Last night I ate the best pizza in Sydney. I was in an unfashionable Calabrian restaurant in the suburbs, where boomboxed cars burned donuts in the street outside.

Since six weeks before the Olympics, the law in New South Wales has said that people can’t smoke inside restaurants.

Every few minutes, a tattooed player at the pool table, or a burly tradesman in his working clothes wolfing pizza, or a tizzed-up, bare-midriffed 18-year-old would go out to the footpath to smoke. It was as if it had always been this way. There were no smoking police tapping them on the shoulder to move outdoors. There were no complaints from management run off their feet trying to control people who didn’t know about the law. And there were certainly none from the many family groups and stray yuppies eating inside.

Wednesday’s historic jury verdict in the Supreme Court, where a former Wollongong bar worker, Marlene Sharp, was awarded $450,000 in compensation for having acquired throat cancer from passive smoking, has catapulted the debate into pubs and clubs, romanticised as the so-called last bastions for smokers.

The gradual creep of smoking bans into hospitality venues has sadly left those most vulnerable to last in their search for a healthy working environment. Can there be any occupational setting anywhere in the world where workers are more exposed to passive smoking than bar workers? What sort of half-pregnant logic allows us to accept that the public (the least exposed) should be protected from passive smoking? So should restaurant workers, people who travel on public transport and those who go to the movies. But if you work an eight-hour shift in an atmosphere thick with tobacco smoke in a bar or club, like it or lump it.

Marlene Sharp didn’t like it and her brave action, following that of Liesel Scholem in 1992, whose successful court action accelerated smoke bans in offices, will almost certainly pave the way for a return to the Victorian days of the “smoking room”. Here, people retired temporarily to a room where they could smoke, before rejoining those who didn’t want to be forced to smoke involuntarily.

We see the equivalent of this today in airports, where separately ventilated rooms cater for smokers to feed their addiction and enjoy the gothic ambiance of overflowing filthy ashtrays and the company of glum fellow-addicts, counting the seconds before they can leave the fog themselves. Provided such rooms were genuinely separately ventilated, doors were not left open and cleaners could enter during intervals when the occupants were not allowed inside, everyone’s civil liberties would be protected, while sane occupational health principles would finally be enacted.

So why hasn’t this happened long ago?

When smoking was allowed in the back sections of airlines, many smokers actually preferred to sit in non-smoking seats rather than endure the unpleasantness. Over the years as community attitudes changed, preferences for smoking seats became so marginal that the airlines lobbied governments to introduce a ban to set a level playing field across all airlines. People haven’t stopped flying. Restaurants are not closing. Cinemas aren’t empty. The TAB is doing a roaring trade. McDonalds and Pizza Hut, two of the first to go smoke free, are not exactly doing badly.

The big losers in all this are, of course, the tobacco companies. Workplace smoking bans cut 24-hour smoking by 20 percent, which translates into hundreds of million of dollars foregone and reduced smoking unparalleled by any other strategy. For more than 20 years the tobacco industry and its mates in the hotel trade have put it about that smoking bans ruin businesses. Yet a 1994 Philip Morris internal document states:

Tobacco companies oppose smoking bans because they eat away seriously at the number of cigarettes consumed. Their arguments about lost business for others are, by their own internal admissions, absolute nonsense. Marlene Sharp’s bravery in going to court to face the formidable prospect of the legal costs of losing will be an important milestone in the historic erosion of public smoking.

NSW health minister Craig Knowles and premier Bob Carr have been a breath of fresh air in introducing the ban on smoking in restaurants. It now seems certain that they will write the final chapter in this saga. The myopic, ill-informed and self-interested lobbying of the Australian Hotels Association to exempt bars from these bans is one of the most contemptible chapters in Australia’s occupational health history.