On January 1st, a ban came into effect in New South Wales prohibiting people from smoking in all 860 of the state's national parks.
The ban extended to roads inside national parks, meaning anyone driving through them would have to stub out their cigarette as they passed through.
The decision was made to reduce bushfire risk, after a Royal Commission into the Victorian bushfires identified cigarette butts as a likely cause.
A debate about the benefits of smoking bans and whether they should be more widespread is also happening in the United Kingdom, after the London Health Comission released a report urging Mayor Boris Johnson to make the city's parks and squares smoke-free.
The report's focus, unsurprisingly, was on health.
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Smoking: new Australian data to die (or live) for
Smoking kills 79,000 people per year in the United Kingdom despite declining numbers of people taking up the habit.
In Australia, home to 2.7 million smokers, the figures are also grim.
New research out this week showed that two-thirds of deaths in current smokers were due to smoking and that smokers died on average 10 years earlier than non-smokers.
The public health argument
Cancer surgeon and Former Chair of the London Health Commission, Ara Darzi, is leading the charge in the United Kingdom.
He argues that a ban on smoking in parks and beaches will promote healthier lifestyles for young people and shield children from seeing people lighting up.
In a debate on the issue published today by the British Medical Journal, Lord Darzi argued that bans on smoking in enclosed spaces had been so successful that stretching them outdoors was the natural next step.
"Targeting the behaviours and physical environments that facilitate the uptake of smoking by banning it in parks and squares is logical progression," he said in the publication.
But Simon Chapman, from The University of Sydney’s School of Public Health, said there was no evidence that passive smoke in parks affected our health.
"The evidence shows that you don't get lung cancer from standing next to someone very occasionally at a park or a beach, you get lung cancer if you live with a smoker or if you work for long hours in a smoking environment," he said.
"Targeting the behaviours and physical environments that facilitate the uptake of smoking by banning it in parks and squares is logical progression."
He said banning smoking in certain outdoor spaces would be an attack on personal freedoms.
"When we intervene with the liberties of people through things like gun laws or speeding restrictions or smoking inside buildings we do it on the basis that we have evidence that there is an unacceptable probability that that would cause harm to others," he said.
"When it comes to restricting smoking outdoors, it comes down to the evidence of whether it causes harm to people and the evidence is very, very poor that smoking in open places is of any consequence to anyone other than the smoker."
Professor Simon Chapman speaks about why he opposes smoking bans in parks
Good for everyone?
But what about the idea that banning smoking in parks would help smokers to quit and be good for them in the long run?
"There is no doubt that if you do ban smoking in many places, a lot of people do reduce their smoking as a result and a lot of people quit as well," Professor Chapman said, "and that’s a good thing but we don't say 'That will make people more healthy so let's do it.'
"If we extended that reasoning we could put people in prison for smoking or we could put all smokers on an island, and obviously no one would do that, even though it would work."
But Mr Arzi said that such arguments had been raised in the UK in 2007 when smoking was banned in some indoor spaces including restaurants and workplaces and had since proved to be irrelevant.
"The introduction of these interventions has been a public health triumph and has led to clear and sustained reductions in passive smoke exposure, reductions in acute cardiovascular incidents and a downward trend in the prevalence of smoking," he said.
"If we extended that reasoning we could put people in prison for smoking or we could put all smokers on an island, and obviously no one would do that, even though it would work."
"Although this legislation was initially censured as an attack on public freedom and civil liberty, the 2007 ban in England stoked an unexpected and ongoing cultural shift against the habit and recent polls show 78 per cent public approval for the 2007 smoking bans."
Evidence of the harm of passive smoked were first revealed in the 1970s when research revealed that children who lived with smokers were more likely to develop respiratory problems than those who don’t.
In 2011, New York’s then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg banned smoking in all 1700 of the city's national parks.
The ban was made part a wider crackdown on smoking in the city – Bloomberg banned smoking in restaurants in 2002 – and has been credited with helping to reduce numbers of people lighting up in the city.
Bloomberg was later quoted as saying that outlawing smoking in all of the city’s parks an beaches helped increase life expectancy by three years during his 12 years in charge, which Professor Champan says is “dodgy reasoning” at best.
"I would say that it would be extremely difficult to tease out the precise impact on life expectancy from any single measure, particularly something as small as banning smoking in parks," he said. "At the same time that Michael Bloomberg was introducing that he was also increasing the tax on cigarettes. There was a lot of anti-smoking activity going on."
"If we were to consider a ban on smoking in parks, we would need pretty clear evidence that this would have direct health benefits – in other words that it would actually save lives," he said. "It is time for London to have that debate."
Is it time for Australia to have it too?
