It’s not as though I don’t have sympathy for the ALP and Bill Shorten.
The last couple of months have been a nightmare for them. Not just a run-of-the-mill, being chased down a dark alley while your legs refuse to work kind of nightmare. We’re talking a dooner-churning, screaming out in abject terror, sweaty, wild-eyed and sobbing for your mammy manner of apparition, a real doozy of a fright-fest.
From riding high in the polls during Tony Abbott’s slapstick tenure, comfy in cruise control, they’re now in freefall, with no prospect of a soft landing on the middle ground, because slick Malc, with his confounding command of the English language and mellifluous voice of reason, has stolen it.
I get it. Times are tough. Ideas are thin on the ground. I can see how sticking it to us smokers (again) could seem a shrewd move. We’re a soft target, with our charred little lungs, our rheumy eyes and yellowy fingers - no one’s going to feel sorry for us; our collective will is so puny we can barely feel sorry for ourselves, let alone raise a wheeze of protest.
If a tax-grab on our mucky habit can raise a cool $47 billion over the next decade, and allow the Labor party to put some distance between itself and the coalition’s proposed GST makeover, it’s easy to see how it might be deemed worth a punt. And speaking of punts - how about an excise hike on the gambling industry, another of our nation’s vice-peddling life-wreckers, though one which is careful to splurge donations all over our political spectrum? Ah, I may have answered my own question, there.
Let me get this straight. I’m not one of the two-and-a-half million Australians who smoke every day, as cited by a solemn and faux-concerned Shorten during his headline-hungry announcement. I’m already down to a measly pack a week, which I get through in guilty mini-binges.
Like most smokers, I want to quit. I tried patches, but found them an addictive complement to my nicotine intake, rather than a replacement. I even have a prescription for Champix somewhere, but don’t fancy the existential panic and suicidal thoughts, thanks. And I am already too enslaved by technology to countenance an e-cigarette habit.
You might think I’d welcome Shorten’s tough love, then, find in the proposed price-jack enough incentive to finally forswear the filthy weed.
And that’s where you’d be wrong. Like many of my kind, who continue to suck on already-extortionate tubes of noxious chemical-cocktails despite the fact that we’re well aware they do not make us look cool, but unpleasant to kiss and likely to die in any one of myriad undignified and agonising fashions, I am spectacularly bloody-minded.
For three years now, we’ve been confronted by the horrorshow imagery emblazoned on the so-called “plain packaging” of our cherished durries, from gangrenous toes to bloodied urinals, so that we’ve grown inured to the grisly tales it tells.
Even now, the carton into which I’ve been periodically delving to fuel this rant (a mini-binge upon me) features the close-up shot of a doe-eyed child, wearing a respiratory mask, looking up at me from beneath a capitalised caption that reads "DON’T LET OTHERS BREATHE YOUR SMOKE", to remind me that, apart from being an idiot doomed to a future of impotence and cancer, I am a potential child-murderer.
And yet. Every time I look into those innocent eyes I find myself fancying another ciggie.
Don’t get me wrong. I know the tobacco industry is dastardly, a blight on civilisation. I even welcome the stringent smoking ban in public spaces to come. But I’m tired of being a pariah, a political football.
Since Tony Abbott’s unlamented demise, I’d almost forgotten how angry politicians could make me. But, on catching Shorten’s cheap shot, I found myself once again spluttering with rage.
Though I guess it could be early stage emphysema.
POSTSCRIPT: Friends, I will give up, I WILL. New year is just around the corner - it's time to find some resolve. I'm getting old enough for intimations of mortality to outweigh my obstinacy. Anyone know a good hypnotist?
Ian Rose is a Melbourne-based writer.
