Astro-turfing?
The Ministry of Health is the biggest astro-turfer
ACR Article
15 OCtober, 2010
Anti-tobacco groups (Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) and Smokefree Coalition, to name a few) have attacked the Association of Community Retailers, calling the ACR a tobacco-industry front.
They accuse us of “astro-turfing” where supposedly groups are created to do the bidding for someone else. The ACR has answered the allegations publicly, and they need not be repeated in this article, suffice to say that the views expressed by the ACR tobacco spokespeople, like me, are the views of retailers and retailers alone.
No tobacco company has a say in the public and political strategy of the ACR. Having said that, we believe that retailers’ concerns and those of New Zealand’s tobacco manufacturers are aligned on the issue of banning displays.
But let’s look more closely at this so-called astro-turfing; notably the role of Ministry of Health, and its funding of particular groups involved in “tobacco cessation”.
As we all know the MOH provides funding to ASH and the Smokefree Coalition, two groups that have been very active in undermining the work of our organisation and trying to stop retailers from having their say on the tobacco proposals. These Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) want the Government to ban displays, and they’ll go to great lengths to achieve that, including attempts to denigrate retailers or prevent our views from being heard.
To understand the role of the Ministry of Health in the debate over whether tobacco displays should be allowed in retail outlets, it is necessary to cast one’s mind back to the Intercontinental Hotel in Wellington on 16 and 17 October 2006, a two-day symposium held by the Health Sponsorship Council, Smokefree Coalition, ASH and others.
This taxpayer-funded meeting was the birth of the campaign to oppose retail displays. Invited speakers talked of the need to build a body of evidence that supported their goal of banning displays from retail outlets. They claimed to the audience – many of whom were from District Health Boards from around the country – that banning point-of-sale displays would reduce consumption of tobacco; that displays were the “last bastion of the tobacco industry” and “point-of-sale bans will hurt big tobacco”. Of course, none of these claims are true.
There was no mention of the fact that the only people who would be hurt by a ban on tobacco displays were retailers.
After that meeting at the Intercontinental Hotel, these MOH-funded lobby groups went public with major claims that tobacco displays “caused” people to smoke; that displays influenced young people to take up smoking and were only another form of “advertising”. They then hired University people to create reports from junk science making the exact claims these lobby groups wanted.
These lobby groups then promoted a tobacco display ban publicly through a media, providing “evidence” from the reports they bought with their MOH money, and the media were all too quick to jump on the bandwagon and report their “scientific” claims about tobacco displays.
After receiving widespread media attention, these groups used their taxpayers’ money to fund surveys of the public that purported to show widespread support for their proposal to ban displays. After all, the widespread public generally only has the country’s media to be informed on these sorts of issues. These surveys of public opinion are again pushed out into the mainstream media, who readily report it as “news”. All in all, this standard NGO strategy, which is used by other NGOs in other anti-industry campaigns, is designed to create the illusion that their proposals are the silver bullet for ending consumption of tobacco. (It’s interesting, but when something hasn’t worked, they undertake the same campaign for other proposals which they promote as their silver bullet.)
Now, enter the Ministry of Health again. The Ministry writes recommendations to its Minister, in this case it was former Health Minister Damien O’Connor. It cites these public opinion surveys, the junk science and its own policies to convince the Minister to change the law. The MOH then recommends the changes that are required and writes a Cabinet paper for the Minister.
So, who’s spending money on front groups to advance their policy positions at an Executive level? The Ministry of Health. The debate over retail displays of tobacco has been created by the MOH, which used its own lobby groups, funded by MOH money, to manipulate and influence public opinion as a means of pushing its own policies through the Executive Government and Cabinet.
Retailers, however, have some hope. Recently the Kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden both rejected bans on tobacco displays, saying there was absolutely no evidence that such displays caused people to smoke. England, which implemented a ban, is looking at reverting back to a sensible position. Canada has a ban on displays and has been finding a growth in youth smoking in areas. And Iceland has seen only the same decrease in public consumption of tobacco since it introduced a ban more than 10 years ago.
It’s time to stop the silliness. The country has more important things to deal with than debate over and again tired rubbish that displays cause people to smoke. They don’t.
It is our view that, in its attempt to rein in public spending, the Government needs to look closely at how much public money from its Ministries is used to fund lobby groups, and should demand robust policies that NGOs should not be funded to advance political positions from these Ministries. It should immediately call on the MOH to cut all funding that it provides to groups like ASH, which continues to attack retailing groups like the ACR and should have to stand on its own without any government funding at all.
Yours in retailing,
Richard Green
