Cigar Weekly

IT MUST be pushing 20 years since I last had a smoke, yet I went perilously close to falling from grace this week.

I passed a bloke with a cigar. It wasn't one of those skinny little girlie- man cigarillos; it was a big fat stogie. It smelt divine and, had he offered me a drag, I think I would have been his on a first date.

And it must be pushing 25 years ago that I watched my mother -- a lifelong weed addict -- die slowly and awfully from lung cancer.

So, I know what an insidious and toxic weed tobacco is. There's not one good thing to be said about it.

I support the bans on smoking in pubs -- although the unenlightened become conversational grasshoppers as they disappear for a drag every five minutes.

Those bans work because they largely put the onus of enforcement on a third party (the licensee) under threat of savage financial penalties.

But, are we erring on the side of the unrealistic with some of our latter-day zealotry?

Adults shouldn't smoke in cars carrying children. Full stop. But a law specifically forbidding it is a bit like banning impure thoughts. Laudable, but probably futile in practice.

Just who is going to enforce this law? The cops don't have enough on their plates without weed busting?

Health Minister Stephen Robertson says the new law -- backed by $150 on-the-spot fines -- will work in a similar way to the bans on using mobile phones while driving.

And hasn't that been a success? When did you last see someone with a phone stuck in their lug while thundering down the freeway? Probably the last time you looked.

People do get busted but drivers take a chance because they know the odds of a harried policeman pulling them over are pretty long unless his haemorrhoids are acting up or there's a PR blitz on the day's duty list.

Some police might like having an anti-smoking regulation in their bastardry armoury for when they want to give some tollway motor mouth a really hard time.

However, the majority, I imagine, would roll their eyes and start to wonder what it would be like to Taser the next pollie who has a good idea.

And, I guess that if some bush lawyer wants to fight a smoking charge in court, it could be a tough one to make stick unless we are going to have a lot of stoolie youngsters blowing the whistle on their parents.

We can add the latest smoking ban to the staggering 34,000 offences for which fines can be issued by agencies ranging from the cops to councils.

And, we can add any fines to the almost $500 million still outstanding for 1.9 million offences ranging from the minor to the big time.

Once again, we are diminishing respect for authority by increasing the number of prohibitions we are probably incapable of enforcing and possibly less than enthusiastic about policing.

It is a farcical situation that turns all our good intentions into little more than hot air and a bit like watching TV with the mute on.

``Blitz'', ``hardline'', ``tough new law'' and ``crackdown'' are code words in the language of civic humbug and most social delinquents have cracked the cipher.

They know from experience that putting their feet on the seat, eating in a train, writing on walls, playing music loudly, dropping trash in public places and all the other sins our civic leaders rabbit on about are pretty much no-risk crimes.

Remember all the palaver last year about a blitz on litter in the Queen Street Mall and all the slick signs warning of on-the-spot fines?

In the first two months, 693 people were slapped with $150 fines but it was reported in the MX commuter paper this week that just 1000 people had been pinged for littering in a year.

According to my shaky maths, that's about three-and-a-bit people a day. Either we've all become very tidy or the campaign has run out of steam.

I guess the smoking ban -- already in force in Tasmania and South Australia -- had to happen in the prevailing climate and in the face of some heavy lobbying from health groups, but will it achieve anything except giving someone a warm inner glow?

And what next? What about those mums I see walking about with a baby on the hip and a fag on the lip? And what sort of familial depravity is happening behind the closed doors out there in suburbia?

There comes a time when moral persuasion and education is about as far as we realistically can push our collective good sense. After that we are whistling in the wind.

This sort of overkill without commensurate resources is the legislative equivalent of crying wolf. It diminishes respect for the laws, for those who pass them and those who must enforce them.

We have quite enough laws. What we're short of is the will and the resources to enforce them. Our manic enthusiasm for more and more laws is like printing money. It merely devalues the currency.

sweetwords@ozemail.com.au