This city is about to be the butt of a joke

SMOKERS are once again under fire in Australia. And this is the biggest change proposed yet.

OPINION

HAVEN’T smokers suffered enough?

North Sydney Council put forward an idea this week to ban all smoking in public places, including in the streets of the entire municipality. If enacted (it will now go to a community consultation), it will become the first Australian CBD to be entirely smoke-free.

Good old smokers. The butts — if you’ll excuse the pun — of everyone’s ire yet again.

Smokers are already furtive, shame-filled wretches, hyper-vigilant about the negative effects of their anti-social habit on ourselves and others. I should know. I’ve been an on-again, off-again smoker for my entire adult life.

Quitting when I was pregnant with my son and while he was little was easy. Picking up the filthy gaspers again in times of stress is, regrettably, just as easy.

But I’m so aware of not forcing my smoking on to others that I wear a nicotine patch during the day if I’m going anywhere and confine my cigarette smoking to mornings and evenings in the backyard of my own home. It’s a cripplingly expensive system — a packet of patches cost around the same as a packet of cigarettes, as much as $40, but I do it because I know my smoking is something I should keep to myself.

The North Sydney CBD mirrors the Sydney CBD. Many large companies have their offices there and it’s home to thousands of workers each day.

I get it. It’s horrible. I don’t need a council to nanny me into better behaviour. My conscience nags me enough as it is.

I recognise the same hunted, haunted expressions on the faces of other smokers I see around Sydney whenever they take a moment to sneak a cigarette in the street. They almost always choose wide open spaces where their smoke will vanish into the atmosphere, or huddle in grubby alleyways out of others’ way.

MORE: Council votes to create Australia’s first smoke-free CBD

We’re sorry, their eyes seem to say, widening apologetically with every draw. We know. You don’t like us, we don’t much like ourselves with this thing in our hands, either. We don’t want to do it. And we don’t want you to breathe it. We’re doing our best.

And now you’re going to ban us from walking the streets? Flip open the stocks and get the stones ready. We’ll just lower ourselves meekly in.

More broadly, it’s hard to imagine how North Sydney Council’s blanket cigarette ban will square with what it says is one of its other top priorities — attracting business.

In its 2017/2018 Delivery Program and Operational Plan, the council’s Acting General Manager Ross McCreanor wrote that “continuing to attract businesses to our municipality” was a key priority for the council this year and beyond.

They might want to think about how these two priorities are going to gel.

If an office worker is addicted to smoking, and they can’t pop outside during their lunch break, they might consider working elsewhere.

Pubs, bars and clubs could be some of the worst affected. They managed to adjust, admirably, to the statewide smoking bans in indoor spaces that came into effect in 2007. They and other businesses adjusted yet again when new laws were introduced in 2012 that banned smoking in a range of outdoor areas including public transport stops and at building entrances.

But the reason that they were able to adjust was that their competition was forced to adjust right along with them, since the bans were enforced across the whole of New South Wales.

Every business suffered together and it evened itself out. That won’t be quite as easy if smokers are incentivised to cross North Sydney off their list as a place to go out for a drink in the evening and turn instead to a neighbouring region.

It also presents other North Sydney businesses — offices, shops, construction companies, etc — with a thorny conundrum. Will they be able to attract or hold on to prospective or current employees who are smokers if they have to tell them that they can’t even sneak out for their one miserable cigarette a day at lunch?

Absolutely no one wakes up in the morning and thinks “Boy I’m glad I’m a smoker!” Most smokers want to quit. Everyone would like to live in a world where cigarettes didn’t exist, and that those of us who do smoke could give up, quickly and painlessly, and never think about it again.

But North Sydney, that is not a magic wand you hold. And your hubris is just another way to kick smokers, miserable pariahs that we already are, when we’re down.

Alex Carlton is a freelance journalist. Follow her on Twitter: @Alex_Carlton