Meet Forest Asia Pacific
Monday, July 15, 2013 at 9:05 A comment on my post about The Freedom Dinner video reads:
Congratulations Forest upon your recent campaign success!
I wish to God that we in Australia had an organisation even half as effective. Perhaps then outcomes for smokers here might not have been so dire. Our national complacency costs us dearly.
Kevin Rudd's recent leadership coup, coupled with Labour's poll improvements, could spell further grim news for Australian smokers.
Simon, feel free to emigrate to Australia anytime soon - we desperately need you here!
Funnily enough, I received an email from Australia in May last year. It read:
We are a group of concerned individuals working together to lobby the government concerning smokers’ rights – presently as an unregistered political party. However, we are keeping our options open with respect to the structure we use to move forward with our agenda.
Australia is one of the darkest markets in the world and, as you would know, has recently introduced plain packaging legislation. We feel it is time to significantly raise the stakes on smokers' rights, anti-nanny state sentiment, and erosion of individual rights and liberties.
They wanted to call their group Forest Asia South Pacific (there's a musical in there somewhere) and were seeking advice.
We exchanged emails and spoke on the phone. Half in jest, I selflessly volunteered to fly half way round the world to help promote their campaign!
After a while it all went quiet and I thought little more about it until, searching on Google for reports featuring the words 'forest' and 'plain packaging', I stumbled upon a website for ... Forest Asia Pacific.
To be honest, I'm hugely disappointed.
First and foremost the website breaks several golden rules. There is very little information (about anything), and nothing to indicate who is behind it.
Address? Media contact? Nothing.
A blog was added on March 20, 2013. It contains seven posts, the last on March 26. After that, zilch.
They have cut and pasted some copy from the Forest website (see Q&As, for example) but, overall, the site lacks passion, personality or purpose.
Australia is the world's number one nanny state. This is a gift made in heaven. Imagine the fun you could have challenging and teasing both the government and the likes of Simon Chapman!
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but this is a missed opportunity.
The people who contacted me last year sounded serious, professional. They had good political contacts, so they told me, having worked for the Rights Party of Australia.
They told me that small, often single issue, parties are a feature of Australian politics, especially at local level.
I advised against forming a political party but I was partly reassured that if they pressed ahead with a campaign group the Forest 'brand' would be in good hands. (That said, I also advised/requested them to use a different name because I didn't know enough about them.)
I have no idea whether the people I spoke to are still involved. According to the website, Forest Pacific Asia was founded in 2011, at least six months before they contacted me, so I don't even know if they are the founders.
What is remarkable, given events in Australia over the past 18 months, is that the group has remained completely invisible.
This is not the first time the Forest name has been adopted for use in Australia. According to this document:
Smokers' rights organisations set up in Australia include Forest ('Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco') and Fair Go. Forest was set up in Victoria in the mid 1980s, when passive smoking was starting to receive serious and sustained media and public attention.
Sadly, I fear this latest project will go the same way as the first. The concept is fine but the execution is very poor.
There is however a small ray of hope.
Forest Asia Pacific also has a Facebook page. Again, there is very little activity but at the time of writing it has 8,007 'Likes'. That's not bad.
My advice, for what it's worth, is this:
Close the website until you have redesigned and built something better and have the personnel to maintain it.
Build support via Facebook and Twitter.
Appoint a spokesman. Comment and engage with the media on smoking-related issues.
Generate and encourage discussion and debate online.
Submit articles to news blogs and popular websites and use the Internet to drive traffic to your Facebook page.
I could go on.
I'm not annoyed, just disappointed that the Forest name is associated with such a limp, half-baked effort.
Perhaps I will emigrate to Australia!
Reader Comments (6)
Forest Asia Pacific...or F.A.P...seems an unfortunate choice of name .(For those not up on their memes: “Fap” is an onomatopoeic Internet slang term for the act of masturbation).
@ The Blocked Dwarf
Heh!, That was also my immediate reaction! An unfortunate acronym indeed! I would say that changing the name should be a priority.
Like you, Simon, I'm amazed that the Aussies have been so supine in the face of the onslaught on smokers. When I lived there in the 70s, and the big issue was marijuana, there was a 'Marijuana Party' canvassing votes, a regular (bi-weekly or monthly) newspaper called 'The Weed' (if I remember right) of which I still have several copies stashed somewhere, and a genuine grass-roots (excuse the pun) movement pushing for legalisation. It came to nothing in the end, but the organisation and will was there.
If a bunch of stoners can get it together, why on earth are the pro-tobacco groups so ineffectual? Most peculiar.
"If a bunch of stoners can get it together, why on earth are the pro-tobacco groups so ineffectual?"-nisakiman
I can just see it now...
..the demo in Canberra
"WHADDA WE WANT?"
"Legalise hash!"
"WHEN DO WE WANT IT?"
"Well dunno Dood, like, dude, any time .like... maybe bro'...sorta ...chill...
..vegetable rights and peace maaaAAn"
Don’t emigrate, Simon. We need you right here!! And, to be honest, I’m not sure that Australia isn’t a lost cause anyway. Some while ago (a few years, I think) when I was a regular on the F2C forum we were contacted by a couple of very fed-up Aussies who took part in our chats for a while before deciding to set up a similar forum of their own in Oz because, as they said “There just isn’t any kind of forum like this for smokers in Australia.” With F2C’s blessing, they set up a forum along exactly the same lines, and several of us Brits signed up to it too – looking forward to getting the lowdown from some of our Aussie counterparts. And we waited, and we waited, and we waited …. and, despite the efforts of one or two stalwart Aussies who signed up to the forum and engaged in a bit of debate, the forum simply withered on the vine. Similarly, the website “I deserve to be heard” which Philip Morris Australia started up prior to the plain packaging legislation being rolled out doesn’t seem to have been updated since last year. I think that Australian smokers have been so browbeaten on the issue that there just isn’t any fight left in them any more. Stick with the UK and Europe, Simon – where resistance is growing, rather than trying to flog a dead horse like Oz back to life. Some countries are now so far down the line that they can’t be saved, and Australia is one of them. Sadly.
I agree with Misty. Turn the tide of fairness back from Europe outwards to other countries. England is showing the courage to say no to the Nannies. Others will follow when they realise they can.
But if you are looking to expand then you need to get into Wales before it becomes a phobic sterile area that welcomes anyone but tobacco consumers.
To understand the plight of Australian smokers, it helps to have some local perspective.
Until recently, for the past 20 years or so, most states and territories were governed by Labour with Greens support.
The Labour party (self proclaimed champion of the little people) are on record as vowing to 'make smoking history' by 2020. The Greens, great haters of big industry and just about everything else, are also anti-smoking (except weed of course).
This political climate, coupled with well funded, excessive influence from rabid, domestic and international, anti-smoking groups, have made it extremely difficult for smokers rights groups to function effectively.
Unlike the U.K (a true democracy) there was no public consultation whatsoever regarding the introduction of plain packaging. It was rammed through parliament, chiefly by Nicola Roxon MP, the then health minister and avowed tobacco hater. Objectors, and there were many, were publicly denigrated as being the puppets of big tobacco.
Against the will of the mildly, conservative majority, Australia has become a sham democracy and greatest of nanny states. Government has little tolerance for personal freedoms or dissenting views.
The good news is that some are fighting back. There is the Liberal Democratic Party, the main libertarian party, who are contesting upcoming federal senate seats and absorbing preferences from pro-choice parties such as the Smokers Rights Party and Outdoor Recreation (Stop the Greens) Party.
It is understandable that Australia might seem a lost cause for smokers rights but where there is a will etc - we just need respected, professional organisations, such as Forest, to assist in the fight. It is in all of our interests after all !