[updated 10 Apr 2025 with photo at end of the two trees we replaced the old one with]

In a piece published this month on April Fools Day in the Sydney Morning Herald by urban affairs reporter Megan Gorry, a picture was painted of Sydney’s Inner West Council region as post-apocalypse chainsaw central.

Between February 2020 and March 2021, 915 trees were removed. This was more than double the 373 felled in 2019 and 409 that came down in 2018.  The Inner West’s tree canopy had fallen to 17.56%, against a Sydney-wide average of 23%. Self-evidently a shocking state-of-affairs?

Well … not quite.

Green cover across Sydney varies enormously, with factors like building and population densities, parkland and rainfall differences all being important factors. Below are examples of a few Sydney local government areas’ green cover:

Sutherland 72.6%      

Ku-ring-gai 58.9%      

Lane Cove 45%                       

Penrith 30.4%

Blacktown 22.4%

Inner West 22.23%

Sydney City 20.7%

Quite clearly areas like Sutherland, Ku-rin-gai and Lane Cove have massive national parks inside their perimeters, while last placed Sydney City has the CBD, with decent tree numbers mostly in the Botanic Gardens, Hyde Park and Barangaroo. If you take a look from a window of any tall building in the inner west, you see trees almost everywhere throughout the region. Some industrial areas with factories and warehouses within the area like Sydenham and parts of Marrickville make it difficult for the Inner West to ever have an abundance of trees throughout its entire area. And without national parks, it will never be in the top league like some of those listed above.

And so who was responsible for the Inner West’s 900 tree carnage last year? It’s those dastardly private landowners! The tree canopy on private land had fallen 20 hectares, while that on public land had grown by 6 hectares, thanks to tree planting by the Council.

I’m hereby outing myself and my wife as people who have signed the death warrant for two trees on our property over the last 30 years. But just in passing, we’ve also planted 13 other trees and very large shrubs (2 Robinia pseudoacia, 2 Elaecarpus emundi, 2 now huge camelia trees, 5 Syzygium australe ‘resilience’ – two metres tall after 1 year, 1 Lagerstroemia (Crepe Myrtle), 1 Tibouchina, and a huge stand of Dypsis lutescens (golden cane palm). But there’s not a lot of faux outrage news in that, it seems.

We’ve lived in our inner west house for 30 years. When we moved in, there was a towering 20 metre tallowwood tree (Eucalyptus microcorys) growing literally one metre from our kitchen wall and 3 metres from our neighbours’ house. They asked us to see if it could be removed. The council tree inspector came around and immediately gave approval, shaking his head in disbelief that such a massive tree could have ever been planted so near two houses.

At the rear of our back garden we had a 15m peppercorn tree (Schinus mole), a non-native. A 70 year old neighbour who was born in the same house he lives in today told us the tree was almost that big when he was boy. It was a beautiful tree with a nobbly 3.68 metre circumference. Our children had a cubby house platform three metres up a rope ladder. To call it imposing was an understatement. We loved it.

About 15 years ago, one of its huge boughs that went across the back lane was hit by two trucks. We applied successfully to have the bough removed and it took four men with a cherry picker several hours to cut it down.

In March 2017, we were experiencing sewage problems with toilet flushes taking a long time to clear. The plumbers quickly determined that there was extensive root penetration which had cracked and collapsed sections of the original clay sewage pipe. $7500 later their report stated in part:

The soil removal exposed extensive root penetration of the large peppercorn tree. These included two roots of approximately 140cm diameter which traversed the entire exposed hole, with one extending under the surface of the rear lane and the other looking like it would have gone under the wall of your garage and under the garage building of the neighbouring property. There were also many roots of smaller diameter from 1-5cm to approx. 60cm. These roots were severed by the excavator, with the two larger ones needed to be cut by a saw.

The tree had also caused extensive cracking to both the exterior and interior double brick walls of our garage, and to its 190cm thick reinforced concrete floor, as well as to raised garden bed brick retaining walls inside our yard. On several occasions I’d had to replace tiles on the garage roof smashed from falling branches.

Seeing this extensive root damage, I phoned the council tree inspector who came around immediately. I wanted him to see and photograph the root invasion for evidence I would provide in an application to remove the tree. On seeing that many roots of the tree had been cut by the excavator needed to get to the pipe damage, he intimidated the plumbers about whether they had applied for permission to cut the roots. I explained that sewage was threatening to overflow from our toilets and was happy to take this further if he believed there was a problem in what had been done. What other option did he suggest should have been taken, I asked.

It then got surreal. He explained in all seriousness that, to do everything possible to avoid damaging the tree roots, we might well have been ordered to re-route the entire sewage pipe from the back of our house to the rear lane. As all waste water currently exited out house from its right hand side, re-directing it to the left would have involved removing a large stand of golden cane palms, two mature robinia trees, demolishing and rebuilding a deck and a large pergola, demolishing a very large raised garden bed with mature shrubs and the brick retaining wall, demolishing and rebuilding our back fence, digging up the rear lane surface to run our pipes to the mains in the lane, and cutting a new hole in the mains.  All this would have cost perhaps $40,000-$50,000 or more.

The inspector left telling me meaningfully that the council had been very reluctant to even let us remove the large bough years ago and that in his judgement any application to remove the tree, regardless of the damage it was causing, would be knocked back.

So when we learned in 2019 that the Inner West Council had passed policy, after intractable opposition from the Greens, to allow any tree that was within 2 metres of a building to be removed, we put in our application a nanosecond after the policy had finally passed through all the stages required. Our tree was 1.4m from our garage wall when measured 1m from the soil at base of tree (photo below). Along with about a dozen others with similar stories to ours, I’d addressed a council meeting in 2019. Only one resident spoke in opposition. I recall her framing her case in terms the need for everyone needing to play their part to reduce global deforestation. I sensed that, for her, almost no case could ever be made to remove any living tree, regardless of the circumstances or replacement plans.

When permission was given, we had the tree removed ($6400), and as required, we planted a replacement.  We renovated the back garden and in a 1m raised garden bed planted two 1.5m native evergreen eumundi quandong trees (Elaecarpus emundi) which will grow to 12-25m.

So the 915 trees that were removed in the Inner West in 2020 included ours. Many of these would have been people like us who love trees, but who faced simply crazy costs and who had been waiting years for a sensible policy to be adopted. The extra numbers reflected a log jam that is now clearing.

Apparently the Greens have not given up their opposition to the tree removal policy.

The two native Elaeocarpus eumundi (quandong) 4 years along. Now well above the (tall) back fence, nearly the height of a light pole in the lane

[UPDATE 28 Apr 2021: the 3 authors of the paper discussed below have agreed to amend their response to reflect issues I raised with them in the email posted below. When this happens on the Addiction website, I will edit the blog below to reflect that.]

Earlier this year, Professor Virginia Berridge, a significant historian from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and four Australian authors from the University of Queensland published a paper in the international journal Addiction. The paper which can be read here looked at “understanding why Australia and England have such different policies towards electronic nicotine delivery systems.”

My colleague Mike Daube, an emeritus professor from Curtin University, and I were both named in the paper. We found several erroneous statements in the paper and so we wrote this response, setting out our concerns. This has now been published together with Berridge and two of her co-authors’ reply to our response.

In their reply they set out some corrections they agree needed to be made, but they have not corrected their comments on my involvement with BUGA UP, doubling down on them.

In their original paper, they wrote: ‘Chapman is an Emeritus Professor of public health who also has a long history as an anti-smoking activist, including as a proud founding member of BUGA UP in Australia, which spray-painted anti-smoking graffiti on cigarette advertising billboards [44]’.

That is simply wrong, and is not supported by the reference they provided. In our response we wrote that  “Simon Chapman was not a member (let alone a ‘proud founding member’) of Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions (BUGA UP), and has indeed at various times paid credit to its founders and members”, providing  two references here and here.

Prior to our response being published by Addiction today (26 April, 2021) I noticed that Berridge and colleagues reply had been published on the journal’s website. I read that they were “puzzled” that I had stated that I was not a founding member or even a member of BUGA UP.

So on 20 April, 2021 I sent the email below to Virginia Berridge, Wayne Hall and Coral Gartner, commenting on each of four new cited references which they seem to believe provide evidence that I indeed was a founding member/member of BUGA UP. 

In the following days, I noticed that their response had been taken down from the Addiction website. I hoped that, now having been given explanations of their further errors, that they would have requested the take-down and edited it accordingly. But apparently not. They appear confident in their conviction that I was indeed a founding member/member of BUGA UP. I received no reply from them and their original reply has been published with its incorrect information intact.

To set the record straight, I publish my email to them.

20 April, 2021

“Dear Virginia (cc: Coral & Wayne)

I’ve seen your Addiction letter. Let me try to clear up your puzzlement about my status with BUGA UP, and whether I was a “proud founding member”.

I’ll start by saying emphatically that I know I was not a “member” of BUGA UP, let alone a “proud founding member”. So when you seek to assemble what you believe is evidence that I was a member or founding member, you’ll appreciate that this is somewhere between galling and amusing.

Let me take the sources used in your edited revision in the order  you presented them in your letter, and then add an additional one – the archival mothership of evidence about BUGA UP that may have eluded you.

1. My statement early in my 2008 book “At our first meeting [of MOPUP] BUGA‐UP… was born… My modest involvement was to take ongoing responsibility for the billboard on a shop directly opposite the entrance to News Ltd… We held a 20‐year reunion in October 2003.” [in fact it was October 2002 .. my error]

Response: It is clear from the unedited quote and the reference supplied in my book (your reference #10) that I was in MOP UP, not BUGA UP when the original MOP UP launch meeting took place at the Sydney morgue.  Several people who I had never met who attended were already graffitiing billboards before that meeting took place. So I could hardly have been a “founding member” of BUGA UP. 

I lived near the News Limited building and I graffitied a small framed, perspex covered shopfront tobacco ad that was at street level on a tiny general store/sandwich shop directly opposite the News Limited entrance. I used a marking pen and always just wrote “cancer” across the covering perspex, which I imagine was quickly erased by with a rag and methylated spirit  soon afterwards. I doubt if I did this more than five times. I never signed these “BUGA UP”, which was considered indicative of membership (“The principle was that if you did a billboard on your own you could sign it BUGA-UP and that meant you were part of BUGA-UP.”) 

So this is quite a long way from the elaborate, marathon and years-long efforts of those who were BUGA UP mainstays, which is why I described my billboard graffiti career as “modest”. I graffitied a few times but I was not a member of BUGA UP, although I admired their efforts immensely. That is an important difference.

The 20 year reunion  held, as this Sydney Morning Herald piece makes clear, was attended by those involved in MOP UP and BUGA UP. The photo shows seven people. L-R, numbers 1,3, 4 and 5 were in MOP UP, the others in BUGA UP. I have a very large number of news clips, newsletters and correspondence showing that I was one of the founding members of MOP UP.  

• “Simon Chapman was also a prominent spokesperson for Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions (BUGA UP)” your reference #4 (the BBC QED documentary in 1984)

Response: The event shown in the QED program was organized by BUGA UP. They tried to get a large crowd there to witness their civil disobedience knowing that  the TV crew would be there to record it. There were lots of medical students and doctors who came along to support BUGA UP, as I did. I can identify several of them. To my knowledge, few if any of them other than those shown painting the billboard were people who were active in BUGA UP. I was there as a supporter too (the billboard was in Moore Park Rd near the (then) Sydney Sportsground, and I lived about 300m away in Selwyn St Paddington). I was interviewed not as a spokesperson for BUGA UP, but as someone who was prominent in tobacco control who had views about BUGA UP. 

Similarly, in the ABC Today Tonight segment (hardly a “documentary”), I was not speaking as a BUGA UP member, but again as someone  prominent in tobacco control. Nowhere am I described as being from BUGA UP. At one point, in recounting how the two groups emerged I said of the BUGA UP people who attended MOP UP’s launch “they said ‘you’re MOP UP, we’re BUGA UP”.

• The on-line article by Dietz: “Founding BUGA UP member, Dr. Simon Chapman” 

Response: I have never seen this article before you cited it. It was published in Autumn 2014. I notice in the reference list that the author says she had a personal communication with me in September 2003. So this is a longer gestation period than even Tolkein took to write Lord of the Rings.    I have no recollection of speaking with the author, but I gave many, many interviews across the years and do not doubt that I did speak with her. But I certainly was never contacted by her to check or approve her attributions to me. Had I been, I would have corrected the following:

• I was never “Professor of Community Medicine at Sydney University” (it’s public health). 
• She says I “hosted the reunion” (of BUGA UP). As  mentioned above, it was a reunion of MOP UP and BUGA UP. The reunion was not held on “23 Aug 2003” but on 11 October 2002.
• I was not a “founding member” of BUGA UP, nor a “member”.

BUGA UP’s archival website has a page where many press items have been posted.  Please look through that page and on any of the other pages on the site and try to find any reference that says I was a member or founding member of BUGA UP. You won’t find any because I wasn’t.

So your letter in Addiction, despite being a correction of your original article, still contains errors. You could have very easily checked your assertions out with me prior to publication. I would have been very happy to assist you.

You also say that we provided no evidence that ATHRA took funding from KAC. But you could have checked that in a few seconds by googling  [ATHRA + “Knowledge Action Change”] which would have taken you immediately to this Sydney Morning Herald item.  You might also like to read this about the tobacco industry’s digital fingerprints on ATHRA’s website.”

In April, 2021 a major Sydney GPS school suspended eight country boarding students who had been reported for vaping on the bus bringing them back to school after the school holidays. This was far from an isolated incident. Schools have been writing to parents threatening suspension for vaping. Convenience stores across Australia are awash with disposable nicotine vapes with sickly sweet chemical fruit flavours, all of course with iron-clad guarantees of being totally unappealing to kids.

Because they contain nicotine, their sale is totally illegal. In NSW, the Department of Health has seized stock and prosecuted a small number of sellers. If you bother to go searching, they also have a webpage where you can report retailers selling these highly profitable training wheels for many years of nicotine addiction. No data have been released about how many reports have been made to the webpage, but you can bet there is a giant chasm between report numbers, investigations by Health Department officials and court prosecutions.

All Big Tobacco companies are now neck deep in manufacturing vapes as well as their cigarette mainstays. With giant fingers crossed behind their backs, they all publicly sing the industry song that they really, truly want all their adult cigarette customers to stop smoking and switch to vaping. When confronted with data on the dramatic rise in teenage vaping,  spin from the industry and its tame vaping advocate quislings goes like this:

1. Awr … that’s so unfortunate. Please, please kids, understand that vaping is meant to be for adults. And you don’t want people to think you’re like an adult do you!
2. But anyway, nicotine is not dangerous. Indeed,  it’s almost a vitamin-like wonder drug. It’s tar and carbon monoxide from burning tobacco that are the problem. So all relax and let vaping rip.
3. So what if kids vape? It’s better that they vape than smoke. We are actually doing public health god’s work these days! (conveniently omitting to mention that  smoking  — and any nicotine use —  by kids is at an all-time record low – see chart at end)

So how has it happened that vaping is exploding among kids in Australia? 

In June last year, health minister Greg Hunt announced that personal imports of nicotine vaping products (NVPs) would be prohibited, harmonising vapes with the law preventing individuals from importing cigarettes and tobacco products without a special permit which has been in place since March 2019. A backbench revolt by a brainstrust of 28 Nationals and Liberals including the usual suspects (Barnaby Joyce, Matt Canavan, George Christensen, Eric Abetz, Tim Wilson, James Paterson,  Jason Falinski, Trent Zimmerman, Dave Sharma,  Amanda Stoker, Bridget McKenzie and good friend of British American Tobacco Australia’s lobbyist Michael Kauter, Hollie Hughes) saw health minister Greg Hunt forced to shelve the plan soon afterwards.

Here’s the letter the 28 sent to Greg Hunt

The Nationals received $55,000 from Philip Morris as “gold” level support in 2019-20. Money well spent!

The import ban was originally proposed by Hunt as critical to the success of the decision of the Therapeutic Goods Administration to require all those wanting to legally access NVP to have a doctor’s prescription after Oct 1, 2021. Those importing will also need to have a prescription, but there are a bewildering number of questions needing clarification to assess how the rubber will meet the road or whether the whole scheme will be a fizzer.

These include

1. How will these import shipments be described?
2. What will stop exporters mislabelling them as other goods?
3. How will the required prescriptions be attached to shipment manifests?
4. How will exporters check that prescriptions are valid  and not photoshopped?
5. How will they ensure a prescription hasn’t been used repeatedly, perhaps by on-sellers?
6. How will post office workers or couriers open imported packages to see if the contents are permitted under the prescription?
7. How will they know the person receiving them is who was named on the prescription?
8. How will they ensure the person receiving them is over 18, as required?

Quite obviously, the import scheme will see both individual vapers and entrepreneurs exploit many of these.  There will be so many ways for those who won’t be bothered to get a NVP license and kids to game the importation route. I often get courier delivered goods and it’s common for the delivery guy to just ask you for your name without any ID requirement, or for you to dash out any old signature on their digital machine.

Retail availability of  Disposable Nicotine Vaping Products (DNVPs)  in Australia

DNVPs are already being heavily marketed and sold via social media platforms in plain sight. A simple search for the brand ‘Puff Bar’ on Instagram provides  this array of opportunites:

• https://www.instagram.com/puffbar_sydney/
• https://www.instagram.com/puffbarau/
• https://www.instagram.com/puff.barsydney/
• https://www.instagram.com/vapes_selling_/
• https://www.instagram.com/puffbars66/
• https://www.instagram.com/loud9.is/

Direct from China online retailing into Australia

With the rise in popularity, availability and production of DNVPs, both genuine and illicit (although the two are most often indistinguishable), came the rise in direct from China online retailing.  A brief desktop search finds a number of offshore retail sites for DNVPs, most of which appear to be for direct from China sales:

• https://puffbaraustralia.com/
• https://www.vapepenzone.com.au
• https://www.puffbar.com.au/
• https://www.vaporcave.com.au/
• https://www.1vapewholesale.com/product/puff-bar-disposable-pod/

These sites often bear typical signatures of direct from China retail sites with  clear syntactical errors in the English translation, consistent with machine translation. The sites themselves are typically ‘au’ specific sub-sites of international domains.

If you go to Facebook marketplace and search for “fruit”, “mixed fruit” or “fruit bars” you’ll be deluged with offers to buy NVPs, in twee ads like those below that, your honour, are not for vapes at all, but for mixed fruit. A phone call to the numbers shown finds that all the fruit you hoped for has sadly sold out, but if you’d like bulk buy vapes you’re in luck!

Disposable NVPs are sold at very low price point so the manufacturing standards used in DNVPs are commensurately low. It is simply not possible to manufacture a high quality, reliable and safe NVP at this price point. Cheap e-cigs use cheap batteries. Exploding ecig batteries are primarily due to the use of cheap, untested and uncertified lithium-ion batteries. As seen in news reports of exploding devices, the exothermic (explosive) potential of a lithium-ion battery is obvious.

This out of control farce has been happening in Australia for months. Retailers are displaying the illegal products openly in many shops having calculated that the chances of prosecution are beyond miniscule. My mail is that there is yet another classic duck-shoving exercise in federal/state responsibilities underway on this. All state and territory health departments are pointing their fingers at the commonwealth government for shelving the decision to ban personal importation of NVPs and urging that the ban be reinstated. The Commonwealth washes its hands, responding that it is a state government responsibility to police retailing breaches, not theirs.

While no recent survey data are available, it seems highly likely that when they are next published that we will see what Canada, the US and New Zealand have experienced with regular vaping (not just curiosity experimentation) being repeated here.

Nicotine is anything but benign. While vaping cultists glibly proclaim that every kid who started vaping and then took up smoking would have taken up smoking up regardless, recent research shows kids who vape are over four times as likely to smoke than non-vapers. And vaping is increasingly being revealed as anything but a revolutionary improvement in how to quit smoking (see here and here).

Australia has an exemplary track record in reducing the number of children who smoke (see chart). These data are draining the life blood out of the tobacco industry with ever-diminishing cohorts of would-be smokers failing to take it up. The tobacco industry’s acolytes in the Australian parliament who are now threatening this massive public health success story need to be urgently stopped.

The NVP import ban should be reinstated quickly. The original $250,000 fines should remain as a serious deterrent to those profiting from this political public health vandalism.

Source https://www.tobaccoinaustralia.org.au/chapter-1-prevalence/1-6-prevalence-of-smoking-teenagers

Postscript (3 May 2021): The Deputy Secretary of the Australian Department of Health and head of the Health Product Regulation Group Adjunct Professor John Skerritt has replied to this blog here. I will comment on his letter at a later date

Matthew Peters and Simon Chapman

Over the past few years, a conga line of English tobacco control academics and e-cigarette barrow-pushers has been in Australia and contributed to parliamentary inquiries in the hope of convincing we ignorant colonials how critical e-cigarettes have been to tobacco control in the Old Blighty. Dummy spits have been rife when their gospel advice has been ignored.  Colonial insolence has been decried when heretics pointed out that smoking affordability was rather more closely related to prevalence trends than was e-cigarette use.

So enter stage left a certain virus. Since March 2020 when COVID began its devastation, the number of English smokers who have tried to quit has increased sharply as has the proportion of those attempts that is successful (see purple line below). So how did they do it? Not in the main by vaping. The proportion of English smokers using e-cigarettes while trying to quit has continued a steady decline that began in late 2016, with a few temporary peaks around promotional events such as Stoptober.

In early 2016, English smokers trying to quit did it unassisted (cold turkey)  in roughly the same proportion as those using e-cigs. Today, the rate of unassisted cessation is more than double that of EC use, all against a background of wall-to-wall high street vaping shops, an almost cult-like veneration of e-cigs by the English tobacco control establishment, long term demonisation of cold turkey (see illustrations below) and massive advertising and promotional campaigns by vaping manufacturers.

Their brethren in Australia valiantly continue to chant the English gospel but the annoying data just won’t go away.

Here is an English translation of a piece published on 14 April, 2021 in the French newspaper Le Monde. It is a profile of Derek Yach, the former senior WHO official who played a major role in establishing the global Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (the FCTC). Today Yach leads the Foundation for a Smokefree World, an “independent” organisation entirely funded by Philip Morris International.

“Project Unthinkable” a 2018 book by Derek Yach, ghostwritten by Lisa Fitterman

Stéphane Horel: Philip Morris’ Secret War against the WHO and tobacco control experts. Le Monde 14 April, 2021