SYDNEY – Australia’s landmark cigarette legislation banning logos and putting dire health warnings and graphic images of sick or dying smokers on packs seems to be working, data shows, even as tobacco companies argue business is better than ever.
The country’s Bureau of Statistics says household consumption of tobacco fell 4.9 percent during the year that ended in March and clipped a small but still noteworthy 0.1 percentage point from Australia’s gross domestic product in the first quarter of this year. Consumption of cigarettes and tobacco dropped 7.6 percent in the first quarter, Commonwealth Bank economists said in a research note.
Although the data does not show the rate of change, it illustrates that total consumption fell, according to the statistics bureau, which warned that the figures could be subject to seasonal revisions.
“We are seeing a very encouraging trend,” said Mike Daube, professor of health policy at Curtin University in Perth. “The numbers are heading in the right direction.”
But British American Tobacco Australia said that industry sales volumes were up, and that the decline in the rate at which smokers start had slowed.
“A year after plain packaging was introduced, industry volumes had actually grown for the first time in over a decade,” a company spokesman, Scott McIntyre, said in a news release.
Tobacco industry data shows the decline in the number of people smoking “has slowed by more than half to 1.4 percent” since plain packaging was introduced, he said in a telephone interview.
Manufacturers fought Australia’s Tobacco Plain Packaging Act 2011 in the country’s High Court and lost in 2012, before the fight moved to the World Trade Organization. A WTO panel will investigate complaints made by Ukraine, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Indonesia, who argue that Australia’s laws breach world trade agreements, including trademark rights.
