Newspaper says plain packaging led to an increase in tobacco sales, but this claim has been attacked by a number of people

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

The Australian Medical Association has accused Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian newspaper of promoting smoking and “big tobacco” by publishing a series of articles undermining the nation’s plain packaging legislation.



The Australian, owned by News Corp, has previously argued that plain packaging deprives tobacco firms of their intellectual property rights, and earlier this month went further and claimed that plain packaging had led to an increase in tobacco sales.

“The AMA urges the government to restate its support for the plain packaging laws and tobacco control generally, and we urge the Australian and other media to stop giving Big Tobacco a free ride in promoting its killer products,” the AMA president, Associate Professor Brian Owler, said.

The intervention of the peak medical body came after The Australian published another five articles on Wednesday critical of public health initiatives to decrease smoking rates, including plain packaging.

The series of news reports and opinion pieces were in response to the ABC’s Media Watch program, which slammed The Australian’s earlier exclusive story claiming that there had been an increase in consumption as “garbage”.

On 6 June The Australian ran a front-page story headlined “Labor's plain packaging fails as cigarette sales rise”.

“Labor’s nanny state push to kill off the country’s addiction to cigarettes with plain packaging has backfired, with new sales figures showing tobacco consumption growing during the first full year of the new laws,” the newspaper reported.

But the accuracy of the evidence presented in the report was immediately called into question by some economists and health experts, as it directly contradicted government figures.

One of the economists who condemned the story, Stephen Koukoulas, said tobacco consumption in the first quarter of 2014 was the lowest ever recorded.

The professor of health policy at Curtin University, Mike Daube, also condemned the report: “Every bit of the report is dodgy, from the way it was set up, to what’s in it, to the lack of analysis.”

Media Watch quoted the two experts in its story, and suggested The Australian had been influenced by the views of the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), a right-wing thinktank.

Undeterred by the Media Watch report, The Australian returned fire, publishing a full broadsheet page of stories on Wednesday.

One of the opinion pieces was written by Professor Sinclair Davidson, an economist at RMIT and a senior fellow at the IPA, which has reportedly received funds from the tobacco industry. British American Tobacco Australia told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2012 it was a member of the IPA.

Davidson wrote that plain packaging policy introduced by the previous Labor government was “state-sponsored persecution of that minority who consume tobacco”.

Davidson was also quoted in the newspaper as saying: “I have no doubt that the consumption of cigarettes has risen since plain packaging was introduced; we just can’t be sure whether it is by existing smokers or new smokers.”

But according to the department of health, recent figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) show that total consumption of tobacco and cigarettes in the March quarter 2014 is the lowest ever recorded.

It has dropped from $3.508bn in December 2012 to 3.405 billion in March 2014.

The Guardian's Data Blog analysed the figures used by The Australian on June 6 and found there was indeed a small 0.28% increase in sales year on year but the paper had failed to account for the increase in the population between 2012 and 2013.

"Adjusted for population, tobacco sales per person have actually continued to decrease from 920.4 in 2012 to 906.9 in 2013," the Data Blog reported.

The AMA was joined by the Cancer Council in pointing the finger at the tobacco industry for driving a misinformation campaign to undermine the effectiveness of plain packaging, but stopped short of naming the Australian.

The Cancer Council CEO and medical oncologist, Professor Ian Olver, cited new Treasury figures which he said were a further indication of a decline in smoking, with tobacco clearances (including excise and customs duty) falling by 3.4% in 2013 relative to 2012, when tobacco plain packaging was introduced.

“The so-called data being spun by the tobacco industry to claim that plain packaging has not worked is plain wrong," Olver said in a statement.

“If we used tobacco industry claims to guide health policy, life expectancy in Australia would be much lower than it is today.”

The Cancer Council said the tobacco industry’s misinformation campaign was “aimed at undermining the introduction of plain packaging in the UK”.

“In a country of 63 million people, plain packaging would be a major blow to the tobacco industry’s profits,” Prof Olver said.

In Wednesday's report The Australian claimed that the government's anti-smoking measures were driving a boom in cheap cigarettes because smokers were "buying more cigarettes from the lowest market segment".

"Neilsen data indicates that 42.3 per cent of all cigarettes now purchased are priced at less than $15 a pack, a rise from 25.6 per cent of the market in 2011 and 35.2 per cent at the end of last year," the report said.

The report quoted tobacco industry executives to back this claim. The managing director of Philip Morris, John Gledhill, told The Australian: “As industry and market experts have previously warned, the government’s forced removal of tobacco brands and trademarks has triggered intense price competition.”