Local lawmakers in Australia have proposed studying a ban on the sale of tobacco products to people born after the year 2000, a week after the country’s highest court signed off on some of the world’s toughest cigarette packaging laws. The upper house of parliament in the Australian state of Tasmania unanimously passed a motion to explore a ban on the sale of tobacco products to anyone born after the year 2000, a parliament spokesman said Wednesday, effectively opening another front in the legal tug-of-war between the government and Big Tobacco.
The non-binding vote, which passed late Tuesday, expresses the body’s strong support for such a ban if it were to be proposed in formal legislation. The measure came less than a week after Australia’s High Court rejected a challenge by multinational tobacco companies seeking to block harsh new cigarette labelling laws, which are set to take effect here in December. Under that so-called “plain packaging” legislation, brand logos will be banned from cigarette packages and replaced instead with graphic images including mouth ulcers, cancerous lungs and gangrenous limbs.
The move has captured the attention of industry lobbyists and health care advocates, who had been closely scrutinizing the legal battle for its potential global ramifications. It was unclear whether last week’s he court’s decision directly inspired the tobacco ban proposal, which was put forth by Tasmanian State MP Ivan Dean, an independent, but it appears to be an attempt to build on the momentum and widespread international attention garnered by the case. Mr. Dean, formerly a police officer and small town mayor, argued that banning people born after 2000 from ever being able to legally buy cigarettes was the most effective way to continue to drive down smoking rates in a country that already has some of the highest taxes in the world on tobacco products.
“This would mean that we would have a generation of people not exposed to tobacco products,” Mr. Dean said, according to a report by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Tasmania, a remote and rugged island south of the Australian mainland that was once home to one of the most feared penal colonies in the British Empire, has the highest smoking rates in the country, according to the non-profit organization Cancer Council Tasmania. One in four young Tasmanians smokes, compared with one in five in the rest of the country. State government officials were quick to signal their willingness to explore the proposal.
Tasmanian Health Minister Michelle O’Byrne said that a smoking ban was worthy of serious consideration, although she admitted that it would be difficult to unilaterally enact such a policy in only one of Australia’s five states. “I think an arbitrary ban on smoking would be very difficult to police, particularly an island state,” she told the A.B.C. “However, saying that those people who sell cigarettes legally cannot sell cigarettes to a certain age is appropriate. We do it now.” Others, however, are far more skeptical of the idea. The health spokesman for the opposition Tasmanian Liberal Party, Jeremy Rockliff, was quoted by The Sydney Morning Herald as having mocked the idea as an example of draconian government overreach. “What’s next,” he asked. “50 lashes for people who break the rules?“
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