NSW will be the only place in the world besides Brazil to institute a total ban on ultraviolet solariums tanning units when the laws come into place from December 31, 2014, and cancer groups hope other states and countries will follow.
Er, no thanks. We've been doing alright for hundreds of years without having to follow the lead of a puritanical colony on the other side of the world. Lately, politicians have fallen for the peculiar belief that if one country does something, every other country should follow. Denmark's introduced a fat tax! Let's not get left behind. Australia's introducing plain packaging! What are we waiting for? Brazil's banned sunbeds! There's no time to lose. Only today, for example, we had this...
In Mauritius, smoking is now prohibited in all private cars carrying passengers, regardless of whether children are present.
With all due respect to the good people of Mauritius, I couldn't give a tuppenny fuck whether they let people smoke in their cars or not. I would struggle to find the place on a map so why would I want to copy their legal system?
This fetish for borrowing prohibitions from satellite states just because they have done something nobody else would think of doing is the exact opposite of what any rational government would do. When faced with something that is legal in 200+ countries and illegal in one country, the reasonable thing is surely to side with the overwhelming majority rather than the outlier. That is no longer how it works. They're taxing sugar in Hungary! Hurrah! Let's follow the example of the Hungarians. When has that mighty world power ever been wrong?
But back to Australia, the undisputed world leader in illiberalism. The sunbed ban has come from the Environment Minister (?!), who says:
"Sadly, Australia has the highest incidence of skin cancer in the world and this ban is long overdue."
This may be true (I can't be bothered to find out right now—leave a comment if it isn't). Certainly Australia has got to be up there in the rankings, but what do expect when you export several million pasty people from England, Ireland and Scotland and thrust them under the blistering sun of an arid continent? Don't go blaming sunbeds for the nation's skin cancer rate. Take a look at that big yellow thing in the sky.
Needless to say, the irksome, omnipresent über-wowser Simon Chapman was on hand to prattle his usual nonsense...
"Solaria are cancer incubators and we have known that for a good while".
I'm reminded of the quote which Alan Partridge mistakenly took as a complement: "In his hands the essentially complex becomes inordinately simplistic." I have yet to see any evidence that sunbeds are more dangerous than sunbathing, nor does there seem to be any scientific reason why they should be. Cancer Research UK merely says that:
Sunbeds aren't a safe alternative to tanning outdoors. Like the sun, sunbeds give out harmful UV rays which damage the DNA in our skin cells and can cause skin cancer...
The main cause of skin cancer is overexposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Like the sun, sunbeds give off UVA and UVB rays.
Similarly, the World Health Organisation says:
Exposure to UV, either naturally from the sun or from artificial sources such as sunlamps, is a known risk factor for skin cancer...
Any excessive exposure to UV, not just from sunbeds, can result in structural damage to human skin.
The message seems to be that sunbeds are no safer than sunbathing. There is no suggestion that they are less safe. Both carry the risk of sunburn and, therefore, skin cancer. That, we knew. How does it justify a total ban on grown adults tanning themselves on a machine that replicates a natural process? The head of the Cancer Council gives the usual excuse:
He said governments paid for cancers caused by sunbeds so they had a right to ban them.
In the 21st century, the price of universal health-care is to be told how to live. This is the logic and there will be many more "next logical steps" before it reaches its logical conclusion. Hold tight.
The Angry Exile has more on this.