Man Who Loves Quitters

The Age

Saturday June 30, 2007

Carol Nader - Carol Nader is health editor

Pubs with no smoke have long been the dream of the campaigner who is now VicHealth's chief.

TOMORROW, Todd Harper is having lunch with 20 friends at a pub. But when it came to a friend of his making the reservation, things became confused. The friend was promptly told that for such a large group, the pub could only accommodate them in the smoking area. Somewhat taken aback, he pointed out, "But that's July 1, isn't it? Won't all of the bar be smoke-free?"

There was silence on the other end of the phone and the flicking of paper. "Oh yeah, it will be. You're right!"

Harper is excited about tomorrow, the day when Victorian legislation effectively spells the end of the smoky bar and pub. He has been the poster boy of the anti-smoking lobby for eight years. And now, after helping drive major reforms in Victoria, he is going to mark the occasion in the most appropriate of ways - by sitting in a pub without the smell of smoke.

Harper, chief executive of the state's main body for health promotion, VicHealth, since April, intends to repeat the celebration on Monday with his work colleagues. Despite his new job, he is still widely known as the guy from Quit. It's a tag the baby-faced 41-year-old will struggle to shake off.

The anti-smoking campaign has had stellar success. Over the years, cigarette advertising has been banned and replaced by increasingly graphic advertisements warning of the damaging effects of smoking. Tobacco sponsorship of sport and other events has been outlawed. And Australia has one of the lowest smoking rates in the world.

It's hard to imagine that not too long ago smoking in restaurants was entirely normal. When Harper moved from Tasmania to Melbourne in 1999 to take up the job of executive director of Quit Victoria, it was a novelty to find a smoke-free restaurant. And talk of imposing tough smoking bans was in its infancy.

His timing was impeccable. He arrived in Melbourne just weeks before the state election - the one in which Steve Bracks unexpectedly trumped Jeff Kennett. Smoking bans weren't a big political issue leading up to the election. But that soon changed.

"It was fascinating because after the change of government we had the issue of smoke-free restaurants on the agenda very quickly," Harper recalls. "I remember there were some very passionate advocates on the issue. (Then health minister) John Thwaites certainly was. There was a lot of nervousness in some parts of government and opposition as well."

Harper says that once laws banned smoking in restaurants and shopping centres in 2001, it was inevitable that the changes would flow on to include all workplaces, including pubs and bars. But it would take a few more years for that to happen. The Government did not extend the bans until its second term. Bronwyn Pike, who replaced Thwaites as health minister, led those reforms. Bracks announced the tougher bans in 2004. They will all be in place tomorrow.

But Harper modestly deflects the credit. He points to a coalition of support including other health promotion groups, unions and businesses. "As with any public health issue, it's never one person that drives that change," he says.

It's not the first time that Harper has been involved in helping to bring about major change. Before moving to Melbourne, he was the executive director of the Tasmanian AIDS Council for five years, at the height of gay law reform in that state. It was, he says "a very bruising time".

He headed the organisation at a time when it was still a crime for men to have sex with other men, and when those who did could be jailed. "We saw the decriminalisation of consenting sex between men," Harper says. Tasmania was the last state to go down the path of decriminalisation. There was a lot of support for change within the Tasmanian community but also "levels of hatred".

This was very distressing to a lot of people, he says, and very harmful for some young men. In some cases it flowed through to the most tragic of consequences - suicide.

Inevitably, acknowledges Harper, he made some enemies. "There were some elements that found not only my stance and public statements but the stance of many others very threatening," he says.

While he never received any specific threats there were "pretty nasty and vitriolic" phone calls, emails and letters, of all which, he says, went with the territory.

Harper headed the AIDS council at a time when there were far fewer drugs available to reduce the impact of HIV. Working in close proximity with so many people affected by AIDS, and watching them die, is something he will not forget.

"Every World AIDS Day is particularly poignant when you've been so close to so many fantastic people who, for an accident of history, are no longer with us," he says. "If they had been around a couple of years later when those drugs became available, they'd probably still be alive today."

There have been other deaths closer to home. His grandmother battled emphysema, a condition linked to smoking. "Those things stay with you," he says.

Rolah McCabe's death is equally unforgettable. McCabe developed lung cancer after years of smoking and sued tobacco giant British American Tobacco. She was awarded $700,000 but lost it after an appeal by the company. Harper spent a lot of time with her near the end of her life.

"The Rolah McCabe case I still find so hard to deal with after all these years," he says. "The fact that the justice system so comprehensively let the family down was really disappointing and highlighted the difficulties of one person taking on the industry, which is what she did . . . The fact that the tobacco industry went after them in the way that they did is shameful, and it is a great motivation to me still today."

Harper is regarded as a polished media performer. But there was a time when he didn't make the news - he reported it.

He was born in Queenstown, on the rugged west side of Tasmania. His father was a teacher and the family moved around the state. He has a younger brother and sister, and was brought up in a family that was nuts about sport.

"The most frustrating thing for me is that I was the one in the family that had the least ability with sport," he laments.

So he decided from a tender age that he was going to write for a living. In grade four, he wrote a letter to the editor of his local paper, The Examiner, telling him how much he wanted to be a journalist. The editor took the trouble to write back. The same editor would, many years later, interview him for a position at the paper.

After getting an economics degree from the University of Tasmania (he had planned to enrol in arts but the queue was too long) Harper put economics aside and started on The Examiner in Launceston, cutting his teeth on everything from flower shows to football to police rounds. He later moved to a more senior job on the paper in Hobart, covering politics, industrial relations and health - although back then public health issues such as smoking and alcohol weren't front-page news the way they are now.

"I loved it," he says of journalism, "and in fact I briefly thought about getting back into it because I really missed it. The adrenalin that goes with it, the ability to be in the thick of some really big stories, that's a real privilege I think."

His stint with the fourth estate ended three years later when he crossed to the other side and took up a public relations job. He did various other things, including running the Tasmanian community housing program at a time when there was a big community of refugees from El Salvador coming to Tasmania.

"They had been through enormous challenges in terms of political turmoil in El Salvador and had left everything behind to escape the conflict there," he says. "It was one of the most satisfying experiences to then develop to a stage where they were able to run and be in control of such an important aspect of their lives, which was housing."

He was also the primary health care co-ordinator for the Tasmanian Health Department in the early 1990s just before he went to the Tasmanian AIDS Council. About then he married Loredana Moretto after a long-distance romance - he lived in Hobart, she lived in Perth. "We kept up meeting each other every couple of months . . . I think it got to a stage when both of us knew we would have to do something here because it couldn't continue this way. But I think by the time we married we'd only spent something like 20 days living in the same state at the same time!"

Harper had already learned to be a patient man. He puts it down to being a "rather hopeless Richmond fanatic".

"In public health you need patience and perseverance. You certainly get those qualities being a Richmond supporter," he says. Despite his AFL team enjoying a dismal season, he still goes to the football pretty much every week.

Harper also has an extraordinary claim to make - he has never smoked a cigarette. Not even so much as a rebellious drag as a teenager. The one vice he will admit to is a love of chocolate.

As head of VicHealth, Harper tries to set a good example by riding to work every day and tries to regularly cycle on the weekends. He can't devote as much time to the pursuit as he would like because he is busy working on a master's in health economics.

He does participate, though, in some of the big bike rides. He remembers one year on the Great Victoria Bike Ride encountering a vaguely familiar person dressed in Lycra. "And you know when you see a person out of a particular context and you don't recognise them? It was Bronwyn Pike, and we both did a double take and said, 'I know you!' "

Having stayed at Quit long enough to witness the sweeping changes to smoking laws, Harper says it was tough leaving. He is still passionate about the cause, but he says it was time to move on.

And some 20 years after he completed his economics degree, he is now starting to use it. He says there are economic benefits to health promotion, and people taking better care of themselves. So much disease can be prevented. "We still spend a very small amount of our overall health budget on prevention," he says.

As for tomorrow and the ban in hotels, "I can't wait," he says. "It will be such an important cultural change for the community. The impact that those laws will have, not only on the health and safety of the people who work in those venues but on future generations of young people who go into pubs and clubs and will no longer now be prompted to smoke . . . It will have an enormous influence."

Carol Nader is health editor.

TODD HARPER CV

BORN Queenstown, Tasmania, March 29, 1966.

EDUCATION Bachelor of economics, University of Tasmania; postgraduate diploma in Health Promotion, Curtin University; currently doing master's in health economics, Curtin University.

PERSONAL LIFE Married to Loredana Moretto; dogs Polley and Freddy.

CAREER Journalist at The Examiner 1987 to 1989; public relations consultant with the Tasmanian Development Authority 1989; media secretary with Tasmanian Health Department 1989 to 1992; co-ordinator of the state community housing program in Tasmania 1992; primary health care co-ordinator with the Tasmanian Health Department 1992 to 1994; Tasmanian AIDS Council executive director 1995 to 1999; Quit Victoria executive director 1999 to 2007; currently VicHealth chief executive.

LINK

? www.vichealth.vic.gov.au/

? www.quit.org.au/