In Victoria, the Cancer Council has spent thousands of dollars fighting the freedom of information request from British American Tobacco, claiming child confidential would be breached if the request was granted.
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British American Tobacco has applied to access data collected by the Cancer Council from school students covering a range of issues, including where they get their cigarettes from, when they started smoking and how they feel about plain packaging.
The director of the Victorian Cancer Council, Todd Harper, said a lawyer had requested the survey data under the Freedom of Information Act, but the request was rejected because it was not in the public interest to release it.
The survey data, collected over 30 years, included 12- to 17-year-old children’s age, gender, location, habits, access to money and preferred brands, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
In 2011, Australia became the first country to pass a plain packaging law, requiring all packs to be stripped of branding, leaving only the health warnings. “All we knew was it was an individual from a law firm who wanted the data”.
The information was then used by the tobacco company last year in Britain to contest plain packaging laws.
TAXPAYER-FUNDED research about what Victorian children think of smoking could be used by a tobacco company for marketing purposes.
British American Tobacco said it was seeking the data to find out if plain packaging was having an impact on its product. Any such evidence is also relevant to the government’s Post Implementation Review into plain packaging, which is still underway.
A British American Tobacco spokesperson has denied the allegations, saying: ‘It’s completely untrue to say that we are interested in this data in order to gain insights into children and teens.
She further said that the company sought out the information to back its view that “instead of Australian youth smoking rates going down because of plain packaging, they’re going up.”
“In this context any such request for an FOI to obtain this information is both reasonable and legitimate”.
“It is illegal to sell tobacco to children and tobacco advertising has been banned for decades”, the company said in a statement.
“They absolutely should not be seeking information about kids and about kids attitudes”.
Graeme Johnson, the lawyer who lodged the application to access the data on behalf of the tobacco company has managed to gain access to similar data conducted by the Cancer Institute NSW on adults.
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Prof Daube believes this tactic is misuse of FOI.
