Our children in smoke chambers

The Government’s reluctance to ban adults smoking in cars with children in them is ‘‘unfathomable’’, says Children’s Commissioner Andrew Becroft. Commissioner, we must protest. Unfathomable suggests there’s depth to the Government’s thinking.

This is giving undue credit. The science must be clear, even to lawmakers who are splashing around in the shallows of social policy.

If parents are chuffing away in cars, this is a toxic environment.

Cracking a window doesn’t suffice. Not when there’s no known level of safe exposure to cigarette smoke, short of none at all.

Children are hardly in a position to insist their parents cut it out, or to take the other adult option of getting themselves out of that situation. They’re pretty much captive.

So what’s the case for continuing to permit this, aside from those that elevate the presumptive rights of the parents stratospherically above those of the child?

Associate Health Minister Nicky Wagner says that the focus should remain on reducing smoking numbers, rather than a ban.

Persuasion rather than compulsion, see?

You have to wonder whether parents would ever have been required to have seatbelts fitted for their children if it had come down to this Government to make the call.

Would it not have been better just to, you know, educate adult drivers about the relevant laws of physics?

One child in five is being exposed, according to the the latest research out of Otago University. And let’s not be dainty – for Pasifika, it’s closer to one in four, and for Maori, one in three.

Perhaps the reason we have a seatbelt requirement is that without a belt, when the predictable consequence happens, things get instantaneously messy.

Whereas the smoke-related damage of respiratory tract infection, asthma problems and glue ear, let alone any of the more high-profile results of secondhand smoking, don’t emerge in scenes of roadway or roadside carnage. They are slower to show up and don’t impact in quite the same high-viz, headlineattracting way.

Then we have the the pseudopractical challenges to a ban like how would it be enforced. As the commissioner says, it could be part of overall road policing.

And spare us the spurious arguments that if children can’t be protected from inhaling other people’s smoke elsewhere, including their own smokefilled homes, then they’re – just quietly – a bit buggered anyway, riskwise. So what’s the point?

The point is, we’re poisoning our kids. Acting against that isn’t political correctness gone mad. It’s rational adult responsibility showing up – and late in the piece at that.