Understanding the links between tobacco companies, their lobbyists and Australian politics “was like doing a complex, 5,000-piece jigsaw with many missing or blank pieces”, Cancer Council NSW researcher Melissa Jones says.
In research that took several months, Jones and her colleagues found almost half (48%) of internal tobacco company lobbyists held positions in state, territory or federal government before or after working in the tobacco industry.
The study, led by University of Sydney tobacco control expert Dr Christina Watts and co-authored by Jones, is the first in Australia to systematically investigate the “revolving door” tactic in tobacco lobbying.
The “revolving door” is where former political staffers go on to work for tobacco companies or for lobby groups acting on their behalf, using their inside knowledge of government and industry to exert influence over health policy.
Published in the Public Health Research and Practice journal on Thursday, the study calls for stronger transparency and oversight legislation to eliminate tobacco industry influence in politics.
“The revolving door has been described as one of the most insidious forms of state capture and a serious threat to democracy,” Jones said.
“It’s a system that favours private, profit-driven and unhealthy industries in their attempts to push back stronger regulations and undermine evidence-based public health policy.”
Jones said the use of arms-length, third-party lobbyists who previously worked for government “is a critical tool” to circumvent an article of of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which calls upon governments to protect policymaking from industry interference.
“There are many, many gaping holes in the available public transparency data and it took us many months of trawling and cross-checking current and historical federal and state lobbying registers against LinkedIn profiles and media articles to establish who had gone through the revolving door,” Jones said.
Laura Hunter, the co-CEO of the Australian Council on Smoking and Health, said the research painted “a very telling picture of the vested interests of lobbyists and tobacco industry”.
“Tobacco industry representatives, including those who have left their roles, are seasoned experts in attempting to infiltrate and influence government policy,” Hunter said.
“Individuals employed by these multinationals willingly sign up to work for an organisation that sells a product which kills 20,000 Australians every year. These interests do not belong in the halls of parliament or on any lobbying register.”
Guardian Australia previously revealed how international pro-vaping groups, supported by big tobacco, hired Australian political lobbyists amid proposed vaping reforms.
The research describes how a vaping industry front group, secretly funded by tobacco giant Philip Morris, hired an ex-ministerial advisor in Canberra – without any public awareness or cooling-off period – to lobby the government to legalise vapes for retail consumer sales.
Afterwards, the advisor returned directly to work for a senior government minister, again with no apparent cooling-off period. Several other ex-ministerial lobbyists were later revealed to have been involved in this big tobacco-sponsored campaign, the paper reveals.
“In Canada, cooling-off periods after working for government are five years compared with Australia’s inadequate 12-to-24 months, and their system is overseen and enforced by an independent regulator who is authorised to apply strict penalties for breaches,” Jones said. “In the USA lobbyists can even end up in prison if they flout lobbying laws.”
During this period former government staff cannot, for example, make representations to a department, organisation, board, commission, tribunal or public sector entity with which they had previous dealings.
Ireland’s strict lobbying transparency laws require “any meeting with high-level public officials, as well as letters, emails or tweets intended to influence policy” be disclosed. Australian federal disclosure laws do not require disclosure of meetings or correspondence, and laws also differ between states and territories.
When the health minister, Mark Butler, announced sweeping vaping reforms this month, he said influence from tobacco and vaping lobby groups over politicians successfully scuppered his predecessor Greg Hunt’s attempt to ban vaping imports in 2020.
One of the priorities identified in the new National Tobacco Strategy 2023-30 include developing “regulatory options to require the tobacco industry and those working to further its interests to periodically submit information” on a range of activities including “marketing expenditure and any related activity, including lobbying, philanthropy and political contributions”.
