Erstellt am: 24. 2. 2010 - 13:00 Uhr

Glawischnig calls for smoke-free gastronomy

The Greens' leader is "very, very dissatisifed" with the current situation.

This month the leader of the Austrian Green’s Eva Glawischnig threw her support behind a general ban on smoking in Austrian gastronomy, accusing the Social Democrat Health Minister Alois Stöger of “indifference” to the fact that Austria had become infamous for having “the most and the youngest smokers in the world”.

Indeed, a recent study suggested that Austria has a higher proportion of smoking 15 year olds than any other member of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) and the news magazine Profil, in an article entitled “Republik der Raucher”, cited Austria's dubious honour of featuring in the Guinness Book of Records for its high level of per capita nicotine consumption.

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In a series of questions in Parliament, the Greens asked Stöger what preventative measures Austria was taking to reduce the rates of smoking in this country and and whether he considered the international image of Austria as “a land of the smokers” as “desirable”.

When I met Glawischnig in her office behind the Burgtheater in Vienna, she said that she was “very, very dissatisfied” with the current situation in Austria and that she had observed the positive effects of general smoking bans in other parts of Europe. Those studies include positive implications of those working in gastronomy and recent studies showing heart attack rates plummeting in countries that have adopted such bans and that the tate might even be reduced by a third.

The timing of the Greens’ campaign opens them up to accusations of flip-flopping. Why didn’t they raise their voices earlier, before the current legislation was passed and before café and restaurant owners invested time and money in plans to renovate their establishments? Glawischnig says she wanted to give Stöger’s plan a year to prove its efficaciousness but since now “in essence, there has been no improvement,” it’s time that measures are taken to improve life for non-smokers and address the “massive problem” of youth smoking. She suggested that gastro-businesses could be helped out of their predicament by the revenues from tobacco taxation. She also thinks that a blanket ban would level the playing field. The current law allows differences on conservation, architectural and even security grounds.

And she criticises the fact that due to legal loop-hole, gastronomy workers aren't offered the same health and safety protection from toxic substances afforded to other Austrian workers. All workers are equal, to borrow the old Orwellian adage, but some are more equal than others.

Glawischnig batted away the existential fears of the gastronomy section, drawing on the example of Italy, where the concerns about waves of closures never materialized and where an acceptance of the ban quickly established itself. She calls the Austrian compromise a “non-solution” and predicts that if a blanket ban was introduced it would soon find general acceptance and would cease to be a talking point.

I confronted the Health Minister Alois Stöger with Glawischnig’s accusation that he was indifferent to Austria’s reputation as a nicotine haven. He denied it strongly, saying that he hoped the prevalence of smoking in Austrian society would decrease. He said the current legislation reduced the amount of areas where smoking is permitted and called on the café, bar and restaurant owners to observe the law.

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He said he didn’t want to punish smokers but instead hoped to persuade Austrians to smoke less. He said that what he termed as “Law & Order” politics was an ineffective deterrent to smoking.

But if personal choice and responsibility are the key-stones to reducing the harmful effects of tobacco, what of those who have no choice? What of non-smoking students, for example, for whom evening work in gastronomy is the only realistic way of supporting their studies? Stöger showed sympathy for the bar staff and waiters who are subjected to high levels of passive cigarette smoke in their daily work and said that if the law was properly implemented they would spend “the majority of their time” in the smoke-free rooms.

That's an argument Professor of Environmental Health Dr. Manfred Neuberger rejects. Neuberger, a member of the Austrian Council on Smoking and Health, calls the protection offered by the current law "totally inadequate" and says that that as long as a waiter or waitress has to serve guests in a smoking room, their pollution burden can barely be reduced. He adds that non-smoking workers in the gastronomy branch will keep on getting diseases typically associated with smokers and calls on those illnesses to be compensated as "occupational diseases."

Asked about the Facebook initiative for smoke-free gastronomy in Austria, a group that has now attracted over 97,000 members, Minister Alois Stöger pointed out that everyone could make the choice of whether they went into a smoking or smoke-free establishment. He said he welcomed such initiatives as a way to provoke the market to adapt, and that “an intelligent landlord” would respond to such public pressure by making his business smoke-free.

But quite clearly that hasn’t happened yet. Greens’ leader Eva Glawischnig says she plans to embark on a test to see how many establishments she could find where she could go to eat with her two children in a smoke-free environment. “I think we won’t find many.” On this point the two politicians agree. Stöger points out that two-thirds of the Austrian population are non-smokers and they need to be accommodated: "I have always called on the landlords to open more smoke-free establishments."