came up with such a massive number. Smokers must be remarkably productive while at their desks.
This has, somewhat predictably, led to calls for banning the smoko altogether. I understand where the people behind such calls are coming from. I’ve seen loved ones die from cancer, I get it.
I’ve seen other problems caused by smoking too. As a child, I used to enjoy the fragrant smell that filled the room when my grandfather smoked his pipe, and imagined myself doing the same when older. But the memory of his last months, coughing and wheezing and with an oxygen tank next to his armchair, ensured nothing of the kind will ever touch my lips.
But to count the smoko hours and translate it to a dollar amount seems a spurious logic. With so few smokers remaining, the cost to business is surely not so great.
What the smoko really amounts to is break time. If you’ve ever seen a “smoko van’’ pull up at a work site and honk its horn, you’ll know that tobacco has little enough to do with it. The effect is more like a grown-up version of an ice cream van arriving at a playground.
And were we to apply the same logic to every reason a worker departs their station for a couple of minutes, things get somewhat ridiculous.
Should we time toilet breaks? How much is the lavatory lingerer costing the economy?
Or the caffeine addict who is constantly popping out to collect a cappuccino?
The horrors of smoke seemed somewhat less important on the Gold Coast last week when a thick blanket covered the city from a burn-off.
While one can’t knock the ingenious work done to hold off bushfires, a little more notice would have been good, especially for the benefit of the asthmatics among us.
Such events are a reminder that smoke and fire are ever present in Australian life, and always have been. Smoking ceremonies have a special place in First Australian communities, warding off bad spirits, acknowledging ancestors and paying respect to the land and sea of country.
It’s a part of the fabric of this place. The Anglo tradition celebrates smoke too. One of the many ways the wonderful Paradise Country at Oxenford entertains tourists is by demonstrating how to make billy tea and damper over a camp fire. And damn it tastes good.
As does anything hocked off a barbecue – an even greater Aussie tradition.
But here is where the war on smoke goes completely off the rails.
I promise you this is no joke – April the first is long gone – but the Tasmanian Government has proposed laws that would make smoke from barbecues unlawful.
A draft law from the Environmental Protection Authority Tasmania says barbecue smoke is outlawed if, and I quote, “the smoke is visible for a continuous period of 10 minutes or more” or “during that continuous 10-minute period, is visible for a continuous period of 30 seconds or more at a distance of 10 metres or more from the point where the smoke is emitted”.
Which pretty much covers every barbecue I’ve ever been responsible for.
For the above offences fines of up to $1600 are proposed.
Although I’m fascinated by the idea of a government official lurking behind my garden fence, clipboard in hand, timing the fumes emitted from my barbecue, this is thin end of the wedge kind of stuff. Once the fun police find a new target, fines, taxes and charges of all kinds are not far behind, and the virus can quickly spread across the nation. Witness the enthusiasm of state governments to ape each other by loading taxes on to cartons of beer, using litterprevention as an excuse, a la the failed NSW “container deposit scheme’’.
Some people have labelled the Tasmanian move “un-Australian”. I’d be slow to make that charge – it might only encourage them.
I may be going out on a limb here, but I’d hazard a guess that the sort of people who want to shut down barbecues are unlikely to be the world’s greatest carnivores, or the most enthusiastic supporters of Australia Day.
I suspect even the brilliant Bob Newhart would have found this all too ridiculous for one of his routines. The 1960s were a simpler time. What seemed silly then can be government policy now.
It all makes you ask, just what are they smoking?