Smoke Screening in Auckland

At the start of September 2007, I was lucky enough to attend the Oceania Tobacco Control Conference, along with several other members of the NSW Cancer Council. Peter and I were present to represent the Smoke Screening group along with Lian our group leader.

Honestly Lian - you were funny      I'm still laughing!

The conference was for me a chance to miss a week of uni, a chance to see some of New Zealand and a chance to learn a thing or two about tobacco control. To be honest I thought it would be a bunch of 20 old people sitting in a room. Well, I was right, there was a bunch of old people, but there was a lot more than 20, and they weren't that old and they certainly weren't boring! That became clear at the conference dinner on the Wednesday night, I thought this will be a laugh, the old people will dance and then tottle off to bed, well they out stayed Peter and myself! So the conference was a lot of fun.

What did I actually learn? Well I learnt lots, I'm not going to waste your time rambling on, about all the facts and figures, but the main sessions had some interesting people from all around the world. If you want to know more than feel free to read the conference report.

The most exciting thing for me was knowing that there are people all around the world and more specifically in Australia and the Pacific who are as passionate about tobacco control and reduction like me and my friends at Smoke Screening.

Time for the laser pointer...

Peter, Lian and I did a presentation by the way. It was great fun. We were given 15 minutes to talk about our group and the new website and what we do well. Lian kicked off and despite some great efforts, wasn't as funny as she had hoped, luckily the audience didn't suffer long as Peter took to the stage, he talked a lot about the difficulties we face as young advocates, and obviously the audience of 3 people were very aware of how hard it is so were very sympathetic to us. After Peter finished his comic routine, the audience was unfortunate enough to have to listed to me and look at the laser pointer, you see I had one slide with 4 points so I had to entertain the audience somehow and the laser pointer was helpful. Plenty of people were laughing, sadly it was more at me rathen than with me. My bad attempt at presenting a paper shortly finished and Lian took the stage to give the first public showing of our new website. The audience was thankful that we finished after that. We were approached after by some ladies who were involved in a national youth program, although they specialised more in younger people they were excited to meet some new people interested in the cause. What was really cool is that they are running a campaign for National Youth Tobacco Free Day next year and the main focus of the campaign is smoking in movies, so that has many benefits. It will make out cause more public and will hopefully allow us to recruit some new members in NSW and perhaps across Australia. There is also a possibility that one of us Smoke Screeners might become a national spokesperson! How exciting!!!

Anyway - I would strongly recommend the conference, it is a great place to meet new people and learn lots of things and have a holiday. Auckland was lots of fun, not that we got much chance to look around because we were at the conference for 3 straight days. But its great fun, so get involved and you might be lucky enough to go next time.

Keep fighting!
Spencer Jarratt - Smoke Screening

Click here to find our more about the Oceania Conference