John Alexander (Bennelong, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I, too, am pleased to join you, Mr Deputy Speaker and member for Hindmarsh, in speaking about this motion and the World No Tobacco Day on 31 May.

It is extraordinary to see the changes of attitude over the past 30, 40 or 50 years with regard to cigarette smoking. At my doctor's surgery there is actually an ad that is still there on the wall recommending a certain brand of cigarette, saying that more doctors smoke this cigarette brand and support it because of its great health benefits in aiding relaxation. Cigarettes were a form of payment for our armed forces. They were given to soldiers and seen as a luxury—something that you could have when going into battle.

In her book talking about her life with Lew, who was one of our great tennis players, Jennie Hoed talked about her great contribution to helping him learn to relax by teaching him the art of smoking. Poncho Gonzales was also a smoker; and possibly one of the greatest players of all time, Bill Tilden, was a smoker. None of those people lived beyond 61 years of age. Hollywood was also engaged in the subliminal message that it was cool to smoke. The greatest actors and singers smoked. Frank Sinatra, even after he had stopped smoking, continued to have a cigarette when doing his rendition of One for My Babyagain, that message came through. It continues today with Hollywood.

I will talk a little bit about the level of addiction. We all have personal stories. We all know, if we have smoked, how difficult it is to stop. I had a great friend in Atlanta, Georgia. He had grown up on a farm in Kansas. As a very young boy, if you were working like a man, you could smoke like a man, so he started smoking at the age of about 12. When he was in his 50s he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He had part of a lung removed. When he was going through his recovery period, this tough Southern man, he said, 'John, this is a son of a—I ain't never gonna have a cigarette again.' He recovered.

I went away, as I did, travelling. I came back a couple of weeks later. His wife was terribly distressed because, in the middle of the night, she would look into the backyard and see that her husband was sneaking cigarettes. Even more distressingly, a couple of months later, Mary-Sue, who had stopped smoking some 20 years previously, commenced this awful habit again. Last time I played golf with Gene, he had a Red Cross flag on his golf buggy. He was suffering from emphysema. He was still smoking. We will play golf no more.

We know now the damage that cigarette smoking does health-wise. We know that it costs a great deal in social costs—$31.5 billion in 2004-05. It is the single most preventable cause of disease. It is interesting that something like 7.8 per cent of our health costs are attributable to smoking and that 14.8 per cent of deaths in men and 8.4 per cent of deaths in women can be attributed to smoking. One in two people who smoke will die of smoking. Therefore, by extension, if you can talk two people into not smoking you have saved one life.

Hollywood has also made its contribution to trying to prevent people from smoking. In the last days of his life, Yul Brynner, a well-known smoker, made an advertisement, a health warning, in which he simply said, 'Whatever you do, don't smoke.'

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