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Australian tactical guidance of the
Global Tobacco Industry

This is a companion to the alphabetic listings of tobacco lobbyists held at the international investigative journalists exchange site https://sciencecorruption.com

There's an adage in investigative journalism. Making comparisons between corporate malfeasance and Hitler's Holocaust, means you've lost perspective because nothing can compare with the systematic gassing and murder of 4 million German Jews.

Of course the temptation still exists when you trace the sophisticated cigarette industry that kills 4 to 6 million of its addicted customers every year. According to the WHO, this death rate from smoking still remains as high among the aspirational young in Africa and is wide-spread in other less-developed countries.

Cigarette smoking's victims are, of course, active participants. Alongside them are the newspapers, radio and TV networks which provide support for the industry, only with the best of commercial intentions. They considered it their duty to defend media freedoms from government intervention and regulation ... such as advertising bans. Philip Morris, with its Australian executives and global lobbyists, spent millions of dollars funding their democratic rights also to put their names on brand-name sports sponsorships.

Index

  1. Overview A substantial outline of the roles played by Australian executives and lobbyists in guiding the global tobacco industry for a number of decades, leading up to the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) signed by the CEO of Philip Morris, an Australian, Geoff Bible, as the main tactician of the global tobacco industry. The MSA was signed with the Clinton Administration and 46 of the States, together with later additions including British American Tobacco.
     
  2. The Master Settlement Agreement. Signed with President Bill Clinton in 1998. It was an agreement to block class actions being taken against the cigarette companies in exchange for the tobacco industry agreed to discontinuing their political lobbying.
        It also included an agreement to release 14 million unculled files. These were internal documents, and some were 1000-odd pages of multiple records - total about 25 million individual documents. These were then deposited with the University of California, San Francisco in the Truth Archive, and slowly made available to journalists and researchers.
     
  3. Australian Tacticians operating through Philip Morris, and based in New York, Brussels, and Sydney. This section deals in more detail with each individual. The main Australian tobacco lobbyist, Donna Staunton, was the partner of Liberal Health Minister, Michael Wooldridge, and he still runs her old company in Sydney after her death with Labor's Sam Dastyari.
     
  4. The Atlas Network of think tanks, worked for tobacco and other poisoning and polluting industries, on a global scale. The Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) in Melbourne, and the Australian Institute of Public Policy (AIPP) in Perth were the main two, although Gerald Henderson's Sydney Institute and the Centre for Independent Studies , both in Sydney, also played substantial roles. The Tasman Institute, also a key player, evolved to become ACIL, a subsidiary of the IPA and a regular source of dubious information in the op-ed pages of Australian newspapers.
     

     
  5. These are the many Acronyms commonly found in the documents.
     
  6. The global cigarette industry was closely united, and a virtual cartel in maintaining its right to exist. So everyone knew everyone else, and they employed commonly used names plus pet names, nick-names and first names.