The lunchtime smokers of North Sydney gathered under a cloud this week after their local council became the first in Australia to vote to ban smoking in all public places within its CBD.
Speaking after the decision the local mayor, Jilly Gibson, said the move was long overdue.
“I believe it is the time of the non-smoker,” she declared.
The ban doesn’t come into force for a few months and Guardian Australia managed to find a few smokers furtively lighting up in the doorways of fire escapes, or hidden in the shadow of alcoves.
A large group of them took refuge in an alleyway behind an Aldi supermarket; in these troubled times, there is safety in numbers.
“We were just talking about it,” Terry Lee, a vaper, says when I ask him if he’s heard the news.
“We’re sad mate, we’re sad,” his colleague Bosco Dcosta tells me.
Word of the ban hadn’t quite reached everyone, however. Nacho Malo, a Spaniard, is shocked when I break the bad news while he rolls a Tally-Ho.
“You are saying I cannot smoke here?”
Well, not me, the council. And not just here (a nook in a wall behind a large, nondescript building near a train station) but anywhere in a radius of several blocks.
“We need some place to smoke, no?” he asks me plaintively, gesturing at the cigarette in my own hand.
I explain the situation to Malo like this: using roughly the same authority that allows a council to create no-parking zones and leash-only dog parks, on Monday night North Sydney council passed a unanimous motion to ban smoking throughout public places in the entire CBD. The ban includes parks, footpaths, benches; any public place.
There will be a three-month awareness campaign and people won’t be fined until a council review next March to see whether the self-regulated ban is working.
Gibson tells me she’s been overwhelmed by the positive reaction to the decision. Councils as far away as Burnie in Tasmania have contacted her to ask for help instituting their own ban.
“I think as a society we should be denormalising smoking,” she says.
“Society changes. I think back to when I was a schoolgirl, my teacher used to chain-smoke and leave his cigarette on my desk in front of me. That just sounds absolutely ridiculous now.
“I think limiting the exposure of young people to a smoking environment is a really positive thing to do and I think the time will come reasonably soon where smoking wont be allowed at all in public. That’s my hope.”
Malo is not convinced.
“I think it is a little bit silly, no? If I am smoking here (he waves his hand around the nook), I am not bothering anyone. If there is a woman with her children here I am not going to blow smoke in her face. So it is my responsibility.”
The wider population, at least in North Sydney, disagrees. Before it instituted the ban, the council called for public feedback and, out of 577 submissions, 80% were in favour of the ban.
Even the New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties isn’t that worried. Pauline Wright, the council president, told me that although she was “a little bit troubled” by the “creeping wowserism” in Australian society, the ban is not concerning.
“It’s not an infringement of people’s rights and freedoms. It’s kind of telling people, don’t do it in a public place because science tells us it actually is a danger to people’s health. So, don’t exercise your rights in a way that harms other people.”
But is there a public health benefit from banning smoking in public places?
Simon Chapman, an emeritus professor in public health from the University of Sydney and a long-time tobacco control activist, says no.
While he strongly supports existing bans on smoking in restaurants and pubs, he’s critical of the policy on the basis that very little evidence exists to say banning smoking in open spaces has a broader public health benefit.
“All of the evidence about passive smoking being a health risk has been gathered from chronic, long-term exposure in domestic situations or in the workplace,” he says.
“I did a review of the research in about 2012 and there was virtually no research at all conducted about outdoor exposures. The reason for that is that you wouldn’t bother measuring it because it’s so insignificant.
“If you’re walking past someone smoking in the street or a park you’re talking about a transitory, fleeting exposure of no consequence at all.”
Chapman also believes the policy is paternalistic, saying arguments about the impact on children ignore proportionality.
“Will they … start going around to fast-food outlets and telling everyone ordering a jumbo meal ‘please, you cant eat that in public’, I think it’s really getting a bit extreme.”
But good luck finding a politician willing to make that argument.
Smokers are a thinning crowd. The 2016 National Drug Strategy Household Survey report found the smoking rate among adults in Australia was 12.8%. That’s almost half what it was in 1995. And among higher socioeconomic demographics the rate is even lower.
According to NSW Health data, the number of daily smokers in Sydney’s wealthy north is the lowest in the state at 5.5%. In more disadvantaged south-west Sydney, it’s 16.2%.
North Sydney council’s decision not to immediately enforce the decision with fines also hints at something else: the social stigma attached to the modern daytime smoker is such that there is already an implied pressure to hide away regardless.
The places where it’s still acceptable to smoke today are fewer and further away; at airports and stadiums, smokers are banished to hazy glass-prisons.
And in popular culture, it’s generally presented as a vaguely parodic period marker, as in Mad Men or Stranger Things (though even that is controversial).
Across the road from North Sydney train station, another smoker, Andrew Storrier, laughs at the idea that making the ban CBD-wide will encourage people to quit.
“If there’s a ‘no parking’ spot outside the dry cleaner and I’m only going to be five minutes I’m still going to risk it,” he said. “This isn’t any different.”
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