Back
in May this year, the ACCC reached “court-enforceable undertakings”
from British American Tobacco Australia Limited and Philip Morris
Limited to remove the misleading terms “light”, “mild” and similar
descriptors from their products. They also extracted $8 million from
the two companies to go toward anti-smoking campaigns.

Three
months later, the brands with the banned terms are still all over the
shelves, the companies have introduced new descriptors like “fine” and
“smooth” which many smokers understand as being synonyms for the banned
terms, and the promised anti-smoking campaigns are nowhere to be seen.

The
third company operating in Australia, Imperial Tobacco, gave the finger
to the ACCC, effectively telling Graeme Samuel to go and get a real
job, and refused to drop the misleading terms. In what has to be the
biggest regulatory eunuch performance in Australian corporate history,
the ACCC’s website excoriated Imperial
with words guaranteed to terrorise the recalcitrant company into early
submission: “Imperial Tobacco’s attitude demonstrates significant lack
of sensitivity and responsiveness to community concerns and
expectations on this issue.” So there!

The lights and mild
deception went on for over 20 years. Today, over half of smokers
believe those brands are somehow less dangerous. This was a major
consumer fraud that caused literally millions of Australian smokers
over the years to take some comfort that perhaps their smoking wasn’t
doing them that much harm. Switch rather than quit was the industry
objective which would have caused the deaths of thousands. With the
ongoing farce of the ACCC not having the money to see the companies in
court, the message is clear to the tobacco industry: do whatever you
like.

Australian tobacco control has the best record in the
world. No nation has seen smoking rates fall as far as we have. The
national “every cigarette is doing you damage” campaign is now being
used by over 25 countries. Its architects have not received as much as
a single phone call from the ACCC asking advice on how to spend the $8m.