Image: AAP News/DailyMail

Sixty-six body bags are being laid out on the lawn of Parliament House – one for every Australian who dies every day from tobacco use. The body bags emerged ahead of the first Senate inquiry hearing on Australia’s illicit tobacco crisis on Monday. Health advocates called for the protests to end because words alone were no longer cutting it. They really needed MPs to see what 66 dead people looked like, lying in black bags on the grass in front of the building where the nation makes its decisions.So why now? Because the Senate is hearing from Australian Border Force officers, medical experts and the Cancer Council about how to tackle the flood of illicit tobacco into Australia. Tobacco lobbyists want the government to reduce cigarette excise duty to harass illicit traders. Basically, they’re saying: If we make smoking cheaper, people won’t buy the crappy stuff. It’s an argument that sounds clever for about five seconds, then falls apart.Laura Hunter, chief executive of the Australian Council on Smoking and Health, called the proposal a “self-serving red herring”. She said: “If you’re comfortable with making all cigarettes cheaper, you’re also comfortable with more people dying from smoking.” ‘You can’t tackle a public health crisis by making Australia’s deadliest product cheaper and more accessible, by engaging in a race to the bottom with criminals.‘When cigarettes are cheaper, more people adopt them, more people are already addicted to smoking and fewer people quit.’According to the DailyMail, quoting Hunter, there are more than 40,000 outlets selling tobacco in Australia, far more than supermarkets, petrol stations and pharmacies. Smoking causes at least 16 types of cancer, including lung, mouth, liver, bladder, bowel and kidney cancer. This is not an evil that affects only the smoker. The health system pays for it. Families suffer. That’s what those 66 bags on the Parliament lawn represent—not some abstract number, but real data.