Cigar Weekly

It's hard to track exactly when NSW became Australia's ``Nanny State'' but we have claimed the title over, can you believe it, the ACT.

Not even Jon Stanhope, Australia's most politically-correct leftie leader, would have unleashed the sort of draconian laws aimed at reducing smoking that the Iemma Government unveiled last week and will push through State Parliament come October.

It feels like we are living in an Australian version of California, where it's virtually a criminal offence to smoke.

Much of Los Angeles is under siege from crack dealers and ice addicts but smoking is the real crime.

In Sydney and around NSW after October you will be considered a criminal if you light a cigarette in a motor vehicle carrying people under the age of 16.

Police patrols, including the specialist Highway Patrol, will be expected to force a driver smoking a cigarette to pull over for a vehicle check.

So, instead of police chasing speeding motorists, arresting drug dealers or looking for that break-and-enter crook who just stole your plasma TV, they will be on smoke patrol.

It will be impossible to know the age of the people in your car, especially back seat passengers, so the police officer will have to ask everyone to step out of the car. Once you are all assembled on the side of the road, your passengers will have to prove their age.

How people aged under 16 are supposed to do this has obviously escaped the minister in charge of these absurd laws, Verity Firth. The ``Minister for Cancer'' thinks this is a great move forward for NSW. But what if that 16-year-old doesn't have any ID? Will police give drivers some discretion or will they enjoy their new role as cigarette cops?

This new duty for our already over-stretched and under-paid police will be added to the task of working out numbers of kids in P-plate cars and checking whether a P-plater should be driving a Volvo with turbo chargers, because that's also illegal.

But the nanny state got a whole lot worse last week. Not only can you not smoke in the car -- and think of this, an 18-year-old can't drive more than one friend and smoke unless that friend is over 16 -- but if you sell cigarettes you have to hide them.

Can you think of any other retail business that can't display what it's selling?

You can walk into an adult sex shop -- I presume -- and inspect displays of sex toys and erotic videos and leather outfits. It may be upstairs or down a dark alley but, unless I'm wrong, it's going to be perfectly legal to sell and display dildos but not Dunhills.

Supermarkets will get six months to pull down and hide their cigarette displays. Smokes, like porno magazines, will go under the counter and presumably will have to be put into a brown paper bag before you leave the shop.

Yet in the same supermarket you will still be able to find three aisles full of fatty junk food that leads to Australia's obesity epidemic. On full display will still be 20 varieties of potato crisps and corn ships, freezers full of ice cream and fatty pizzas, and a special section for sweets and lollies.

Smaller retailers such as newsagents will have a year to make their cigarette displays disappear and one newsagent I know said he would replace it, at great cost, with more gambling products. Instead of fags, we will have lots of displays of scratchies and lotto products to encourage you to gamble.

It's tobacconists, though, that the nanny state has saved the best for.

These ``drug dealers,'' who are selling a perfectly legal product that state and federal governments suck billions in taxes out of, will have to black out their windows to shield children and at-risk adults from the sight of tobacco.

Presumably they will still be able to display pipes for smoking and cigarette papers (mainly bought by marijuana users) and maybe even smoking jackets, but no smokes.

How has it come to this? We all know smoking is bad for you but it is legal and, until it's banned, surely tobacco sellers have a right to display it. Booze sellers can fill warehouses to overflowing with grog and take out full-page adverts in the paper, but try and sell a cigarette or smoke one in a car and you are a criminal.

I feel for the tobacconist I went to recently. I had been having lunch with a former government minister and two Channel Nine TV stars. We felt like a cigar, so I found a tobacconist at Wynyard Station selling Romeo and Juliet cigars. I bought them and went back to the bar that has been built, at great expense, to indulge smokers. We lit up and finished a very pleasant Friday afternoon.

Come October that tiny tobacconist will have blackened windows, no way of letting me compare cigars, and I'll feel more like a desperate in search of a sex toy. Buying a dildo will be easier and the Nanny State will have won.

Steve Price is on 2UE daily from 9am