Joy greets Aussie smoking ruling

Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi was ecstatic after hearing that the Australian government had won a high court challenge allowing it to enforce strict regulations on the marketing of cigarettes.

Australia plans to force cigarette manufacturers to sell their products in plain, olive-coloured packaging without any branding or logos from December 1.

The only pictures that will now be allowed on the packages are pictures of body parts ravaged by smoking-related diseases.

Multiple tobacco companies had appealed the law, but lost yesterday when a majority of seven judges ruled the plain packaging was not unconstitutional.

The tobacco firms argued the plain packaging violated their intellectual property rights.

Motsoaledi has said previously that if the Australian government won the case, South Africa would follow suit.

In response to the judgment, he said: "Rest assured I am extremely excited."

At a meeting in May in Geneva at the Commonwealth health ministers told Australian Health Minister Tanya Plibersek: "If you win, you will win for all of us."

Motsoaledi said: "She has won for all us. We will do it, definitely. I want to meet one minister in the whole world who is not happy with this."

Dr Yussuf Saloojee, of the National Council Against Smoking, said the Australian judgment was an international victory.

"Cigarette companies hate nothing more than laws that restrict their ability to sell more cigarettes.

"Their legal challenges are destined to fail because the courts accept that more cigarette sales, mean more sickness and more deaths.

"Governments have a duty to act to reduce these harms," Saloojee said.

However, the Free Market Foundation's executive director, Leon Louw, who has spoken out against proposed laws to restrict smoking indoors, said the decision was lamentable.

"The authoritarian nanny state has gone wild in this way.

"We [now] follow the world's most authoritarian societies [in] treating human beings like idiots," he said.

"Any excuse can be found for revoking liberty. Cancer has been the excuse with tobacco."