Peter Goers: It’s time to make smoking illegal

Even though he still has one (or two) a day, Peter Goers says it’s time the federal government gives up the $15bn it earns from cigarette tax. Take our poll.

Where have all the ashtrays gone? Long time passing. A generation ago, every coffee table and telephone table and many desks and public places featured ashtrays, with smokers hovering ash over and in them.

They have disappeared and I rarely even see them in op shops. Public ashtrays have been removed to discourage smokers.

Smokers are becoming rare. Good. Don’t smoke. Don’t vape. Don’t be stupid. No one can afford to smoke. If you smoke, give up. Australia is one of the most expensive places in the world to smoke. Two-thirds of the price is tax.

Non-smokers are incredulous at the cost of tobacco (and so are the remaining smokers). A pack of 20 cigs costs between $35 and $50, and the price goes up each year.

Punishing the hip pocket of the sinner has worked. Even yours truly, who happily smoked 30 cigs a day for decades (and enjoyed every one), now smokes one, sometimes two, a day.

Tiring of the fight and the iniquitous expense, I now smoke only in the privacy of my home.

The huge cost of tobacco has punished the poor and, sadly, far more poor people smoke than those financially better off. It led to a huge increase in tobacco crime as convenience stores and servos are rolled for cigarettes.

Once Australia led the world in anti-smoking legislation but now we follow. Canada will soon introduce warnings on cigarettes. Your white stick will carry warnings such as: “Cigarettes cause impotence” although, happily, that hasn’t happened to me. Yet.

We’re told that 12.5 per cent of Australian adults smoke, which is down from 25 per cent a decade ago. The federal government wants that figure to be 5 per cent by 2030, but New Zealand is at that point now. It is wisely introducing legislation that means that no one born after 2009 will ever be able to buy tobacco – and that year will go up each year.

The best thing to do is to ban smoking altogether. The Australian government tells us that smoking kills yet, hypocritically, it makes $15bn a year from a decreasing number of smokers – so 2.4 per cent of total government revenue comes from allowing people to slowly kill themselves.

So, ban it. Let’s be the first non-smoking nation. Why the should governments be the biggest addicts?

The young loathe smokers and smoking and have no concept of the former ubiquity of smoking.

My grade 5 teacher, Mr Martin, stood in front of the class endlessly smoking, and drinking Coca Cola. Naturally, he became a great role model.

I love my one cig a day, and I’ll still go to the crematorium in a flip-top coffin because where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

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Last week, many readers complained that I’d misused the word rugger for rugby league. I don’t care. I’d never watched rugger before I saw the game at Adelaide Oval on TV. It is ridiculous and stupid.

Someone with no neck gets the ball and runs two steps and lots of men with no necks jump on him and try to strangle him.

Adelaide restaurants moving to set menus for smaller groups of diners as business costs escalate

Somehow, the ball is liberated and someone else with no neck grabs it, runs four steps and the mobile brawls continue. This is a sport?

It’s thugby and it’s rugger and it’s played and watched by morons. It belongs in NSW and Queensland because those states deserve it.

The greatest game ever invented, Australian rules, rules.