Is this meant to be an Australian accent?

Tobacco companies, as a rule, aren’t the most well-liked of institutions, especially when they use their immense wealth and influence to do things like bankroll studies claiming that cigarettes don’t actually give you cancer.

But with that argument largely over in the public mind, for years now the big fight tobacco companies have taken up has been against plain cigarette packaging laws. The tobacco industry has had tremendous success discouraging countries, many of them small, relatively poor nations like Uruguay and Togo, from enacting plain packaging.

Which makes Australia’s world-first example all the more important. When Australia began toying with the idea of plain packaging about seven years ago, tobacco giants like British American Tobacco and Philip Morris rolled out a huge campaign to try and sink the laws before they were even passed, spending $5 million on ads ahead of the 2010 election and taking Australia to court in Hong Kong, of all places, to get the laws thrown out on intellectual property grounds.

Despite Big Tobacco’s best efforts, though, it seems our plain packaging laws are here to stay. What’s more, they’re starting to reveal that other countries would do well to follow suit; since they came into effect in 2012, Australia’s laws appear to be having their intended effect. A comprehensive set of studies published in the British Medical Journal last year found that plain packaging reduced smoking’s appeal and saw an increase in people attempting to quit, while other research has suggested plain packaging has made a big impact on perceptions of smoking in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. Plain packaging legislation has recently been passed in the UK, Ireland and France, and tobacco firms have seen their legal challenges to those new laws thrown out.

But tobacco companies aren’t going down without a fight. A decidedly opaque outfit called the Property Rights Alliance has just released this pearler of an ad attacking Australia’s plain packaging experiment, and it deserves a closer look. Besides parroting certifiably bogus claims that youth smoking rates haven’t declined since plain packaging was introduced (they have) and that smoking rates actually increased after plain packaging was introduced (they haven’t), the whole thing appears to be narrated by an American doing a hilariously woeful attempt at an Australian accent, making the end result so unwatchable it’s actually kind of entertaining. If you’ve ever wanted to hear what Bruno Dundridge has to say about intellectual property, then you have absolutely come to the right place.

Crocodile Dundee up there paints a pretty grim picture of a world without branded cigarette packs, but it’s worth noting who made that ad — and who funds them. The Property Rights Alliance is a project of Americans for Tax Reform, a US-based lobby group that pushes a conservative, pro-corporate agenda and takes stacks of money from anyone who needs their services. The ATR opposes all tax increases, is a member of climate sceptic collective the Cooler Heads Coalition, and — surprise, surprise — has taken money from tobacco firms like Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds.

It’s not just cigarette branding the PRA are so courageously fighting for — they’re also pushing to halt or reverse similar restrictions on fast food and alcohol branding. A follow-up ad, mercifully not featuring Steve Irwin’s toothless second cousin on voiceover, paints a future world without advertising as a bleak, dystopian cross between Brave New World and a Radiohead film clip, and implores us to imagine what joyless hells our lives will be without brightly-coloured booze and junk food packaging to give them meaning.

“Imagine a world without brands”, the extremely rich-sounding British voiceover lady ominously intones.

Go ahead. Think of a world where giant, predatory corporations can’t invade your attention and eyeballs with lurid, deceptive advertising that makes you feel bad about yourself and reduces your worth as a human being to what you consume. What a horrible existence that would be. Can you imagine?

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Tip to Ketan Joshi for finding the ad.