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Tobacco repackaging appeal runs out of puff

Aug 25th, 2016
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http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=516d5294-b62d-4d4a-9d32-b0f55aba23ab

Scandinavian Tobacco Group Eersel BV v Trojan Trading Company Pty Ltd [2016] FCAFC 91

The appellants (STG) manufacture and sell cigars under various marks, including the marks in suit. Trojan imported and retailed genuine STG cigars in competition with STG’s authorised Australian distributor, but from a different source. STG cigars supplied to the authorised Australian distributor complied with Australia’s plain packaging laws for tobacco products; those supplied to Trojan did not. Accordingly, Trojan had to unpack STG’s cigars upon their arrival in Australia and repackage them in compliant packaging. Trojan’s packaging, among other things, included the marks in suit on an area and portion of the packaging which was not the same as the packaging of STG’s authorised distributor.

STG’s claim of trade mark infringement failed at first instance, because the defence in s 123 of the Trade Marks Act 1995 (Cth) was held to apply. In particular, the learned trial judge (Allsop CJ) found that the registered owner’s “consent” was to be assessed at the time of manufacture, rather than when Trojan repackaged and arguably “re-applied” the marks in suit to otherwise genuine goods. That interpretation was held to be consistent with the role of s 123 in “protecting as non-infringing use that which does no more than draw a connection between the goods and the registered owner”.

STG appealed against the decision, arguing unsuccessfully that the trial judge’s conclusion on the application of s 123 was erroneous (see below). Trojan filed a notice of contention that put into issue the correctness of the trial judge’s finding (which followed Full Court authority) that Trojan’s repackaging constituted use of the marks in suit “as a trade mark” within the meaning of s 120. At first instance, Trojan had argued that there had been trade mark use, but that the use had been by STG and not Trojan because Trojan applied the marks only to indicate a trade connection between the goods and STG. The Full Court (Besanko, Nicholas and Yates JJ) dealt with that issue first.

The Full Court first considered the state of authorities prior to the current Act, and observed that “by the time the 1995 Act was drafted, the question whether a person uses a registered mark already applied to goods by the registered proprietor which that person later imports and sells in Australia was by no means settled”. The Full Court also noted the conceptual difficulty in accepting (as Trojan would have it) that a reseller of goods to which a mark is applied by the trade mark owner does not itself “use” that mark, whereas on the authorities it is clear that a reseller of goods to which a mark is applied by a third party does use the mark. The Full Court concluded that “under the provisions of the 1995 Act, a person who, in the course of trade, imports and sells goods to which a registered mark was applied by its owner at the time of manufacture will have used the mark as a trade mark”. If that were not the case, the defence in s 123 would be little more than smoke and mirrors.

The Full Court accepted, as had the trial judge, Trojan’s submissions concerning the application of s 123. On Trojan’s approach, if a registered owner has applied its mark to the relevant goods, then it is open to another person to purchase the goods, remove the mark, and then re-apply it for the purposes of resale. In contrast, under STG’s approach, the re-application of a mark also would need to have occurred with the consent of the registered owner.

In preferring Trojan’s approach, the Full Court noted that “a registered trade mark may be used in many different ways which do not involve physically applying the mark to goods”, such as in advertising material (which a reseller may well create itself), invoices and other documents, and even in conversations. There does not need to be any direct physical relationship between the owner’s use of the mark and that of the reseller. It also is important to note that s 123 does not require that the registered owner consent to the acts of the reseller (whether they be selling a genuine product outside of the owner’s official channels, the creation of advertising material to promote those products, or some other activity in which a mark is “applied to, or in relation to,” the goods within the definition in s 9(1)). Section 123 must be construed so as to allow it to cover a wide variety of circumstances of use.

Further, the “operation of the section is not expressly or impliedly confined to a situation in which the goods still bear the mark as applied by the owner. The temporal requirement of the section will be satisfied if at some time in the past, which may be after the time of manufacture, the mark has been applied to or in relation to goods by or with the consent of the owner.” The defence therefore will be available, for example, in cases where original packaging has been removed due to damage or a need to comply with local regulation.

Insofar as that result might give rise to concerns about potential impacts on a registered owner’s goodwill or reputation, the Full Court emphasised that issues of deception were not relevant to the operation of the defence (although they might arise under, for example, passing off or the prohibition of misleading or deceptive conduct). Further, a registered owner is afforded some protection by the “notice of prohibition” mechanism under s 121 of the Act, to which s 123 does not apply.

The Full Court upheld the dismissal at first instance of STG’s claims for passing off and breach of the Australian Consumer Law.

The Commercial Bar Association of Victoria – The Honourable Peter C Heerey AM QC, Tom D Cordiner and Alan Nash

Tobacco giant shrinking size of some cigarette packs as smokers to be hit with another tax rise

Aug 14th, 2016
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http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/tobacco-giant-shrinking-size-of-some-cigarette-packs-as-smokers-to-be-hit-with-another-tax-rise/news-story/535e6f0188faad2317a570620e6b7b26

A TOBACCO giant is shrinking the size of some cigarette packs as smokers are set to be hit with another tax rise.

Retailers will start phasing in Dunhill brand packs of 23, culled from 25, from next month. The wholesale price of the new packs will be the same as the bigger size now.

British American Tobacco Australia spokesman Nicholas Booth said: “Dunhill smokers told us that instead of paying a higher price after the next tax hike in September, they’d prefer to have slightly fewer sticks and have the price stay the same.

“The wholesale price will be the same as the pre-tax Dunhill 25.”

A double whammy 12.5 per cent federal tobacco excise increase, plus indexation, takes effect from September 1.

The current tobacco tax take on a single cigarette is AUD 53.7 cents — a grab ranging from AUD $10.75 for a pack of 20, to AUD $26.85 for a pack of 50.

Next month’s increase is expected to see smokers cough up at least AUD $1.30 to AUD $3.35 more tax per pack, depending on size.

Retail price changes vary depending on competition and margins.

Public health campaigners say a series of 12.5 per cent annual tax hikes pencilled in for the next four years will further reduce smoking rates because of soaring prices.

The Dunhill downsize adds to a string of shrinking packs including Freddo Frogs, laundry liquid, deodorants and potato chips such as Pringles.

“British American Tobacco Australia is working with retailers to roll out Dunhill 23s from September,” Mr Booth said.

“The product remains the same with all Dunhill 25s variants transitioning to this pack size by the end of the year.

“Like most fast moving consumer goods companies we have a portfolio of products we offer our consumers and this is constantly reviewed.

“The introduction of Dunhill 23s is in response to feedback from consumers.”

September’s 12.5 per cent tobacco excise increase is in addition to twice-yearly indexation linked to average weekly ordinary-time earnings. The indexation amount for September will be determined soon.

Cigarette makers have warned that steep excise rises are fueling the illegal tobacco black market.

Australian tobacco executive bashed and stabbed in attempted kidnap

Aug 11th, 2016
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http://www.smh.com.au/national/australian-tobacco-executive-bashed-and-stabbed-in-failed-kidnap-attempt-20160811-gqqds1.html

The attempted kidnapping, bashing and stabbing of an international tobacco company manager outside his family home in Sydney suggests crime syndicates are hitting back at efforts to combat the booming illicit tobacco trade.

A criminal syndicate is suspected of ordering the botched kidnapping in June of a former decorated NSW policeman turned manager of British American Tobacco.

The BAT manager was stabbed and bashed by at least three men, after he refused their order that he get into a car. The kidnappers arrived at the man’s Sydney home at around 10pm on Saturday June 4.

A source said the manager was forced to “fight for his life” to ward off the kidnappers, who have not been identified. He was rushed to hospital after the attack.

The attack appears to be an unprecedented escalation in the struggle between policing agencies and the syndicates driving the illicit tobacco trade. Evidence suggests the attack was linked to BAT’s support of police inquiries.

Police and big tobacco companies believe the illegal trade is driven by the escalating cost of legal cigarettes, and is now worth more than $1 billion. Budget measures mean a legal pack of cigarettes will cost $40 by 2020, compared with as little as $10 for a smuggled packet.

The bashed BAT manager had been working closely with state and federal agencies investigating the illicit trade, which is a huge source of income for organised crime syndicates in Melbourne and Sydney.

The attack has shocked law enforcement and security officials, who have compared it to the Italian mafia’s violent confrontations with managers from supermarket giant Woolworths over control of the fruit trade several decades ago.

The attack comes less than a year after a separate incident in which an undercover agent was threatened while working confidentially with organised crime detectives investigating tobacco smugglers.

A key concern to emerge from the attempted kidnapping is how the underworld may have learned of the BAT manager’s support of transnational police investigations into tobacco trafficking.

It may have also been designed as a warning to any person supporting authorities.

The attack has led some organised crime investigators to question why NSW Chief Commissioner Andrew Scipione, who has been briefed on the attack, agreed in May to shut down the Polaris waterfront crime taskforce, which was investigating several leading illicit tobacco importers in NSW.

The federal government’s response to the spike in the illicit tobacco trade has been a modest $7.7 million funding boost for the small but successful Australian Border Force Tobacco Strike Teams, which have been operating for a year.

The teams, devised by Australian Border Force chief Roman Quaedvlieg, have already intercepted tens of millions of dollars worth of tobacco smuggled in shipping containers into Sydney and Melbourne from the Middle East and Asia.

The teams have also mapped strong links between the illicit tobacco trade and notorious organised crime families in Melbourne and Sydney – families that are also allegedly involved in drug trafficking and violence.

It is possible the success of the strike teams, or the work of Taskforce Polaris, encouraged the attack on the BAT manager.

Organised crime investigators in NSW and Victoria have been warning for months that the illicit tobacco trade is booming.

One NSW based tobacco smuggling syndicate has used its profits to fund cocaine importations and is also linked to fundraising for a Lebanese community organisation loosely aligned with the militant Lebanese group Hezbollah.

Organised crime groups traditionally involved in drug importations have embraced the illicit tobacco market due to the less serious penalties for those caught importing and the huge profits available.

Increases in tobacco excise, which is set to rise again this year and are backed by both major parties due to public health and revenue raising benefits, has been a boon for the illicit trade.

Criminal intelligence suggests that this has in turn led to an increase in efforts to corrupt law enforcement officials and waterfront workers who can aid smugglers.

Despite successful law enforcement efforts, illicit tobacco is sold freely and openly across Australia, suggesting huge quantities of the untaxed product is being continuously and successfully smuggled into Australia.

Health advocates have accused the tobacco industry of overstating the size of Australia’s illicit tobacco market and the involvement of organised crime as part of a strategy by ‘big tobacco’ to combat anti-tobacco initiatives that erode the profits of cigarette companies

Big Tobacco’s controversial, ailing crusade against plain packaging

Aug 6th, 2016
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http://www.economist.com/news/business/21703424-big-tobaccos-controversial-ailing-crusade-against-plain-packaging-no-logo

THREE years ago, the government of Togo, which has a gross domestic product of $4 billion, received a letter from Philip Morris International, a tobacco giant which last year earned revenues of $74 billion. The country had been mulling bringing in plain packaging for cigarette boxes. It would risk “violating the Togolese constitution”, the firm’s subsidiary explained, “providing tobacco manufacturers the right to significant compensation.” It then outlined how plain packaging would violate binding global and regional agreements. Togo was in no position to anger its international partners, it suggested.

For health advocates, such tactics are the last refuge of firms they have long denounced. But tobacco companies will do what they can to protect their packaging. They detest warnings with repulsive images of decaying body parts. In 2010 Philip Morris sued Uruguay, claiming that big warnings on boxes violated a trade deal. Then two years later Australia became the first country to go further, banishing iconic trademarks from tobacco packs. Its law mandates that brand names—such as Marlboro, Winfield or Dunhill—appear in grey type against a background of Pantone 448C, a putrid green deemed the world’s ugliest colour by a market-research firm.

Reprints

So tobacco firms sued—in Australian courts, before a UN tribunal and by supporting countries that challenged the rule before the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on the ground that banning trademarks represents an expropriation of intellectual property (IP). Less formally, they and allies have lobbied against warnings and plain packaging in places ranging from Namibia to New Zealand. It has all been surprisingly effective. Until very recently, Australia has been the only country to ban tobacco trademarks from cigarette packs.

Such avenues may be closing. Although the WTO’s decision is still pending, firms lost their other suits against Australia. Last month arbitrators at the World Bank threw out the lawsuit against Uruguay. In May the European Court of Justice upheld a rule on big warnings and Britain’s High Court confirmed one for plain packaging. It seems likely that more governments will in future prioritise public health over IP. Canada, France and Ireland are already moving towards plain packs.

If so, ugly packaging could become the most damaging rule tobacco firms have faced in years. To date many laws have hurt firms in some ways but also, strangely, helped them in others. Bans on advertising lower their costs. Small competitors, unable to advertise, struggle to grow. High excise taxes can be another boon: when taxes are fixed and large, a big increase in the underlying price of a pack amounts to a relatively small rise in the pack’s total price. High prices have sustained tobacco firms, even as smoking rates decline. “They probably have the best pricing power of any industry,” says James Bushnell of Exane BNP Paribas, a broker.

But plain packaging clamps down on one of their last bits of advertising. The design of the box is where they must convey not only the name of the brand but abstract qualities, such as masculinity or the idea that a product is “premium”, and worth an extra outlay. If such traits are stripped from packs, consumers may choose cheaper brands. That is particularly worrisome in emerging markets, says Mr Bushnell, where standard packs would threaten the aspirational appeal of smoking. Other “sin” industries are worried. The International Trademark Association frets that governments might strip trademarks from junk food and liquor.

It may become pointless for cigarette firms to start legal proceedings. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a pending free-trade agreement among 12 countries, shields governments from lawsuits over tobacco rules. It may unravel, but future pacts could have similar terms. Only America, where the right to free speech makes standard packs highly unlikely, may remain an anomaly (though it is a signatory to the TPP). In the past investors often viewed a new wave of rules on tobacco as a chance to buy tobacco stocks inexpensively, before they resumed their steady rise. This time may be different.

Experts fear legalising e-cig nicotine

Aug 5th, 2016
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http://www.news.com.au/national/breaking-news/tga-considers-legalising-ecig-nicotine/news-story/3076b8f342f2b8fce572dd6147c86208

It’s feared young people could again be encouraged to take up smoking if nicotine is allowed to be used in e-cigarettes.

E-cigarette devices are legal in Australia but the sale and possession of the nicotine used in them is illegal.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration is seeking public submissions on a proposal to exempt nicotine from the Schedule 7 dangerous poisons list, at concentrations of 3.6 per cent or less, in a bid to reduce the harm caused by tobacco.

The proposal comes from the New Nicotine Alliance, a not-for-profit body that advocates safer alternatives to tobacco smoking.

Alliance spokeswoman Donna Darvill says it’s “ludicrous” to ban low-strength nicotine when deadly tobacco cigarettes can be purchased at any petrol station.

“Keeping nicotine-containing vaping devices illegal deprives many thousands of Australian smokers a safer alternative to burning tobacco,” she said.

But experts warn the medicines regulator will be bombarded by big tobacco companies, looking to e-cigarettes as another opportunity to get people hooked.

Tobacco giant Philip Morris sells e-cigarettes in Japan and some European countries, while e-cigarette company Nicoventures is owned by British American Tobacco.

“They will receive a large number of totally commercially driven submissions from people who see this as an opportunity to make a lot of money,” University of Sydney public health Professor Simon Chapman told AAP on Friday.

He says big tobacco hasn’t taken its foot off the accelerator when it comes to opposing tobacco control.

Companies are still taking governments to court over plain-packaging laws and lobbying against tobacco taxation.

“They’re doing all of that while at the same time trying to be on the side of angels by saying, ‘Oh we’re into harm reduction’.”

Curtin University professor of health policy Mike Daube, who chaired the federal government expert committee that recommended plain-packaging laws, called for caution around any move that could allow big tobacco to renormalise smoking.

There was evidence raising concerns about the safety of e-cigarettes and harms from nicotine.

“Smoking trends in Australia are as good as anywhere in the world and we have to be very careful that we don’t allow anything to distract us from the measures that are proven to reduce smoking,” he told AAP.

Prof Chapman says evidence from the US and Poland shows e-cigarettes are acting as a gateway to smoking for young people.

The smoking rate among 12 to 15-year-olds is 3.5 per cent, the lowest ever seen in Australia, and that could be jeopardized if the e-cigarette genie is let out of the bottle, he says.

It could also become a crutch preventing smokers from quitting altogether, he warns.

But tobacco treatment specialist Colin Mendelsohn says there’s no evidence to suggest e-cigarettes are being used as a gateway to smoking.

E-cigarettes are a “fantastic” option to help people quit smoking, he says.

“What you die from is the smoke, not the nicotine – this is tobacco harm reduction and that’s saving millions of lives,” Dr Mendelsohn said.

“If tobacco companies make money out of it, I couldn’t care less, I want people to stop smoking.”

Why Big Tobacco has reason to fear the waking divestment giant

Aug 3rd, 2016
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http://www.econotimes.com/Why-Big-Tobacco-has-reason-to-fear-the-waking-divestment-giant-243662

This week The Guardian published a long-form profile by veteran journalist Gideon Haigh of Dr Bronwyn King.

I wrote a column about her last October when her efforts to dissuade the Australian superannuation industry to divest itself of tobacco stocks had been followed by a dozen companies selling off more than A$1 billion worth of tobacco stock.

Haigh’s report details the recent decision of AXA, the world’s second biggest insurance company to sell €200m of tobacco shares and to start divesting €1.6 billion worth of tobacco bonds after interaction with King. She now heads an International Union Against Cancer project to spread it globally, and her work has all the momentum of a brakeless train.

In Haigh’s article, Dr Alan Blum – a long time tobacco-control advocate who was once editor of the Medical Journal of Australia – tried to pour cold water on the project:

As long as another investor buys what a university, pension fund, or a health insurer sells there’s no net loss of investor confidence in the stock or capital in the company’s coffers.

This is a profoundly myopic view of why King’s work will instead be of great concern to the global tobacco industry. It’s true that every time an owner sells tobacco stock, it is bought by another, and often at a higher price (tobacco stocks are mostly still highly valued). The net value of the industry may go up as a result.

But when the reasons for such transactions are publicised in terms of the seller wanting no further part in assisting the tobacco business (or profiting from it) there is an additional externality or “price” in the transaction that is of absolute importance.

If we try to answer the question “why do some governments enact tough legislation and policy that we know impacts hard on tobacco sales?” we cannot avoid considerations about the values that drive such decisions.

When I interviewed former Labor health minister and attorney general Nicola Roxon for our book (with Becky Freeman) on plain packs, she was emphatic that the decision to go down that path was seen as a political no brainer. She told me: everyone hates the tobacco industry. So any government hitting them hard will be seen as doing good work.

It’s not hard to find evidence that the tobacco industry is widely reviled. A 2011 survey of 85,000 international respondents (including an Australian sample of 5,611) conducted by the independent Reputation Institute and AMR Australia rated all major industries in 25 categories for reputation.

The top categories were consumer products (73.8), electrical and electronics (73.2) and computers (70.3). By far the worst performing category was tobacco which scored only 50.1 – well behind the next lowest category (utilities – 59). Few love their gouging power companies, but even fewer apparently love tobacco companies.

A 2005 Australian study found 79% of Australians thought tobacco companies either never or mostly did not tell the truth and another from 1999 found tobacco executives were rated the lowest of all occupational groups, including used car salesmen, traditionally the populist low-water mark of ethical business conduct.

This enduring stench didn’t happen capriciously or by fairy dust being cast about. It happened because over the years arc lights turned on the industry’s conduct and the unparalleled health consequences of its sales success stripped it of legitimacy and turned it into a pariah industry.

This is the key to why Bronwyn King’s work is so important. Each time she gets to argue for the reasons for divestment, and each time an investor repeats those reasons in making the announcement, the public and political narrative against tobacco consolidates an imperceptible, but cumulatively undeniable extra few steps forward.

As this inexorable momentum proceeds, people in power emerge, like Nicola Roxon, who translate that narrative into policy action which hammers the industry by reducing smoking.

With the narrative now rapidly percolating though the global finance community, King’s mission is now turbo-charging that narrative in a community which has always responded by reflecting Milton Friedman’s dictum from Capitalism and Freedom that:

Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible.

The tobacco industry goes to great pains to paint itself as just another perfectly legal, legitimate industry selling products that fully informed customers choose to smoke, addiction notwithstanding.

But in the 19th century, other similarly perfectly legal industries like the slave, opium, and child labour trades, began to see their legitimate status eroded by the social revulsion that their activities caused. These industries also richly rewarded their owners and investors, but those considerations were pushed aside by other values.

This is what is now happening with the tobacco divestment momentum.

Share price is a very poor proxy for the goals of tobacco control which are to reduce tobacco use and therefore the massive disease burden being caused. As Big Tobacco’s share prices have risen around the world, smoking has often gone back the other way.

The negative value to the industry of the divestment argument is so much larger in the long term than any short term profit. Bronwyn King is doing historic work.

Simon Chapman, Emeritus Professor in Public Health, University of Sydney

The doctor who beat big tobacco

Aug 2nd, 2016
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When Dr Bronwyn King discovered her pension fund was investing in the cigarette companies that were killing her cancer patients, she was staggered. And she knew she had to act

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/aug/01/the-doctor-who-beat-big-tobacco

On Good Friday this year, Dr Bronwyn King and her husband were staying with her parents in the quiet coastal town of Torquay in Victoria, Australia. They started watching a movie – although King, as she often is, was only half-there, busily pecking at her laptop.

“AXA – news …” said the subject line of the email from a French insurance executive. “In confidentiality,” it read: “we have decided to divest tobacco … If you can, let’s discuss further. Thanks for your help.” King felt momentarily giddy. It was six years since she had sent the first of tens of thousands of hopeful, courteous but determined emails with such ends in mind. She had already persuaded 35 Australian superannuation funds, as Australians call their private pension funds, controlling nearly half the total funds under management to shun tobacco. AXA, the world’s second biggest insurer, was her greatest success yet. But she passed up a celebratory glass of wine: there was work to do, on the details and timing of the announcement. When her family turned in, they left King, as they often do, at her laptop.

Two months later at Geneva’s plush Beau Rivage Hotel, King looked out over a sea of faces, mostly delegates gathered for the World Health Assembly, and introduced her “new best friend”, AXA boss Thomas Buberl. AXA, he said, would forthwith sell €200m of tobacco stocks: there was applause. It would also, he added, run down €1.6bn of tobacco corporate bonds. There was a hush. Had he just said billion?

In an old war, a new front had opened. Tobacco kills six million people a year: the McKinsey Global Institute deems it humankind’s greatest self-generated social burden, ahead even of war and terrorism. Yet as an issue, observes King’s colleague Clare Payne, it has receded in public consciousness: “There’s this tendency for people to think: ‘Oh we’re done with tobacco, aren’t we? Everyone knows. It’s just a choice thing for people now.’ When we’re actually in an epidemic – history’s first epidemic of a non-communicable disease.”

To restore it to the headlines, then, is no mean feat. “She’s a star,” says Cary Adams, CEO of the Union for International Cancer Control, who just over a year ago put King in charge of the Global Task Force for Tobacco Divestment. It’s not a mantle that rests easily with King. All the 41-year-old oncologist at Melbourne’s Epworth Healthcare feels she’s done is take to heart her hippocratic oath, especially the injunction to “do no harm”.

Into her mid-20s, King’s career had seemed mapped out. At Fintona Girls’ School in the Melbourne suburb of Balwyn, she had been a star junior swimmer, thriving on the daily pre-dawn starts and unrelenting competition, climaxing in medals at national championships and a victory in the Pier-to-Pub, a famous open water race in Australia. On completing medical studies in 1999, she became an Australian swimming team doctor, and weighed up specialising in sports medicine and paediatrics.

In February 2001, however, King began three months as a radiation oncology resident in the lung cancer unit of Peter MacCallum Cancer hospital. She was, she confesses, a reluctant conscript. Radiation oncology, which uses giant linear accelerators to beat back advancing cancers, is a technically and emotionally challenging field of medicine, undertaken underground for the containment of its x-ray emissions, dedicated chiefly to the very sick. And sickest of all are smokers.

For King it was an education. The five-year survival rate after diagnosis for lung cancer is 15%: her job was largely to alleviate its acute associated sufferings. Most people have an image of lung cancer sufferers propped in bed subsiding gently, maybe with a bit of a cough, possibly on oxygen. The reality is very different. In a fifth of cases, for example, lung cancer metastasises to the brain, inducing paralysis and loss of cognitive function: the patient, literally, loses their mind. Death can come violently too. One morning King arrived to find the corner of a ward absent not only its bedclothes but its curtains and furnishings. The night before a patient had essentially drowned in her own blood from a burst vessel, drenching staff in her death throes. In the room were three other terrified patients who had heard the whole thing.

Almost every interaction bore witness in some way to tobacco’s toll. Taking a history from a new female patient one day, King asked her age. “I’m 43,” the woman replied. “I’m getting quite old.” It transpired that her whole immediate family had died in their 40s from smoking-related cancers. “I had this overwhelming sense of the impact of tobacco,” King recalls. “The public did not know what was going on. They didn’t know because I was a doctor and I hadn’t known. Until I worked there. I started to wish I had a television camera with me, so people could see what I was seeing.”

But so much was out of sight for a reason – to which King was first introduced by an older patient who beckoned her from his bed, looked around furtively, and whispered: “This is because of the smoking, isn’t it?” When she said it probably was, he nodded and looked away. Here were lung cancer’s little-acknowledged secondary symptoms: disgrace and shame. Where families could be relied on to rally around sufferers from breast and prostate cancer, tension surrounded those with tobacco-related illness, who were perceived as having brought cancer on themselves. This has been an unforeseen impact of the public health campaign to scare smokers straight: in a recent survey, 30% of Australians agreed with the sentiment that lung cancer patients were less deserving of sympathy than other cancer patients. “Lung cancer has become the syphilis of the 21st century,” says the head of Peter MacCallum’s lung cancer unit, Professor David Ball. “Patients are regarded as victims of their own lack of self-control. Whereas they’re actually victims of a concerted and successful campaign by the tobacco industry to turn them into addicts.”

It was Ball, a fixture at Peter Mac since 1973, who became King’s lodestar. He instilled an environment of kindness and hope. Young doctors, says Ball, can feel overwhelmed: “I’ve had people in training in this specialty who’ve eventually been reduced to tears, saying they can’t go on. They want all their patients to get better. Life’s not like that.” He encourages them to think differently:

For a doctor, lung cancer sufferers are tremendously rewarding to work with. They don’t come in saying: ‘Why me? I’m pissed off. Why aren’t you working harder to find a cure?’ They come in feeling ashamed. When you reassure them that you want to make their life as good as it can be, they’re immensely grateful. Because they tend to stay long periods, you get to know them as people too. And you’re at that very serious time of life, where the questions are deep and philosophical, and existential concerns come to the fore.

Those questions resonated with King. “People say that if you don’t know what you want to do before you work with David, you will afterwards,” she says. “He was the first doctor I really wanted to be – a great teacher, a great colleague, interested in everyone and everything. In that three months, I got to know patients, I got to know families, I worked with an inspiring medical team, I felt so privileged, and it changed me forever.” She dug in for what became the seven-year haul towards adding FRANZCR – Fellow of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists – to her postnominals. After a couple of years she was joined in this pursuit, and in her life, by Dr Mark Shaw, a quietly-spoken New Zealander whom she met at Geelong’s Andrew Love Cancer Centre and married. Yet her life-change remained incomplete until she and her husband emerged from their high-stakes, high-stress discipline to do something of utmost normality – buy a house.

King calls it “the story”; maybe it should be “The Story.” It’s how she prefaces most presentations – if ever time precludes it, she feels regretful. “It explains everything, really,” she says. “Sometimes I apologise to audiences for having told it so often. But people always come up afterwards and say: ‘I love that story’.”

The scenario, a conversation about her finances with a consultant from superannuation fund Health Super in the Peter MacCallum cafeteria in March 2010, could hardly have been more prosaic. In fact, King was standing to leave when a final question crossed her mind: was she meant to specify how she wanted her money invested? No need, said the consultant: her money, as it is with 75% of Australians, was in the “default option”.

King asked about the alternatives. Oh, came the reply, there was a “greenie option”, involving no investment in mining, alcohol or tobacco. The answer brought her up short. “Does that mean I’m currently investing in tobacco?” she asked. Well yes, the consultant replied: “Everyone is.” King sat back down.

It was worse. Two weeks later the consultant confirmed that four of the five biggest holdings in the international component of Health Super’s default option were tobacco-related: British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco, Philip Morris and Swedish Match. King shared this exposure with the overwhelming majority of Peter Mac’s 2,500 staff members. “We’re a dedicated cancer hospital,” she recalls. “There was nowhere else this could have mattered more. The idea that all of us, the doctors, the nurses, the occupational therapists, the speech pathologists, were invested in tobacco companies … well, it had to be fixed.” King’s concerns were immediately shared by Peter Mac’s CEO, Craig Bennett, who accompanied her to a meeting with members of Health Super’s executive and investment team.

The response was cordial but bemused. “It was strange for a financial institution to be approached by members about these issues,” King recalls. “Mainly they were surprised.” A “good-natured” discussion ensued. Other factors then conspired to relegate tobacco to a back burner: Health Super commenced a merger with Sydney-based First State Super. In the hiatus, King started educating herself. Australian super funds had only between 0.5 and 1.3% of their assets in tobacco. But in a $2tn pool, that was still in the region of $10bn. The seven biggest funds with health professionals as members all offered “greenie” opt-outs, designated “sustainable”, “ethical” or “socially responsible”. But four of these actually had money in tobacco.

After a year’s to-and-fro with Health Super, King finally got in front of its board, flanked by Craig Bennett and David Ball, punctuating her PowerPoint presentation with knockout statistics: that someone in the world dies from tobacco use every eight seconds; that these include 15,000 Australians a year; that no substance takes a steeper toll of lives and years lost.

King was nervous and exhilarated: “I was presenting to all these people from a world I knew nothing about sitting next to the man who knows everything [Ball].” She was also shortly to take maternity leave: “I thought: ‘If this doesn’t work, it’s probably going nowhere.’” But the response was gratifying: “I could also tell by the end of that meeting we had a lot of friends.” The impression deepened at the first instance of what would be a recurrent experience, when a director trailed her to the lift. “Just so you know,” the director said, “my mother died of lung cancer. Thank you for doing this.”

About to fold, Health Super’s board bequeathed the issue to its new parent. First State Super CEO Michael Dwyer is an unusual boss – inspired by visiting Timor-Leste in 2000, he co-founded Australia for UNHCR, which raises funds for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. He sensed a problem it might be prudent to get ahead of: a group with 40% of its members in health services that had $170m invested in tobacco was bound to hear more about it.

Like other super funds, First State Super was required to observe the Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Act, binding trustees at all times to act in members’ best interests, which has tended to be interpreted by law in a narrowly financial sense. But at this point, another statute made its presence felt: tobacco share prices were hit by, among other things, the proclamation of Australia’s Tobacco Plain Packaging Act in 2011. “I could tell the board that these were stocks whose product was being condemned and restricted by every government round the country,” says Dwyer. “They had no redeeming feature. As Bronwyn says: ‘There’s no such thing as a safe cigarette.’” In July 2012, CEO and doctor put their names to a press release declaring First State Super the first Australian superannuation fund to renounce tobacco; six months later HESTA, whom King had also courted, followed suit. And though the process had taken two years, she was used to long hauls. “I started thinking,” she says, “if they could do it, why not others?”

Superannuation conferences can be dry affairs. So when Dwyer started dropping King into programmes through 2013 and 2014, her presence and message quickly gained a following. Grabbing audiences with The Story, she did not let go. “I’ve never seen anyone network like Bronwyn,” says Michael Baldwin, CEO of the Funds Executive Association, an industry group whose conference she addressed in June 2013. “It’s a skill I wish I had. People love dealing with her.” She distributed a business card bearing the rubric Tobacco Free Portfolios, featuring a logo designed online for $300 transfiguring the ribbon that is a cancer remembrance’s best-known symbol into a cigarette. She piled up cards she collected and studiously emailed the addressees, politely petitioning to meet directors, trustees and investment managers – even just to “have a coffee”.

Those meetings regularly begat further meetings, and also elicited personal confidences. In any group of five people she sat down with, King found, at least one person would be harbouring a story about how tobacco-related illness had touched their lives; down the track, two chairmen would recuse themselves from votes about their funds’ tobacco exposures, fearful of emotion clouding their corporate decision making.

Pregnant through some of this time with a second child, King found that her most incisive pitch was illuminating the tobacco industry’s exploitation of the young. The average age at which Australian smokers take the habit up, 15 years and nine months, is actually high by world standards. Globally it’s estimated that 80-100,000 children start smoking every day – so much for the notion of smoking being based on mature, fully-informed choice. What’s more, according to the International Labour Organisation, up to 60% of the 33 million engaged in tobacco farming worldwide are under 16. To those who challenged that tobacco stocks were historically good performers, King had a brisk rejoinder: “If a business can live with six million deaths and externalising €2tn in health costs a year while employing mainly children, then it probably won’t find it difficult making money. All it has to do is adjust its moral compass.”

King was careful, all the same, not to scold. After all, much of this information was new to her too – and as a medical practitioner she might have been expected to know it. In fact, as she realised, medicine has historically been divided between clinicians like herself, who treat people, and public health specialists, concerned with society. So she sought out the likes of Professor Simon Chapman at University of Sydney and Professor Mike Daube from Curtin University, whose experiences in tobacco control stretched back to the 1970s. They were impressed. “I get a lot of approaches from people with crackpot ideas,” says Chapman. “Bronwyn immediately struck me as different – someone highly intelligent, very organised, and street smart. Not to mention engaging and vivacious in an area that’s stereotyped as deadly earnest and tinged with moralism.”

Says the wryly humorous Daube: “She’s such a deeply unpleasant person, isn’t she?”

While the tone of King’s campaign came naturally, she was shrewd enough to understand it as an attribute. She shrank from calling herself an “activist”; she was simply an “oncologist”. She denied hers was a “cause”; she spoke instead of pursuing her “interest”. She did not regard financial institutions as “targets”; instead she was seeking “partners”. She respected confidentiality, avoided confrontation, declined to court the media, and drew on her own experience as exemplifying the involuntary nature of much tobacco investment, which had its institutional counterparts. “I presented to one fund that took sustainability very seriously,” King recalls. “They had a ‘sustainable investment’ option. I looked into it. They chose their international shares via the Dow Jones sustainability index – a best of sector index which BAT [British American Tobacco] is part of … The board members of this super fund were … well, they felt tricked. Before I got home I had an email from their CEO saying: ‘We’ve issued a comprehensive tobacco free mandate across our portfolio.’”

By mid-2014, King’s initial epiphany had become almost all-consuming. A dozen funds had divested more than $A1bn of tobacco stocks. With two small boys, she was not sleeping much anyway, but she was enjoying herself. Tobacco Free Portfolios was winning support not only from business leaders but Australian politicians of all stripes: Liberal health minister Sussan Ley, former Labor health minister Nicola Roxon, the Greens’ Richard Di Natale and independent Andrew Wilkie all recorded video testimonials. Papers were being invited for the forthcoming biennial World Cancer Conference, which the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) happened to be staging in Melbourne. When King impulsively submitted an abstract, she had her first glimpse of the world of global tobacco control, and an opportunity to spread The Story. It cast its now-familiar spell.

The only time King falters in making the case for Tobacco Free Portfolios is in making the case for herself. And four and a half years after starting, she remained a one-woman band paying for things on her credit card. “I’m a doctor,” she says. “Doctors aren’t good with money. Most of us don’t even really like talking about it.” Introduced to the UICC boss, Cary Adams, she started talking about how much more she could do in Australia if she could afford it – just a little money to cover expenses. “You know,” said Adams, “you’re not thinking big enough.”

Adams is a former banker: prior to this role, he had been chief operating officer of Lloyds TSB. Maybe it was time his new community started talking to his old industry. Unbeknownst to King, the UICC every two years takes a local project to a “global platform”. They were shortly to do it again. “Leave this with me,” Adams said. “I’ve got big plans.”

There had been such plans before. Under the anti-tobacco sun, little is outright new. In the UK, activists had eyeballed the City as far back as the 1970s, buying single shares in tobacco companies so as to lob questions at annual meetings. After one, Mike Daube recalls, he was taken aside by Rothmans chairman Lord Pritchard, who offered to fund the protest campaign of his choice … providing it had nothing to do with tobacco.

Divestment was trialled in the US in the 1980s, partly inspired by the boycott of companies invested in apartheid South Africa. Activists first cajoled the American Medical Association into urging medical schools to withdraw from tobacco funds. In the 1990s several universities and state pension funds followed suit. But efforts petered out after 1998’s Master Settlement Agreement (in which 46 states settled healthcare lawsuits with the four biggest US tobacco companies), which perversely aligned the interests of big tobacco and state legislatures dependent on them for future funds. And opinion remains divided on the efficacy of divestment. “As long as another investor buys what a university, pension fund, or a health insurer sells,” says leading anti-tobacco authority Professor Alan Blum, of the University of Alabama, “there’s no net loss of investor confidence in the stock or capital in the company’s coffers.”

Anything attached to what’s conventionally abbreviated as CSR (corporate social responsibility) and ESG (environment, social, governance) also raises fiduciary questions. Does a manager of funds owe clients anything other than maximum returns? Is socially responsible investment even possible? In the 1990s, Philip Morris ran a stealth campaign against “social investing”, relying on an oft-cited 1980 paper by two distinguished American law professors. In “Social Investing and the Law of Trusts”, John Langbein and Richard Posner argued, in the context of disinvestment in South Africa, that “the trustee who sacrifices the beneficiary’s financial well-being for another object breaches both his duty of loyalty to the beneficiary and his duty of prudence in investment”; Langbein was subsequently employed by Philip Morris as a consultant.

Has the position changed? Professor Richard Daynard of Northeastern University, another veteran of the anti-tobacco movement, thinks so: “The Chicago School position argued by Milton Friedman is that the corporation has only one objective, which is greed, or shareholder return. Which means that any organisation doing socially responsible investing can get away with it only if is a complete fraud… and does not cost the company a penny. But nobody argues that any more. Lots of companies flourish their social responsibility credentials. They’re good for business. And there are business judgment rules which offer a board of directors a large amount of leeway.”

Two multilateral instruments have further widened that leeway. Ten years ago, after consultation with a group of big institutional investors, the United Nations laid out six “Principles of Responsible Investment”: there are today 1,500 signatories. The principles are aspirational and non-binding, but the first articulates a departure from circumscribed conceptions of fiduciary duty: “We will incorporate ESG issues into our ownership policies and practices.” And while UN PRI does not single out tobacco, another UN treaty does: in force since 2005, the World Health Organisation’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control has been signed by 180 countries, representing 89%of the world’s population. The framework is exacting and comprehensive, committing governments to a wide variety of risk minimization measures, taxes, regulations and prohibitions – including on investment. Article 5.3 specifies that “no branch of government, including local government, should have any financial interest or investment in the tobacco industry.” So far, only three countries have complied: New Zealand since 2007, Norway since 2009, Australia since 2013. Some even seem unaware of it, and not just the usual delinquents: the UK is presently rolling local government pension funds including their tobacco investments into seven sovereign wealth funds.

So divestment, says public health specialist Simon Chapman, has a different context, as well as a broader purpose. “The standard critique that someone sells then someone else buys misses the symbolic importance of building the rank odour around the industry,” he says. “That odour already exists in the health and medical professions and in the general population – when we poll them, we even get it from smokers. Building that consciousness among people making financial decisions furthers that delegitimisation.” Investment in tobacco, argues King, is a devil’s bargain. “When you invest in a company, you want that company to thrive, don’t you?” she says. “But do you really want big tobacco to thrive?”

Like a lung cancer, tobacco is also metastasizing as a public health issue. When the UICC appointed Tobacco Free Portfolios to run its global divestment initiative in March 2015, Adams appointed to its as chair a darling of the anti-cancer movement. Since her son’s diagnosis with leukaemia 20 years ago, Princess Dina Mired has dedicated her life to improving cancer treatments in Jordan: she is director-general of the Amman foundation of the King Hussein Cancer Center, her country’s largest.

Introduced to King, Princess Dina loved The Story: “It was one person seeing something shameful and deciding to do something about it, by herself, knocking on doors, showing commitment and never giving up.” More than that, she sensed the need for a form of tobacco control aimed at supply rather than demand. It is poorer countries, with weaker public health consciousness, that will chiefly bear tobacco’s brunt: the World Health Organisation estimates that by 2030 they will account for four in five tobacco-related deaths. The reasons are not far to seek.

“As countries like Australia, the US and Canada have been increasing regulation and hiking up prices, tobacco companies have made extra efforts in the Middle East and Africa,” she says. “Since the Arab Spring, we are a stressed-out population, and we are game … They [tobacco companies] are zooming on our youth in a really big way.” Today more than a third of Jordanians smoke and the proportion is growing: the crop of tobacco-related cancers being sown prelude a bitter harvest. “And if you invest in tobacco,” she adds, “you are part of that killing machine.”

Heading a Global Task Force, King still had unfinished business in Australia. But she now had a helper. Lawyer Clare Payne worked at Macquarie Bank for 11 years before founding an initiative called the Banking and Finance Oath: an attempt to popularise for finance industry professionals a code of practice akin to the hippocratic oath. So when she and King watched each other speak consecutively at a responsible investment conference in November 2014, they felt a natural kinship. “Bron’s achieved more than most people have in20 years of responsible investment,” says Payne. “She’s got more than engagement. She’s got action.” Payne joined Tobacco Free Portfolios as “chief operating officer”, even though her “office” was a cleared out built-in wardrobe in the Sydney cottage she shares with her young daughter.

Boards now faced two advocates, Payne with her corporate experience perhaps slightly steelier. Where King was always sunnily optimistic, Payne groaned inwardly at counterarguments trotted out, like a board chair who couldn’t see a problem with tobacco because an uncle had smoked till he was 95, not to mention the familiar slippery slope fallacies. “I remember one day this American saying to me: ‘Let me just play devil’s advocate here… ,’” says Payne. “And I thought: ‘Really? Aren’t we beyond that now? Unless it’s your view. Otherwise we’re just proceeding from a silly starting point.’” To Payne, the problem was straightforward: it was persuading the powerful to heed the people. “Australian society accepts tobacco control,” she says. “They don’t want their children to smoke. If they smoke themselves, they want to stop. They want fewer people to die. Governments want better health outcomes. Funds should reflect that.”

King, meanwhile, was pondering how to replicate across the world her Australian system. She tapped her “partners” for contacts and introductions, never failing to follow up the faintest lead. She would start days in oncology at Epworth Healthcare with two sheets of paper: her patient schedule, and her Tobacco Free Portfolios to-do list. The patients came first, their needs acute, their questions poignantly familiar. “‘How long?’” says King. “That’s what they all want to know. ‘My daughter’s getting married. Will I make it?’ ‘My daughter’s having a baby in January. Will I live to see it?’ ‘My son’s graduating next year. Will I be able to go?’”

Of time, she was constantly reminded, there was never enough. So any minute before, between or after patientcare was an opportunity to make a phonecall, send an email, or dash into the central business district. Nights steadily became Skype marathons. One evening her husband walked in with a cup of tea suggesting she take a break. “Quick, close the door!” she exclaimed. “I’m about to talk to Kuwait!” King laughs: “He looked at me and it was, like, ‘Who are you?’ He thought I’d lost the plot.”

Extending the filaments of her network also involved serious travel. In July 2015, King made her first trips to Washington and New York. In September, she took in a Principles of Responsible Investment conference in London and visited the World Health Organisation in Geneva. In November she travelled to Istanbul for the World Cancer Leaders summit, and swung on to London for a first look at the City.

Where doors were now open in Australia, they were only tentatively ajar in the UK. Big tobacco and City merchant banks align snugly. Rock star fund manager Neil Woodford has made a fortune from tobacco stocks for his eponymous investment boutique, explaining that clients expect him to “exercise an investment judgment” not a “moral judgment”. King notes: “The influence of companies like BAT and Imperial Brands is enormous.”

A roundtable for 20 investment professionals at the Whitechapel offices of Principles of Responsible Investment, a UN-supported NGO, became an eye-opening realtime experiment in City attitudes.

One guy, a very senior leader in UK finance, was quite difficult,” said King. “He just kept saying: ‘Our approach is to engage with the tobacco companies. We engage with the industry.’ He was getting very fired up, and I just had to hold my ground. Finally I said: ‘I understand engagement is a useful tool, and it’s important to be a good steward of capital. But this is the exception. Engagement with the tobacco industry is futile. Positive influence is impossible. There’s not one example in all the history of engagement leading to fewer deaths.”

Of course, this was very uncomfortable for him. Suddenly, out of the blue, this other guy whom I’d not met says: ‘We’re getting bogged down in the nitty-gritty here. What about the big vision? Isn’t this industry just killing six million people a year and we’re part of it if we’re investing in it?”

The interjector, Dawid Konotey-Ahulu, had arrived at the last minute, without particularly high expectations: “I assumed it would be a run-of-the-mill discourse on the dangers of tobacco and the virtues of shunning it.” Now he was excited. A former Merrill Lynch banker, Konotey-Ahulu has for the last decade run an investment and risk management consultancy for pension funds, Redington. King reminded him of a popular business concept: the Big Hairy Audacious Goal, or BHAG, coined by Jim Collins in his 1994 management bestseller Built to Last. Since the roundtable, he has become Tobacco Free Portfolios’ City adviser, including on the recruitment of a new London representative, Dr Rachel Melsom. “We are living in an era where ‘Do the Right Thing!’ is increasingly the guiding principle, and pension funds, by and large, want to do the right thing,” says Konotey-Ahulu. “It will not surprise me if in the near future, several large pension funds elect to disinvest from intrinsically harmful assets such as tobacco.” They now have an example.

On 28 February, after months of planning, King landed in London on her first European mission: 12 days, six countries, 45 meetings, with pension funds, insurers, sovereign wealth funds and health leaders. She had pursued every introduction, cadged every favour on offer. To her excitement, not one approach had been rebuffed. To her further excitement, she had arranged to spend the weekend in Paris with friends, the De Viennes, for whom in 1997 she had worked as an au pair. Then, unable to help herself, she asked round her Australian business “partners” with whom in France it might be worth meeting. The CEO of a major funds management business connected her with AXA.

So it was that six years after that meeting in her hospital’s cafeteria, King sat across a luncheon table at Café Chic on Rue du Faubourg from Sylvain Vanston, the 44-year-old responsible for the company’s corporate social responsibility initiatives. A year earlier Vanston had been instrumental in AXA’s ceasing to invest in coal; but since agreeing to meet, he had been musing that this was the first red flag ever raised about a vastly more significant killer. “Tobacco has been a problem for health, but it has not been a problem for investors,” he observes. “When I met Bronwyn, she immediately started putting together the pieces of the puzzle that we hadn’t.’

In King’s telling, that puzzle of tobacco’s unique iniquity has four pieces. Can the product be used safely? No: zero is the only safe number of cigarettes. Can an investor have a positive influence on the tobacco industry? No: the risks are indivisible from the product. Is the problem huge? Yes: the WHO forecasts a billion tobacco-related deaths in the 21st century. Is there a UN treaty? Yes: the WHO’s convention on tobacco control has sought to limit tobacco usage for more than a decade. A concluding pith: would you set up an industry now knowing that in the next year it would kill six million people and cost the health care system €2tn? Vanston was taken aback: “I thought I knew about tobacco, but in reality I’d missed important facts.” Did she have all this written down, he asked? King fished a Tobacco Free Portfolios information kit from her bag. That night she rang Payne. ‘I’ve got a good feeling about this,’ she said.

Likewise Vanston. This was a far bigger deal than coal: four times the size of investment, and entailing not insignificant financial sacrifices. But AXA’s incoming CEO Buberl had been promoting a redesign of its health business, arguing that insurance must change from being a payer of bills to a helper of clients toward healthier life choices incurring fewer health costs. And if AXA wanted clients to forswear tobacco, it could hardly do otherwise. Besides, Buberl observes, the calculus has changed: “Once, lung cancer meant a quick death. As treatment has improved and lives have been prolonged, it has gone from being a lethal to a chronic illness, and costs are exploding. It’s a simple equation – the social, medical and taxation consequences of smoking have grown considerably worse.”

Vanston was commissioned to present to Buberl’s management team; King, now back in Melbourne after whirling through Geneva, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Oslo, contributed by email. Back at work at the Epworth, preparing prognoses, counselling patients about their survival chances, she messaged Vanston just before his presentation, three weeks after their single meeting: “Good luck with your speech. Just imagine that you have every oncologist and every patient who has suffered from tobacco standing right beside you.” His CEO actually needed little convincing. “Decisions take longer when they’re ambiguous,” says Buberl. “There is nothing ambiguous about tobacco.”

Nor, it must be said, is there anything ambiguous about the money tobacco makes. It is a high cash-flow, low-volatility business – a classic defensive stock pick in times when they are scarce. Yet no industry could exercise so dark an allure – something accentuated by the profile of smokers, skewed increasingly towards the poor, the young, and, frankly, the darker-skinned and further away.

It is a problem of a magnitude that occasionally dismays King, although never for long. “I’m an optimist,” she says. “Some people I’ve met have been unconvinced by the arguments. Others have said ‘Oh it’s a bit early’ or ‘Can you come back with more information?’ But I’ve watched literally dozens of people move from that position of initial resistance, to thinking ours is a reasonable position, to being completely convinced and ringing up a few months later asking: ‘Is there anything I can do?’ I never hear ‘no’ as ‘never’; I hear it as ‘not yet’.” Since AXA, she has had contact with a score of European financial institutions: one sovereign wealth fund has already divested, although is yet to announce its decision. King’s travel schedule for the rest of the year looks unsparing, and she is resigned to forgoing sleep because of it. “But if I knew what I know and did nothing,” she says, “I couldn’t sleep at all.”

The doctor who beat big tobacco

Aug 1st, 2016
by Editor.
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When Dr Bronwyn King discovered her pension fund was investing in the cigarette companies that were killing her cancer patients, she was staggered. And she knew she had to act

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/aug/01/the-doctor-who-beat-big-tobacco

On Good Friday this year, Dr Bronwyn King and her husband were staying with her parents in the quiet coastal town of Torquay in Victoria, Australia. They started watching a movie – although King, as she often is, was only half-there, busily pecking at her laptop.

“AXA – news …” said the subject line of the email from a French insurance executive. “In confidentiality,” it read: “we have decided to divest tobacco … If you can, let’s discuss further. Thanks for your help.” King felt momentarily giddy. It was six years since she had sent the first of tens of thousands of hopeful, courteous but determined emails with such ends in mind. She had already persuaded 35 Australian superannuation funds, as Australians call their private pension funds, controlling nearly half the total funds under management to shun tobacco. AXA, the world’s second biggest insurer, was her greatest success yet. But she passed up a celebratory glass of wine: there was work to do, on the details and timing of the announcement. When her family turned in, they left King, as they often do, at her laptop.

Two months later at Geneva’s plush Beau Rivage Hotel, King looked out over a sea of faces, mostly delegates gathered for the World Health Assembly, and introduced her “new best friend”, AXA boss Thomas Buberl. AXA, he said, would forthwith sell €200m of tobacco stocks: there was applause. It would also, he added, run down €1.6bn of tobacco corporate bonds. There was a hush. Had he just said billion?

In an old war, a new front had opened. Tobacco kills six million people a year: the McKinsey Global Institute deems it humankind’s greatest self-generated social burden, ahead even of war and terrorism. Yet as an issue, observes King’s colleague Clare Payne, it has receded in public consciousness: “There’s this tendency for people to think: ‘Oh we’re done with tobacco, aren’t we? Everyone knows. It’s just a choice thing for people now.’ When we’re actually in an epidemic – history’s first epidemic of a non-communicable disease.”

To restore it to the headlines, then, is no mean feat. “She’s a star,” says Cary Adams, CEO of the Union for International Cancer Control, who just over a year ago put King in charge of the Global Task Force for Tobacco Divestment. It’s not a mantle that rests easily with King. All the 41-year-old oncologist at Melbourne’s Epworth Healthcare feels she’s done is take to heart her hippocratic oath, especially the injunction to “do no harm”.

Into her mid-20s, King’s career had seemed mapped out. At Fintona Girls’ School in the Melbourne suburb of Balwyn, she had been a star junior swimmer, thriving on the daily pre-dawn starts and unrelenting competition, climaxing in medals at national championships and a victory in the Pier-to-Pub, a famous open water race in Australia. On completing medical studies in 1999, she became an Australian swimming team doctor, and weighed up specialising in sports medicine and paediatrics.

In February 2001, however, King began three months as a radiation oncology resident in the lung cancer unit of Peter MacCallum Cancer hospital. She was, she confesses, a reluctant conscript. Radiation oncology, which uses giant linear accelerators to beat back advancing cancers, is a technically and emotionally challenging field of medicine, undertaken underground for the containment of its x-ray emissions, dedicated chiefly to the very sick. And sickest of all are smokers.

For King it was an education. The five-year survival rate after diagnosis for lung cancer is 15%: her job was largely to alleviate its acute associated sufferings. Most people have an image of lung cancer sufferers propped in bed subsiding gently, maybe with a bit of a cough, possibly on oxygen. The reality is very different. In a fifth of cases, for example, lung cancer metastasises to the brain, inducing paralysis and loss of cognitive function: the patient, literally, loses their mind. Death can come violently too. One morning King arrived to find the corner of a ward absent not only its bedclothes but its curtains and furnishings. The night before a patient had essentially drowned in her own blood from a burst vessel, drenching staff in her death throes. In the room were three other terrified patients who had heard the whole thing.

Almost every interaction bore witness in some way to tobacco’s toll. Taking a history from a new female patient one day, King asked her age. “I’m 43,” the woman replied. “I’m getting quite old.” It transpired that her whole immediate family had died in their 40s from smoking-related cancers. “I had this overwhelming sense of the impact of tobacco,” King recalls. “The public did not know what was going on. They didn’t know because I was a doctor and I hadn’t known. Until I worked there. I started to wish I had a television camera with me, so people could see what I was seeing.”

But so much was out of sight for a reason – to which King was first introduced by an older patient who beckoned her from his bed, looked around furtively, and whispered: “This is because of the smoking, isn’t it?” When she said it probably was, he nodded and looked away. Here were lung cancer’s little-acknowledged secondary symptoms: disgrace and shame. Where families could be relied on to rally around sufferers from breast and prostate cancer, tension surrounded those with tobacco-related illness, who were perceived as having brought cancer on themselves. This has been an unforeseen impact of the public health campaign to scare smokers straight: in a recent survey, 30% of Australians agreed with the sentiment that lung cancer patients were less deserving of sympathy than other cancer patients. “Lung cancer has become the syphilis of the 21st century,” says the head of Peter MacCallum’s lung cancer unit, Professor David Ball. “Patients are regarded as victims of their own lack of self-control. Whereas they’re actually victims of a concerted and successful campaign by the tobacco industry to turn them into addicts.”

It was Ball, a fixture at Peter Mac since 1973, who became King’s lodestar. He instilled an environment of kindness and hope. Young doctors, says Ball, can feel overwhelmed: “I’ve had people in training in this specialty who’ve eventually been reduced to tears, saying they can’t go on. They want all their patients to get better. Life’s not like that.” He encourages them to think differently:

For a doctor, lung cancer sufferers are tremendously rewarding to work with. They don’t come in saying: ‘Why me? I’m pissed off. Why aren’t you working harder to find a cure?’ They come in feeling ashamed. When you reassure them that you want to make their life as good as it can be, they’re immensely grateful. Because they tend to stay long periods, you get to know them as people too. And you’re at that very serious time of life, where the questions are deep and philosophical, and existential concerns come to the fore.

Those questions resonated with King. “People say that if you don’t know what you want to do before you work with David, you will afterwards,” she says. “He was the first doctor I really wanted to be – a great teacher, a great colleague, interested in everyone and everything. In that three months, I got to know patients, I got to know families, I worked with an inspiring medical team, I felt so privileged, and it changed me forever.” She dug in for what became the seven-year haul towards adding FRANZCR – Fellow of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists – to her postnominals. After a couple of years she was joined in this pursuit, and in her life, by Dr Mark Shaw, a quietly-spoken New Zealander whom she met at Geelong’s Andrew Love Cancer Centre and married. Yet her life-change remained incomplete until she and her husband emerged from their high-stakes, high-stress discipline to do something of utmost normality – buy a house.

King calls it “the story”; maybe it should be “The Story.” It’s how she prefaces most presentations – if ever time precludes it, she feels regretful. “It explains everything, really,” she says. “Sometimes I apologise to audiences for having told it so often. But people always come up afterwards and say: ‘I love that story’.”

The scenario, a conversation about her finances with a consultant from superannuation fund Health Super in the Peter MacCallum cafeteria in March 2010, could hardly have been more prosaic. In fact, King was standing to leave when a final question crossed her mind: was she meant to specify how she wanted her money invested? No need, said the consultant: her money, as it is with 75% of Australians, was in the “default option”.

King asked about the alternatives. Oh, came the reply, there was a “greenie option”, involving no investment in mining, alcohol or tobacco. The answer brought her up short. “Does that mean I’m currently investing in tobacco?” she asked. Well yes, the consultant replied: “Everyone is.” King sat back down.

It was worse. Two weeks later the consultant confirmed that four of the five biggest holdings in the international component of Health Super’s default option were tobacco-related: British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco, Philip Morris and Swedish Match. King shared this exposure with the overwhelming majority of Peter Mac’s 2,500 staff members. “We’re a dedicated cancer hospital,” she recalls. “There was nowhere else this could have mattered more. The idea that all of us, the doctors, the nurses, the occupational therapists, the speech pathologists, were invested in tobacco companies … well, it had to be fixed.” King’s concerns were immediately shared by Peter Mac’s CEO, Craig Bennett, who accompanied her to a meeting with members of Health Super’s executive and investment team.

The response was cordial but bemused. “It was strange for a financial institution to be approached by members about these issues,” King recalls. “Mainly they were surprised.” A “good-natured” discussion ensued. Other factors then conspired to relegate tobacco to a back burner: Health Super commenced a merger with Sydney-based First State Super. In the hiatus, King started educating herself. Australian super funds had only between 0.5 and 1.3% of their assets in tobacco. But in a $2tn pool, that was still in the region of $10bn. The seven biggest funds with health professionals as members all offered “greenie” opt-outs, designated “sustainable”, “ethical” or “socially responsible”. But four of these actually had money in tobacco.

After a year’s to-and-fro with Health Super, King finally got in front of its board, flanked by Craig Bennett and David Ball, punctuating her PowerPoint presentation with knockout statistics: that someone in the world dies from tobacco use every eight seconds; that these include 15,000 Australians a year; that no substance takes a steeper toll of lives and years lost.

King was nervous and exhilarated: “I was presenting to all these people from a world I knew nothing about sitting next to the man who knows everything [Ball].” She was also shortly to take maternity leave: “I thought: ‘If this doesn’t work, it’s probably going nowhere.’” But the response was gratifying: “I could also tell by the end of that meeting we had a lot of friends.” The impression deepened at the first instance of what would be a recurrent experience, when a director trailed her to the lift. “Just so you know,” the director said, “my mother died of lung cancer. Thank you for doing this.”

About to fold, Health Super’s board bequeathed the issue to its new parent. First State Super CEO Michael Dwyer is an unusual boss – inspired by visiting Timor-Leste in 2000, he co-founded Australia for UNHCR, which raises funds for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. He sensed a problem it might be prudent to get ahead of: a group with 40% of its members in health services that had $170m invested in tobacco was bound to hear more about it.

Like other super funds, First State Super was required to observe the Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Act, binding trustees at all times to act in members’ best interests, which has tended to be interpreted by law in a narrowly financial sense. But at this point, another statute made its presence felt: tobacco share prices were hit by, among other things, the proclamation of Australia’s Tobacco Plain Packaging Act in 2011. “I could tell the board that these were stocks whose product was being condemned and restricted by every government round the country,” says Dwyer. “They had no redeeming feature. As Bronwyn says: ‘There’s no such thing as a safe cigarette.’” In July 2012, CEO and doctor put their names to a press release declaring First State Super the first Australian superannuation fund to renounce tobacco; six months later HESTA, whom King had also courted, followed suit. And though the process had taken two years, she was used to long hauls. “I started thinking,” she says, “if they could do it, why not others?”

Superannuation conferences can be dry affairs. So when Dwyer started dropping King into programmes through 2013 and 2014, her presence and message quickly gained a following. Grabbing audiences with The Story, she did not let go. “I’ve never seen anyone network like Bronwyn,” says Michael Baldwin, CEO of the Funds Executive Association, an industry group whose conference she addressed in June 2013. “It’s a skill I wish I had. People love dealing with her.” She distributed a business card bearing the rubric Tobacco Free Portfolios, featuring a logo designed online for $300 transfiguring the ribbon that is a cancer remembrance’s best-known symbol into a cigarette. She piled up cards she collected and studiously emailed the addressees, politely petitioning to meet directors, trustees and investment managers – even just to “have a coffee”.

Those meetings regularly begat further meetings, and also elicited personal confidences. In any group of five people she sat down with, King found, at least one person would be harbouring a story about how tobacco-related illness had touched their lives; down the track, two chairmen would recuse themselves from votes about their funds’ tobacco exposures, fearful of emotion clouding their corporate decision making.

Pregnant through some of this time with a second child, King found that her most incisive pitch was illuminating the tobacco industry’s exploitation of the young. The average age at which Australian smokers take the habit up, 15 years and nine months, is actually high by world standards. Globally it’s estimated that 80-100,000 children start smoking every day – so much for the notion of smoking being based on mature, fully-informed choice. What’s more, according to the International Labour Organisation, up to 60% of the 33 million engaged in tobacco farming worldwide are under 16. To those who challenged that tobacco stocks were historically good performers, King had a brisk rejoinder: “If a business can live with six million deaths and externalising €2tn in health costs a year while employing mainly children, then it probably won’t find it difficult making money. All it has to do is adjust its moral compass.”

King was careful, all the same, not to scold. After all, much of this information was new to her too – and as a medical practitioner she might have been expected to know it. In fact, as she realised, medicine has historically been divided between clinicians like herself, who treat people, and public health specialists, concerned with society. So she sought out the likes of Professor Simon Chapman at University of Sydney and Professor Mike Daube from Curtin University, whose experiences in tobacco control stretched back to the 1970s. They were impressed. “I get a lot of approaches from people with crackpot ideas,” says Chapman. “Bronwyn immediately struck me as different – someone highly intelligent, very organised, and street smart. Not to mention engaging and vivacious in an area that’s stereotyped as deadly earnest and tinged with moralism.”

Says the wryly humorous Daube: “She’s such a deeply unpleasant person, isn’t she?”

While the tone of King’s campaign came naturally, she was shrewd enough to understand it as an attribute. She shrank from calling herself an “activist”; she was simply an “oncologist”. She denied hers was a “cause”; she spoke instead of pursuing her “interest”. She did not regard financial institutions as “targets”; instead she was seeking “partners”. She respected confidentiality, avoided confrontation, declined to court the media, and drew on her own experience as exemplifying the involuntary nature of much tobacco investment, which had its institutional counterparts. “I presented to one fund that took sustainability very seriously,” King recalls. “They had a ‘sustainable investment’ option. I looked into it. They chose their international shares via the Dow Jones sustainability index – a best of sector index which BAT [British American Tobacco] is part of … The board members of this super fund were … well, they felt tricked. Before I got home I had an email from their CEO saying: ‘We’ve issued a comprehensive tobacco free mandate across our portfolio.’”

By mid-2014, King’s initial epiphany had become almost all-consuming. A dozen funds had divested more than $A1bn of tobacco stocks. With two small boys, she was not sleeping much anyway, but she was enjoying herself. Tobacco Free Portfolios was winning support not only from business leaders but Australian politicians of all stripes: Liberal health minister Sussan Ley, former Labor health minister Nicola Roxon, the Greens’ Richard Di Natale and independent Andrew Wilkie all recorded video testimonials. Papers were being invited for the forthcoming biennial World Cancer Conference, which the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) happened to be staging in Melbourne. When King impulsively submitted an abstract, she had her first glimpse of the world of global tobacco control, and an opportunity to spread The Story. It cast its now-familiar spell.

The only time King falters in making the case for Tobacco Free Portfolios is in making the case for herself. And four and a half years after starting, she remained a one-woman band paying for things on her credit card. “I’m a doctor,” she says. “Doctors aren’t good with money. Most of us don’t even really like talking about it.” Introduced to the UICC boss, Cary Adams, she started talking about how much more she could do in Australia if she could afford it – just a little money to cover expenses. “You know,” said Adams, “you’re not thinking big enough.”

Adams is a former banker: prior to this role, he had been chief operating officer of Lloyds TSB. Maybe it was time his new community started talking to his old industry. Unbeknownst to King, the UICC every two years takes a local project to a “global platform”. They were shortly to do it again. “Leave this with me,” Adams said. “I’ve got big plans.”

There had been such plans before. Under the anti-tobacco sun, little is outright new. In the UK, activists had eyeballed the City as far back as the 1970s, buying single shares in tobacco companies so as to lob questions at annual meetings. After one, Mike Daube recalls, he was taken aside by Rothmans chairman Lord Pritchard, who offered to fund the protest campaign of his choice … providing it had nothing to do with tobacco.

Divestment was trialled in the US in the 1980s, partly inspired by the boycott of companies invested in apartheid South Africa. Activists first cajoled the American Medical Association into urging medical schools to withdraw from tobacco funds. In the 1990s several universities and state pension funds followed suit. But efforts petered out after 1998’s Master Settlement Agreement (in which 46 states settled healthcare lawsuits with the four biggest US tobacco companies), which perversely aligned the interests of big tobacco and state legislatures dependent on them for future funds. And opinion remains divided on the efficacy of divestment. “As long as another investor buys what a university, pension fund, or a health insurer sells,” says leading anti-tobacco authority Professor Alan Blum, of the University of Alabama, “there’s no net loss of investor confidence in the stock or capital in the company’s coffers.”

Anything attached to what’s conventionally abbreviated as CSR (corporate social responsibility) and ESG (environment, social, governance) also raises fiduciary questions. Does a manager of funds owe clients anything other than maximum returns? Is socially responsible investment even possible? In the 1990s, Philip Morris ran a stealth campaign against “social investing”, relying on an oft-cited 1980 paper by two distinguished American law professors. In “Social Investing and the Law of Trusts”, John Langbein and Richard Posner argued, in the context of disinvestment in South Africa, that “the trustee who sacrifices the beneficiary’s financial well-being for another object breaches both his duty of loyalty to the beneficiary and his duty of prudence in investment”; Langbein was subsequently employed by Philip Morris as a consultant.

Has the position changed? Professor Richard Daynard of Northeastern University, another veteran of the anti-tobacco movement, thinks so: “The Chicago School position argued by Milton Friedman is that the corporation has only one objective, which is greed, or shareholder return. Which means that any organisation doing socially responsible investing can get away with it only if is a complete fraud… and does not cost the company a penny. But nobody argues that any more. Lots of companies flourish their social responsibility credentials. They’re good for business. And there are business judgment rules which offer a board of directors a large amount of leeway.”

Two multilateral instruments have further widened that leeway. Ten years ago, after consultation with a group of big institutional investors, the United Nations laid out six “Principles of Responsible Investment”: there are today 1,500 signatories. The principles are aspirational and non-binding, but the first articulates a departure from circumscribed conceptions of fiduciary duty: “We will incorporate ESG issues into our ownership policies and practices.” And while UN PRI does not single out tobacco, another UN treaty does: in force since 2005, the World Health Organisation’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control has been signed by 180 countries, representing 89%of the world’s population. The framework is exacting and comprehensive, committing governments to a wide variety of risk minimization measures, taxes, regulations and prohibitions – including on investment. Article 5.3 specifies that “no branch of government, including local government, should have any financial interest or investment in the tobacco industry.” So far, only three countries have complied: New Zealand since 2007, Norway since 2009, Australia since 2013. Some even seem unaware of it, and not just the usual delinquents: the UK is presently rolling local government pension funds including their tobacco investments into seven sovereign wealth funds.

So divestment, says public health specialist Simon Chapman, has a different context, as well as a broader purpose. “The standard critique that someone sells then someone else buys misses the symbolic importance of building the rank odour around the industry,” he says. “That odour already exists in the health and medical professions and in the general population – when we poll them, we even get it from smokers. Building that consciousness among people making financial decisions furthers that delegitimisation.” Investment in tobacco, argues King, is a devil’s bargain. “When you invest in a company, you want that company to thrive, don’t you?” she says. “But do you really want big tobacco to thrive?”

Like a lung cancer, tobacco is also metastasizing as a public health issue. When the UICC appointed Tobacco Free Portfolios to run its global divestment initiative in March 2015, Adams appointed to its as chair a darling of the anti-cancer movement. Since her son’s diagnosis with leukaemia 20 years ago, Princess Dina Mired has dedicated her life to improving cancer treatments in Jordan: she is director-general of the Amman foundation of the King Hussein Cancer Center, her country’s largest.

Introduced to King, Princess Dina loved The Story: “It was one person seeing something shameful and deciding to do something about it, by herself, knocking on doors, showing commitment and never giving up.” More than that, she sensed the need for a form of tobacco control aimed at supply rather than demand. It is poorer countries, with weaker public health consciousness, that will chiefly bear tobacco’s brunt: the World Health Organisation estimates that by 2030 they will account for four in five tobacco-related deaths. The reasons are not far to seek.

“As countries like Australia, the US and Canada have been increasing regulation and hiking up prices, tobacco companies have made extra efforts in the Middle East and Africa,” she says. “Since the Arab Spring, we are a stressed-out population, and we are game … They [tobacco companies] are zooming on our youth in a really big way.” Today more than a third of Jordanians smoke and the proportion is growing: the crop of tobacco-related cancers being sown prelude a bitter harvest. “And if you invest in tobacco,” she adds, “you are part of that killing machine.”

Heading a Global Task Force, King still had unfinished business in Australia. But she now had a helper. Lawyer Clare Payne worked at Macquarie Bank for 11 years before founding an initiative called the Banking and Finance Oath: an attempt to popularise for finance industry professionals a code of practice akin to the hippocratic oath. So when she and King watched each other speak consecutively at a responsible investment conference in November 2014, they felt a natural kinship. “Bron’s achieved more than most people have in20 years of responsible investment,” says Payne. “She’s got more than engagement. She’s got action.” Payne joined Tobacco Free Portfolios as “chief operating officer”, even though her “office” was a cleared out built-in wardrobe in the Sydney cottage she shares with her young daughter.

Boards now faced two advocates, Payne with her corporate experience perhaps slightly steelier. Where King was always sunnily optimistic, Payne groaned inwardly at counterarguments trotted out, like a board chair who couldn’t see a problem with tobacco because an uncle had smoked till he was 95, not to mention the familiar slippery slope fallacies. “I remember one day this American saying to me: ‘Let me just play devil’s advocate here… ,’” says Payne. “And I thought: ‘Really? Aren’t we beyond that now? Unless it’s your view. Otherwise we’re just proceeding from a silly starting point.’” To Payne, the problem was straightforward: it was persuading the powerful to heed the people. “Australian society accepts tobacco control,” she says. “They don’t want their children to smoke. If they smoke themselves, they want to stop. They want fewer people to die. Governments want better health outcomes. Funds should reflect that.”

King, meanwhile, was pondering how to replicate across the world her Australian system. She tapped her “partners” for contacts and introductions, never failing to follow up the faintest lead. She would start days in oncology at Epworth Healthcare with two sheets of paper: her patient schedule, and her Tobacco Free Portfolios to-do list. The patients came first, their needs acute, their questions poignantly familiar. “‘How long?’” says King. “That’s what they all want to know. ‘My daughter’s getting married. Will I make it?’ ‘My daughter’s having a baby in January. Will I live to see it?’ ‘My son’s graduating next year. Will I be able to go?’”

Of time, she was constantly reminded, there was never enough. So any minute before, between or after patientcare was an opportunity to make a phonecall, send an email, or dash into the central business district. Nights steadily became Skype marathons. One evening her husband walked in with a cup of tea suggesting she take a break. “Quick, close the door!” she exclaimed. “I’m about to talk to Kuwait!” King laughs: “He looked at me and it was, like, ‘Who are you?’ He thought I’d lost the plot.”

Extending the filaments of her network also involved serious travel. In July 2015, King made her first trips to Washington and New York. In September, she took in a Principles of Responsible Investment conference in London and visited the World Health Organisation in Geneva. In November she travelled to Istanbul for the World Cancer Leaders summit, and swung on to London for a first look at the City.

Where doors were now open in Australia, they were only tentatively ajar in the UK. Big tobacco and City merchant banks align snugly. Rock star fund manager Neil Woodford has made a fortune from tobacco stocks for his eponymous investment boutique, explaining that clients expect him to “exercise an investment judgment” not a “moral judgment”. King notes: “The influence of companies like BAT and Imperial Brands is enormous.”

A roundtable for 20 investment professionals at the Whitechapel offices of Principles of Responsible Investment, a UN-supported NGO, became an eye-opening realtime experiment in City attitudes.

One guy, a very senior leader in UK finance, was quite difficult,” said King. “He just kept saying: ‘Our approach is to engage with the tobacco companies. We engage with the industry.’ He was getting very fired up, and I just had to hold my ground. Finally I said: ‘I understand engagement is a useful tool, and it’s important to be a good steward of capital. But this is the exception. Engagement with the tobacco industry is futile. Positive influence is impossible. There’s not one example in all the history of engagement leading to fewer deaths.”

Of course, this was very uncomfortable for him. Suddenly, out of the blue, this other guy whom I’d not met says: ‘We’re getting bogged down in the nitty-gritty here. What about the big vision? Isn’t this industry just killing six million people a year and we’re part of it if we’re investing in it?”

The interjector, Dawid Konotey-Ahulu, had arrived at the last minute, without particularly high expectations: “I assumed it would be a run-of-the-mill discourse on the dangers of tobacco and the virtues of shunning it.” Now he was excited. A former Merrill Lynch banker, Konotey-Ahulu has for the last decade run an investment and risk management consultancy for pension funds, Redington. King reminded him of a popular business concept: the Big Hairy Audacious Goal, or BHAG, coined by Jim Collins in his 1994 management bestseller Built to Last. Since the roundtable, he has become Tobacco Free Portfolios’ City adviser, including on the recruitment of a new London representative, Dr Rachel Melsom. “We are living in an era where ‘Do the Right Thing!’ is increasingly the guiding principle, and pension funds, by and large, want to do the right thing,” says Konotey-Ahulu. “It will not surprise me if in the near future, several large pension funds elect to disinvest from intrinsically harmful assets such as tobacco.” They now have an example.

On 28 February, after months of planning, King landed in London on her first European mission: 12 days, six countries, 45 meetings, with pension funds, insurers, sovereign wealth funds and health leaders. She had pursued every introduction, cadged every favour on offer. To her excitement, not one approach had been rebuffed. To her further excitement, she had arranged to spend the weekend in Paris with friends, the De Viennes, for whom in 1997 she had worked as an au pair. Then, unable to help herself, she asked round her Australian business “partners” with whom in France it might be worth meeting. The CEO of a major funds management business connected her with AXA.

So it was that six years after that meeting in her hospital’s cafeteria, King sat across a luncheon table at Café Chic on Rue du Faubourg from Sylvain Vanston, the 44-year-old responsible for the company’s corporate social responsibility initiatives. A year earlier Vanston had been instrumental in AXA’s ceasing to invest in coal; but since agreeing to meet, he had been musing that this was the first red flag ever raised about a vastly more significant killer. “Tobacco has been a problem for health, but it has not been a problem for investors,” he observes. “When I met Bronwyn, she immediately started putting together the pieces of the puzzle that we hadn’t.’

In King’s telling, that puzzle of tobacco’s unique iniquity has four pieces. Can the product be used safely? No: zero is the only safe number of cigarettes. Can an investor have a positive influence on the tobacco industry? No: the risks are indivisible from the product. Is the problem huge? Yes: the WHO forecasts a billion tobacco-related deaths in the 21st century. Is there a UN treaty? Yes: the WHO’s convention on tobacco control has sought to limit tobacco usage for more than a decade. A concluding pith: would you set up an industry now knowing that in the next year it would kill six million people and cost the health care system €2tn? Vanston was taken aback: “I thought I knew about tobacco, but in reality I’d missed important facts.” Did she have all this written down, he asked? King fished a Tobacco Free Portfolios information kit from her bag. That night she rang Payne. ‘I’ve got a good feeling about this,’ she said.

Likewise Vanston. This was a far bigger deal than coal: four times the size of investment, and entailing not insignificant financial sacrifices. But AXA’s incoming CEO Buberl had been promoting a redesign of its health business, arguing that insurance must change from being a payer of bills to a helper of clients toward healthier life choices incurring fewer health costs. And if AXA wanted clients to forswear tobacco, it could hardly do otherwise. Besides, Buberl observes, the calculus has changed: “Once, lung cancer meant a quick death. As treatment has improved and lives have been prolonged, it has gone from being a lethal to a chronic illness, and costs are exploding. It’s a simple equation – the social, medical and taxation consequences of smoking have grown considerably worse.”

Vanston was commissioned to present to Buberl’s management team; King, now back in Melbourne after whirling through Geneva, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Oslo, contributed by email. Back at work at the Epworth, preparing prognoses, counselling patients about their survival chances, she messaged Vanston just before his presentation, three weeks after their single meeting: “Good luck with your speech. Just imagine that you have every oncologist and every patient who has suffered from tobacco standing right beside you.” His CEO actually needed little convincing. “Decisions take longer when they’re ambiguous,” says Buberl. “There is nothing ambiguous about tobacco.”

Nor, it must be said, is there anything ambiguous about the money tobacco makes. It is a high cash-flow, low-volatility business – a classic defensive stock pick in times when they are scarce. Yet no industry could exercise so dark an allure – something accentuated by the profile of smokers, skewed increasingly towards the poor, the young, and, frankly, the darker-skinned and further away.

It is a problem of a magnitude that occasionally dismays King, although never for long. “I’m an optimist,” she says. “Some people I’ve met have been unconvinced by the arguments. Others have said ‘Oh it’s a bit early’ or ‘Can you come back with more information?’ But I’ve watched literally dozens of people move from that position of initial resistance, to thinking ours is a reasonable position, to being completely convinced and ringing up a few months later asking: ‘Is there anything I can do?’ I never hear ‘no’ as ‘never’; I hear it as ‘not yet’.” Since AXA, she has had contact with a score of European financial institutions: one sovereign wealth fund has already divested, although is yet to announce its decision. King’s travel schedule for the rest of the year looks unsparing, and she is resigned to forgoing sleep because of it. “But if I knew what I know and did nothing,” she says, “I couldn’t sleep at all.”

E-cigarette advertisements are luring ex-smokers back to tobacco, warns Quit Victoria

Aug 1st, 2016
by Editor.
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Cancer Council research has shown the ads harm attempts to quit.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/ecigarette-advertisements-are-luring-exsmokers-back-to-tobacco-warns-quit-victoria/news-story/1050fbfda65e814532591c503a224801?nk=ad8b3617ba5432f0a5bf0486b18c5027-1471041332

E-CIGARETTE advertising has the power to drive former smokers back to real cigarettes, new research has suggested.

While debate rages about whether the battery-powered cigarettes are a safe or effective way to quit smoking, a study of 800 former smokers has found advertising for the products had the opposite effect.

Findings of the Cancer Council study have prompted calls to ban e-cigarette promotions in the same way tobacco advertising was restricted decades ago.

Quit Victoria director Dr Sarah White said failing to ban e-cigarette advertising could undermine the resolve of former smokers as well as decades of gains since tobacco advertising was outlawed.

“Some of these ads look very much like people using a cigarette, (and) probably just watching people using that ¬motion doesn’t help former smokers suppress their urges,” she said.

E-cig ads can trigger ex-smoker’s urges, health authorities fear.

“We have lost hundreds of thousands of people to cigarettes, we have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to help people get off cigarettes that kill two out of three people, we have legislation in place to help people get off cigarettes, so we need to keep watch we are not letting something else come through that plays on the similarities.”

After showing 800 former smokers e-cigarette advertisements that had screened on television or online, the Cancer Council Victoria’s Centre for Behavioural Research in Cancer found their desire to start smoking normal cigarettes ¬returned, as did an urge to use e-cigarettes.

Results published in the journal Tobacco Regulatory Science showed twice as many former smokers felt a desire to smoke after watching the ads compared to those who viewed promotions for other products, while a quarter felt an “urge” to use tobacco.

Lead author, Associate Professor Sarah Durkin, said the e-cigarette ads were also found to adopt the same techniques as long outlawed tobacco ads, suggesting the products ¬increase a person’s social status and ¬romantic appeal, and portray users as “independent and ¬rebellious”.

“The e-cigarette finding is unsurprising, since the aim of these ads is to encourage people to use e-cigarettes,” she said.

“What is concerning is the e-cigarette ads also reminded former smokers of smoking ¬tobacco cigarettes, increased their desire to smoke tobacco cigarettes and reduced their confidence to abstain.”

grant.mcarthur@news.com.au

Tripling of tobacco sellers’ licence fee in Tasmania reasonable, retailers say

Jul 31st, 2016
by Editor.
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http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-31/retailers-label-tobacco-licence-fee-hike-reasonable/7675024

A planned tripling of the tobacco sellers licence fee in Tasmania is a “reasonable compromise”, a retail industry group says.

On Saturday, the Tasmanian Government detailed its $6.4 million Healthy Tasmania plan, which includes raising the licence fee to $731 next year and then about $1,100 by January 2018.

The Australian Retailers Association’s executive director, Russell Zimmerman, said retailers would have to factor in increased costs.

“We like to see people live healthy, good lifestyles and we don’t encourage things that would deter that,” he said.

“Having said that we would also say that the tripling of the licence fees will hit small, independent retailers.”

But Mr Zimmerman said increasing the licence fee was a better option compared to the Government’s original plan to increase the minimum smoking age.

“With all the tourism happening in Tasmania we think it would have been very hard to police,” he said.

“This is probably a reasonable compromise.”

Last week, the State Government said it would shelve its controversial plan to lift the legal smoking age from 18 to as high as 25, saying that after consultation it was clear it was not an appropriate course of action.

Funding labelled a joke

Greens party spokeswoman Rosalie Woodruff was critical of the $6.4 million Healthy Tasmania plan, labelling the amount a joke.

“It is nothing like the serious investment, the strong plan that the Minister has been talking about for a year now,” she said.

“We’ve got soaring rates of chronic diseases in Tasmania and the Government’s prevention health strategy is a paltry amount of money to deal with what’s ahead of us.”

Education Minister Jeremy Rockliff said the Government was already spending $70 million on preventative healthcare in addition to the $6.4 million.

He said $2 million from the Healthy Tasmania plan would be spent on improving student health and wellbeing, including updated drug education programs.

“Alongside the investment of resources education plays such a key role when it comes to cultural and intergenerational change,” he said.

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