Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper the Australian has declared in a front page “exclusive” that plain packaging for cigarettes has failed because sales have gone up.
Under the headline “Evidence ‘world’s toughest anti-smoking laws’ not working”, it blamed the previous government, saying “Labor’s plain packaging fails as cigarette sales rise”.
It was a great scoop. Except it isn’t true.
In fact tobacco consumption in Australia is at its lowest since statistics were first gathered in 1959. Stephen Koukoulas, a former economic adviser to Julia Gillard, the Labor prime minister who introduced the world’s first plain packaging laws in December 2012, says the figures used in the article looked wrong.
“The Australian said the consumption of tobacco had gone up according to confidential industry research. I’m an economist who has looked at data up and down and back and forth for many decades and I thought, ‘That doesn’t sound right’,” he told The Irish Times.
“So I looked at the data in the Australian Bureau of Statistics national accounts, and found the volume of tobacco consumed is falling. The figures show that total consumption of tobacco and cigarettes in the March quarter of 2014 is the lowest ever recorded. This is extraordinary. It is a Great Depression for tobacco sales.”
The Australian’s article also referred to “Labor’s nanny state”, which Koukoulas says is par for the course.
Source: Padraig Collins, Irish Times, 19/06/14
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