Joe Jackson Down Under
Wednesday, July 16, 2008 Joe Jackson first toured Australia in 1983. He liked it. "The people," he writes on The Free Society blog, "were laid-back, with a dry sense of humour, and the culture had a nice mix of American and British influences." Recently returned from his latest tour, he found the country "stifled by American-style paranoid health-freakery and a very British-style nanny state".
Most disturbing, writes Joe, was the email he received from a journalist from the Melbourne paper The Age, shortly after doing a telephone interview.
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.
Full article HERE.
Reader Comments (5)
Thanks, Joe -
Another excellent article.
What CAN one say ?
Well - in the absence of anything more constructive to offer at present - and because I'm feeling an increasingly irresistible urge to PUNCH someone, I have a WICKED question to put:
Having just done a quick Google Image search for 'Anne Jones' - of the Australian 'branch' of ASH - I wonder why it is that these anti-smoking dames tend in the main to be SO BLOODY UGLY (as well as so bloody STUPID)?
Is there a connection.................?
Yes, I know: one shouldn't 'get personal'.
Especially when one considers how commendably humane and chivalrous they are toward US (and our nasty, disease-inducing, tooth-rotting, anti-social, child-killing, atmoshphere-polluting, skin-ageing, youth-corrupting, womb-destroying 'addiction') !
O brave new world,
That hath such people in it !
A Dame, Martin? A dame is the female equivalent of address to Sir for a British knighthood.
The person you refer to would surely be better described at a sprat, without the "S" of course.
When that law comes in over here - as it will - my entire backlist will become instantly unpublishable! As opposed to now, when it is merely unsellable ...
Martin V, scroll down this page and you'll see a pic of Lucy Page Gaston on the right, one of their inspirations:
http://www.socialsmokers.org/
Mat, I'm going to look you up on Amazon immediately! :)
Peter/Struggling Spirit -
Re:
"The person you refer to would surely be better described at a sprat, without the "S" of course."
Or (possibly) a 'cocunut' without..........(no, forget that one).
I intended no disrespect to the British Aristocracy, I can assure you.
My immediate impulse was to use a certain word beginning with 'B' - and ending in 'H' (pluralised) - but on reflection I considered that that would be insulting to the Animal Kingdom (Canine Branch).
And as for Lucy Gaston Paige (is that an ananagram ?) - thanks, Struggling Spirit !! If Robert E Lee had had HER on his side, the South would never have lost the war.
We mustn't mock, of course: the poor creature obviously had some VERY bad karma to work off.
Nonetheless, I shall nail some garlic round the doors and windows, and sleep with the lights on - just to be on the safe side.
She definitely has a Certain Something, it's true.
But somehow, I STILL think I prefer Scarlett Johansson................