JTI goads Australia over ‘branding ban’ failure

After three years in which Australia’s standardized tobacco packaging legislation has been in force, the government is still refusing to admit that it has been a failure, according to a note posted on Japan Tobacco International’s website today.

Australia’s Tobacco Plain Packaging Act (TPPA) was aimed at: discouraging people from taking up smoking or using tobacco products; encouraging people to give up smoking and to stop using tobacco products; discouraging people who have given up smoking or who have stopped using tobacco products from relapsing; and reducing people’s exposure to smoke from tobacco products.

JTI said that as a result of the failure of the policy to meet these aims, the Department of Health (DoH) was pushing back the publication of its Post-Implementation Review (PIR).

Since the introduction of the ‘branding ban’ in December 2012, the government’s own data had shown no change to the pre-existing decline in smoking rates, it said. Minutes of a Senate debate held in October had highlighted the uneasiness surrounding the PIR and the difficulty that the DoH was having in producing a report that complied with government guidelines. There were fears that the review might be sub-standard because it did not measure the TPPA against its original objectives.

“Anti-tobacco lobbyists have misrepresented the data to hide the fact that the ban on brands has failed”, said Michiel Reerink, JTI’s Regulatory Strategy vice president. “Australia – the only country where the measure has been introduced – cannot be held up as a model for other countries to follow.”

JTI said that official guidelines stated that PIRs on major policies such as the standardized packaging law should be conducted within two years of the policy’s being introduced, and completed within six months. They require PIRs to measure the success of the policy against the original objectives of the legislation.

“The DoH is desperate to prove the success of this policy but all of the evidence – their own evidence – points to failure,” said Reerink. “The government should own up to this failure, and the PIR is an opportunity to do that. If this review is not completed and published soon, and if it is not compliant with the government’s own standards, other countries will be misled.”