Mark Metherell, THE AGE NEWSPAPER AUSTRALIA
PRESSURE is mounting for brand labels to be removed from cigarette packets – a move that the tobacco industry bluffed a previous Labour government out of pursuing, according to anti-tobacco campaigners.
The Public Health Association, the Cancer Council and Heart Foundation yesterday swung behind Family First Senator Steve Fielding’s move to introduce legislation banning brand labels on cigarette packs. “There is no case for allowing any glossy brand promotion for a product that is lethal and addictive,” Senator Fielding said.
The national preventative health taskforce in its report handed to the Government this week is expected to call for the branding ban – which the tobacco industry has fiercely resisted in the past.
A former Labour health minister, Dr Carmen Lawrence, proposed the idea as far back as 1994 but dropped it after the industry claimed that loss of brand rights would breach international trade law and open the way to massive compensation claims.
But it later emerged that tobacco companies had received advice that they had no basis for a legal challenge, the Heart Foundation’s spokesman on tobacco issues, Maurice Swanson, told The Age yesterday. A spokeswoman for Health Minister Nicola Roxon said the Government would look at the branding issue as part of its consideration of the preventative health taskforce report.
Opposition health spokesman Peter Dutton said that while the Coalition was prepared to increase taxes on cigarettes, the ban on branding “is a bridge too far”.
This story was found at:
http://www.theage.com.au/national/renewed-push-to-ban-cigarette-branding-on-packs-20090701-d57x.html