Joe Jackson Down Under
Wednesday, June 18, 2008 Joe Jackson is back in the UK this week for concerts in Wolverhampton, Gateshead, Manchester, Edinburgh and London. His current world tour - which began in February and has taken him to Canada, America, Australia, South Africa and Israel - will finally wind up at the North Sea Jazz Festival in Rotterdam in July after further gigs in Germany, France and Belgium.
In addition to his two-part Smoker's Guide to Europe, published HERE and HERE, Joe has now written a smoker's eye view of Australia. It doesn't make pretty reading. Describing Brisbane as "the place where bad smokers go when they die" he notes:
In Brisbane it's illegal to smoke anywhere food or drink is served or consumed, including at outside tables. Sometimes there's a dismal area 15 feet away where you can go and have a fag but it's illegal to take your drink.
Most disturbing was the email Joe received from a journalist from the Melbourne paper The Age, with whom he'd done a telephone interview a couple of weeks earlier.
He'd been sympathetic to my views on smoking, and wanted to tell me that his article had been 'butchered' by his editor on instructions from their legal department. It seems there are now laws governing what can and can't be printed about tobacco, and it's actually illegal to say anything which might be construed as positive.
He adds:
I was starting to feel numbed by all this by the time we arrived in Perth, our last stop. This was where the bus driver who was to take us from the airport to our hotel announced that no food or drink was allowed on board. Not just no eating or drinking; we were forbidden to have any food or drink in our possession.
The full article will be published on The Free Society blog next week.
People
Reader Comments (3)
This doesn't surprise me at all and concurs with other people's accounts. Australia certainly lacks cultural maturity and is heavily focussed on sport and fitness. That's fine except it leaves them wide open to influence by the health zealots. Given the lack of culturl maturity, there is nothing to serve as a bulwark against this, although I also understand from friends that many rural communities are more resistant to this kind of pressure and frequently ignore it.
Blad -
You're quite right, of course.
But even in America - the Land Of The Free - there are towns where it's illegal to smoke even in one's own home.
If that bloody nonsense had been tried in a more robust age than our own lifestyle/health and fitness-obsessed one, there'd have been rioting on the streets.
Prosperity, I fear, has made us all complacent, overly compliant - and SELFISH (other peoples' freedoms matter ONLY when we chose to exercise them ourselves).
Oh yes, Martin, parts of America are horrendo, but there is something odd about Australia going that way as it always had a reputation for tough individualistic people.
Your last point about people exercising their freedoms is also accurate. I had a girlfriend once who, when she wanted to smoke, would always smoke as she wished. However, if she was in giving up mode, then she would complain if you smoked around her.