Petition local councillors and ask for bylaws
As you can see from our news articles, local councils across Australia are seeking more powers to control smoking and passive smoking in their areas. We suggest you visit local councillors in person and share with them the details of your documented case. Be productive about this and outline where you think the breaches have occurred, what opportunities there are for improvement and where the line needs to be drawn on what is acceptable and what is not acceptable.
Local councils want their towns and suburbs to have a good reputation for services and lifestyle, so they would be inclined to accept recommendations that improve their area’s attractiveness. Councillors may not be aware just how bad passive smoking is affecting residents in their area and your efforts to expose how bad it is may just be the impetus they need to act.
Some councils already have anti-smoking laws, and they may also have bylaws against excessive smoke from wood fires and other causes (use of incinerators, etc.). Use these existing bylaws to argue your smoking problem case. If they don’t have any explicit bylaws against passive smoking use these other bylaws to prove that passive smoke needs to be addressed specifically too.
It is up to you to investigate your council’s bylaws and find any laws that can be used as arguments to restrict the nuisance smoker negatively affecting people’s lives. As part of that process please let us know what you find and we can add that information to this site for the benefit of other Aussies.
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