The big smoke? Not Invercargill, buddy.

So downtown public smoking in Invercargill has become a designated abnormality.

The Invercargill City Council has adopted smokefree policy for the central business district. It’s not a bylaw ban enforced by penalties, but a policy to be expressed in terms of signage and highlighted, if necessary, by friendly comments from passersby.

The stated agenda is to rid ourselves, especially our kids, of the impression that smoking is a normal social activity.

It’s a reasonable piece of civic leadership in which the council heeded a case presented in scientific and social terms by the Murihiku Smokefree Coalition, and before that its own youth council, alongside Government policy agendas.

It also considered emphatically supportive surveys of local businesses’ views and ran a draft policy through the public submissions process before it finally made the call.

Still there will be smoky sighs of protest and wheezed complaint that this is all political correctness gone mad. Not so. It’s political correctness in one of its saner incarnations.

People retain the right to poison themselves but not in public environments where not only are they normalising the persistence of one of our society’s most self destructive habits, but also perhaps harming others through second-hand smoking.

Counter-intuitive though it may seen in the well-ventilated outdoors of Invercargill, secondhand smoke is deemed in international studies to be potentially harmful to people 5m away. What’s more, ‘‘significant’’ effects can occur at least 9m from a burning cigarette in light winds. If that sounds like malarky to you (and for a while there it struck us that way), then by all means take it up with the not-exactlyinsubstantial Kobe Journal of Medical Science or the peerreviewed Nicotine & Tobacco Research by Hwang and Lee.

Formal penalties are deemed unnecessary because smokers nationally and internationally have largely been found to be considerate of society’s rules. (Who knew, right?) And, reasonably enough, they don’t want people having them on about it. The smokefree advocates depict this being done in polite, nonconfrontational ways by people who feel empowered by the knowledge of the policy and the reasons for it.

The other likelihood, let’s face it, is that smokers will get the stinkeye and the scowls. Failing that, well there’s always the Game of Thrones scenario: the zealot Septa Unella trailing after the offender, ringing that unlovely handbell and repeatedly crying out ‘‘Shame!’’