Smokers, they’re comin’ for ya
FIRST they came for the pubs and smokers did not speak out – because they still had designated outdoor choofing areas.
Then they came for lit cigarettes within five metres of bus stops and smokers still did not speak out – because, well, that’s fair enough.
Now they have come for durrymunching on apartment balconies – and smokers are too busy wheezing up their entirely law-abiding lungs to speak out for themselves.
A proposal to rejig the 20-year-old Body Corporate and Community Management Act is gathering pace, with nosy parkers with finetuned noses shrieking for a ban on residents smoking on their own balconies.
The concept makes sense at face value – what non-smoker wants gross plumes of tobacco fumes wafting into their living room – but the devil is in the detail. Here’s the rub. If you are building an entirely new apartment complex and marketing it as a militant non-smoking health utopia with organic eggplant-infused kombucha delivered through the showerhead, then great!
Go ahead and ban smoking from the get-go and build a wholesome commune in your pristine image by gathering only like-minded folk as tenants and owner-occupiers.
The economic equation has its pros and cons.
On one hand, it will open up a new market of fragrant lung-lovers who would somersault at the idea of no longer being molested by the exhaust of grubby dart-punchers.
On the other, smokers (who you don’t want anyway) and generally sane people already deeply suspicious about handing over even more meddling power to body corporates will walk briskly, with intermittent breaks to regather their breath, for the hills.
What is unacceptable is for existing tenants and owner-occupiers to simply be told they will be kicked out of their home for doing something which is not in any way illegal.
Changing the law to make it illegal while still happily accepting the $10.5 billion Australian addicts paid in exorbitant tobacco taxes in 2016 would be a disgraceful act.
The Federal Government charges a 71¢ excise for every single legally acquired, non-chop-shop, pre-rolled cigarette smoked in Australia.
It reels in a staggering $916 for every kilogram of roll-your-own pouch tobacco sold.
A figure often bandied about is that smokers cost the Australian economy $31.5 billion a year, a superhuge-and-scary number that came from a report focusing on 2004-05.
It was a pretty dubious breakdown that only actually attributed a $318.4 million additional cost to the country’s health system, with the rest made up by lowered workplace pro- duction, household production, tobacco manufacturing and distribution costs, and $19 billion in “intangible costs”.
When you consider that everybody is going to die at some stage, and smokers will likely die sooner and not spend as long in hospital, it seems logical their cost to the health system could not be as enormous as claimed.
Especially when they kick $10.5 billion into the national tin every year.
But why don’t they just smoke inside, where their grotty vapours will not harass the neighbours?
The vast majority of leases already contain a clause that bans smoking inside a property – a genuinely enforceable rule.
Ban them from smoking on the balcony and they cannot have a lungbuster anywhere on their property.
If it is such an important issue, the government should ban tobacco outright, stop suckling on smokers’ diseased teats and reap the supposedly great economic benefits of not having the deal with the miscreants’ deaths for a few years longer.
Until then, those who choose community living are choosing to live with compromise.
They can always move to a house.