Melbourne City Council is considering making outdoor dining smoke-free in the city, which will include the CBD, if the lord mayor’s proposal is approved.

Melbourne is in fact the last Australian capital to introduce the ban, a city where 13.5 per cent of its population continue to light up, counting 4,000 smoking-related cancer deaths per year.

“I reckon most smokers these days, if they’re in an area for outside dining, they won’t sit there and smoke, they’ll go and smoke somewhere else,” Lord Mayor Robert Doyle said. “I don’t think it’d be a great imposition.”

Director Sarah White also agreed, stating that in areas where the ban was already in place, trade at cafes either improved or remained the same.

“If you speak to families, they don’t want to take their children to sit outside at outdoor cafes, and have the children subject to smoke drifting over from the next tables, so I think it would be a huge benefit for our culture,” Ms White said.

The opposition, supported by Greens’ health spokesperson Colleen Hartland, supports the immediate application of the ban. Ms Hartland finds the implementation of one council area at a time nonsensical, whilst health minister Jill Hennessy believes it’s vital to consult before imposing any new measure.

“Maybe that’s the next step in ensuring we allow smokers to smoke, but making sure that when people are eating and enjoying themselves they are not interrupted by cigarette smoke,” Premier Daniel Andrews said.

“I can tell you as somebody with three young kids, if we go out for breakfast we can’t really sit outside.”

“One of our kids, our youngest kid Joseph, has asthma, so the outside area becomes the default smoking area and therefore a whole lot of families can’t enjoy that,” he added.

Victoria may have been leading tobacco control measures internationally, however it still allows smoking in certain alleyways and outdoor drinking and dining areas, which isn’t actually urging people to quit.

If the law is voted by six of 11 counsellors, smokers will have to put out their cigarettes around the Queen Victoria Market, the Hoddle grid, Lygon St, several parts of South Yarra, the Docklands, Kensington as well as East Melbourne. The law will come into effect this July for New South Wales, with South Australia to follow in July 2016.