Australia's plain packaging cigarette laws have received global attention thanks to a starring role in a segment of John Oliver's satirical television news program, which skewered big tobacco companies and explained how they attack laws designed to reduce cigarette consumption and protect public health.
Sunday's episode of Last Week Tonight also presented a tongue-in-cheek alternative to cigarette mascots like the Marlboro Man or Camel Joe called 'Jeff the Diseased Lung' - a cartoon character whose image quickly went viral, along with the hashtag promoted on the show, #JeffWeCan.
Let's make Jeff the Diseased Lung the new face of
#Marlboro by getting
#JeffWeCan to trend worldwide!
pic.twitter.com/0tfLVV7YCT — Last Week Tonight (@LastWeekTonight)
February 16, 2015
Oliver began the segment by describing tobacco as an "ageing product that's decreasing in popularity and yet somehow it can't stop making money ... it's basically the agricultural equivalent of U2."
He then went on to look at high rates of smoking in some developing countries, the very permissive attitude to smoking in some of those places, and the efforts by tobacco companies to fight attempts to curb cigarette marketing and branding.
 
Using clips from programs including the ABC's 730 and Lateline, Oliver outlined the plain packaging laws introduced in 2011 by the former Gillard Labor government, which saw branding removed from packets.
Instead, he said, Australians could now only buy packets adorned with health warnings, the name of the product in generic typeface, and images such as "the toe-tag on a corpse, the cancerous mouth, the nightmarish eyeball and the diseased lung ... I'm pretty sure I would find a healthy lung disgusting."
"Perhaps unsurprisingly, since this law was implemented, total consumption of tobacco and cigarettes in Australia fell to record lows, and nightmares about eyeballs have risen to record highs," he said.
To get these laws though, he said, "Australia's had to run a gamut of law suits", before detailing the former government's High Court battle with tobacco companies, which the government won in 2012, and other subsequent attempts to challenge plain packaging.
It is not the first time Oliver has drawn the world's attention to legislative change in Australia. In 2013, when he was still a reporter for the The Daily Show, he presented a series of segments about the former Howard government's crackdown on gun ownership after the Port Arthur massacre.
The alternative cigarette mascot devised by Last Week Tonight, 'Jeff the Diseased Lung', along with the hashtag #JeffWeCan, was still trending on Twitter a day after the show was broadcast in both the United States and Australia.
