THERE is uproar Down Under about a recent move to change the packaging of tobacco products.

Now plain, apart from displaying some gruesome health warnings, the move has been greeted with dismay by tobacco companies.

But interestingly, it also appears to be having a psychological effect on smokers.

Lots of them have been complaining to anyone who will listen that since the switch to plain packaging, their beloved cigs taste worse.

Manufacturers have been at pains to try to convince them that nothing has changed, but their attempts at assurance seem to be falling on deaf ears.

But isn’t this an ideal opportunity for the health lobby to try to persuade smokers to kick the habit?

This appears to be a new phenomenon, and as time passes and the new packaging becomes more familiar, however uncomfortable it makes people feel, won’t this strange effect become diluted?

The new packaging on Australian cigarette packets is pretty startling. Plain is perhaps the wrong word to use, because while manufacturers’ logos and designs have all but been obliterated, a large part of the packaging is now dominated by images of rotting teeth, people in hospital beds on breathing apparatus and, my favourite, a none too health looking eyeball, its sickly appearance emphasised by being held open by an extremely uncomfortable looking piece of clinical kit.

It would pass for a very good horror movie poster, and that is probably the point.

It is unpopular and discomfiting because it is meant to be. What do smokers expect? Photographs of azure skies, golden beaches, endless field of corn blown by warm winds?

If a side effect of this new packaging is that it makes people think their cigarettes taste worse - to the point where it does have that effect - then health bodies should be acting on that and rolling out even more programmes to help people to stop.

The Australian government must we applauded, from the point of view of the non-smoker, for adopting this hardline stance on packaging.

While the UK tinkers about with the issue of the displaying of cigarettes, the Gillard government has gone for it big style. What it needs to do now is capitalise on the unintended effect the move is having on smokers’ taste buds, or what is left of them.

Black day for rugby

ONCE again, the rugby authorities have let themselves down on the issue of discipline.

The outcry over the shameful, cowardly actions of All Black hooker Andrew Hore last weekend, in pole-axing Wales’ Bradley Davies has been long and loud.

Longer and louder however, should the outcry over his punishment, a five-week ban that includes three pre-season friendlies back in New Zealand.

Evidently, the All Blacks’ legal team managed to persuade the judicial officer Lorne Crerar that his initial eight-week ban could be reduced to five because of mitigating factors such as Hore’s “remorse” and his subsequent daily contact with his victim.

Quite where remorse comes in when a player has hit a member of the opposing team, from behind, in the head, causing concussion, just a minute into the match when there has been no time for any ill-feeling to build up, is beyond me.

Rugby has its disciplinary criteria, but for this viewer at least, even eight weeks is not nearly enough. Hore would have been arrested, tried and probably imprisoned had such an attack taken place a mere 100 yards away on Westgate Street.

Yes, rugby is a contact sport, perhaps the most contactest of sports, to make up a word for the occasion. But this sort of thing is inexcusable.

It is time for those bleaters who say that the sport can police itself effectively to have a long, hard look at themselves.

No-one who plays rugby should go onto the field expecting not to take knocks and be involved in flare-ups.

But this was of another magnitude entirely, and it does no credit to anyone that the perpetrator will be back plying his trade having missed just today’s Test against England and his club Highlanders’ first competitive fixture of 2013.

Even more ludicrous is that Mr Crerar accepted that Hore had not intended to strike Davies in the head.

Huh. At least those of us who crave proper justice can get easy access to the video evidence these days, to remind ourselves just how ridiculous an assertion that is.