Pecked To Death By Ducks: Advocacy in Australian Tobacco Control

Abstract

This is the fifth world conference on tobacco control I have attended. At my first in Winnipeg in 1983, Australians like Arthur Chesterfield-Evans inspired nearly everyone with stories about the world’s first anti-tobacco civil disobedience campaign against tobacco advertising. It’s now widely accepted that the BUGA UP graffitists reframed the entire debate on tobacco advertising in Australia. They gave it much needed humour. They politicised it. But most of all, their radicalism shifted the centre ground in tobacco control policy, causing conservative health and medical groups to embrace policies like advertising bans through fear of looking like they had lost the whole plot. The Australian Medical Association is now in the frontline against the tobacco industry, while fifteen years ago it was nowhere to be seen.