A friend in his 60s recently remarked that of all the social transformations he has witnessed in his life, the most visual has been Australia's transition from a smoking culture to a non-smoking one.

Smoking was once glamorous. Audrey Hepburn, a lifelong heavy smoker, famously tapped ash from the end of a cigarette holder in the iconic Breakfast at Tiffany's. The Marlboro Man stared into the vast expanse of his unfettered cowboy masculinity with a filtered cigarette between his lips. Hepburn died of inoperable smoking-related cancer, and three of the Marlboro Men models followed. When style icon Yul Brynner made an anti-smoking plea to camera before he, too, died of cancer, the pastime that looked so sexy in Now, Voyager suddenly had all the sex appeal of tar squeezed out of a lung.

And yet, there remains 23% of the Australian population who smoke regularly - and their addiction in the midst of a ubiquitous social understanding of smoking's harmful effects has become fodder for both pre-election moralising and morally-dubious fundraising.

The Labor party recently proposed a "sin tax" to raise cigarette costs of up to an additional 50c a stick, and a plan is in consideration to force smokers to register for a "smart card license" to be scanned whenever they seek to purchase a packet of demons. That almost a quarter of Australian voters are about to be disproportionately financially punished for an addiction warrants greater consideration than some Temperance League-style policy heavy-handedness.

My parents worked in the club industry when I was a child, and I remember all too well the pall of heavy smoke that hung over bars and offices, the secretaries who smoked at their desks, and the designated job description "APU" (ashtray picker-upperer). I also remember ashtray tins on the floor of banks, swing-lid smokers' bins in the ladies' restrooms of department stores, and making ceramic ashtrays for primary school craft assignments.

When I was a teenager, every boy at my high school carried a zippo lighter, and as a student every corduroy student pocket was dusty with the "pubes" of rolling tobacco. I was one of legions of young people who pooled their silver coins for a cigarette machine group-buy on a big night out at the pub. Many of my first kisses were made in the context of going outside "for a smoke". I even met a longterm partner on a neighbouring balcony to my own, when each of us had gone outside our apartments for a cigarette-as-a-circuit-breaker, and our eyes met over curlicues from our tailor-mades.

I am proudly no longer a smoker, and the aim of this article is not to romanticise smoking – for I can tell you from my own experience that there is nothing romantic about the yellow phlegm of a smoker's cough, the "death breath" of a smoker's morning-after, an apartment that smells like a Guinness fart, or kissing a man – however handsome – who tastes like a week-old industrial accident.

It is not to defend it either, for smoking was the cause of the of metastasised small-cell lung cancer that only this March deprived me of the life of my most loyal ally and closest friend – my beloved father.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Van Badham's parents in hospital. Photograph: Van Badham

It is to contextualise that smoking (like drinking, experimental drug use and tacky titty bars) has, for all its vile dangers, had until only very recently occupied a very deeply entrenched place in our culture. In my own lifetime, our culture facilitated smoking to the point that my mother requested and was provided a cigarette to smoke in the very hospital bed in which she had just given birth to me – a post-partum treat.

As a society we have barely emerged from the culture of addiction; financially punishing those who fell prey to it – those statistically likely to die, and painfully, from its health effects – is cruelty. I say this as the love-besotted daughter who watched her father die in slow, horrific pain from his smoking addiction. For all the valid arguments made that sin-taxes discourage smoking, I can tell you that at the height of his dependence, a packet price of $100 would not have dissuaded my father from taking a puff.

Amongst crucial concern about the health effects of smoking, the impact of financial punishments on addicts in low-income families is something that has to be taken into account. Bear in mind, if smokers continue to smoke knowing full well that the "cancer sticks" are going to prematurely age, damage their tissues and kill them, what dissuasion is a mere price hike, even if paying the electricity bill or the kids' school meals are on the line?

My father actually quit smoking a full 15 years before he succumbed to a smoking-related illness. What enabled his quitting, as mine and my mother's, were the combination of the anti-smoking campaigns, the removal of encouragement advertising, free quit programmes, helpful doctors and, most valuable of all, the institution of smokefree workplaces and public smoking bans that removed from smoking its onset attraction – its social aspect.

Again and again, scientific studies prove that indoor smoke-bans, just on their own, have immediate and powerful positive effects on public health as well as reverse the traditions of a smoking culture; the social example of smoke-free public places encourages even smokers to make their indoor homes smoke-free.

This change was too late to help my father - I am only grateful that I had, at least, a greater number of years with him than if he hadn't been able to quit smoking at some point in his life.

His legacy is that I shall never smoke again, and I urge any young person testing the margins of social experimentation to fool around with radical acts less likely to kill them. Personally, I'd recommend situationist literature, industrial electronica or Australian psephology instead. Socially frowned upon they may be, but at least they won't give you cancer.