The tobacco industry, from plain packaging to the black market

Why the tobacco industry is worth tracing across registers

On 3 September 2026 the Coalition adopted a policy to cut tobacco excise by 80 per cent, legalise regulated vapes and nicotine pouches and fund a $200 million enforcement surge. Three days later the Coalition told the ABC it had not modelled how the cut would affect smoking rates, and three days after that the Prime Minister, asked to guarantee there would be no excise cut under Labor, declined to give one. The argument behind the policy is the one Philip Morris and British American Tobacco put on 1 August 2013, when Labor announced four annual 12.5 per cent excise rises: that higher tax feeds the black market. That argument lost for thirteen years and is now winning, and the road from one to the other is what makes the tobacco industry worth tracing across the registers.

The money came first. Both major parties took tobacco donations. The AEC donor returns hold rows from Philip Morris and British American Tobacco to Labor, Liberal, National and Liberal National branches every year from 1998 to 2003. Labor stopped accepting tobacco money in 2004, and on 22 August 2013, the day it promised to legislate a ban for every party, Tony Abbott announced that the Liberal Party would stop taking it too. The Nationals did not. In 2021 Michael West Media reported that Philip Morris was a paying top tier member of the party, its fees collected through a company owned by two former deputy prime ministers, and the 2024-25 returns published in February 2026 showed the two manufacturers giving the Nationals $225,500 in a single year, the most since the plain packaging era.

Plain packaging was the fight the industry lost at every step. Kevin Rudd announced it with a 25 per cent excise rise on 29 April 2010. Two and a half weeks before that year's election a new retail body, the Alliance of Australian Retailers, launched a $5 million advertising campaign against it and confirmed the three manufacturers were paying; leaked documents then showed the campaign had been designed for Philip Morris by a lobbying firm. The Tobacco Plain Packaging Act passed on 21 November 2011, and the same day Philip Morris Asia began investor state arbitration under the Hong Kong investment treaty. The High Court dismissed the companies' constitutional challenge in August 2012, plain packs took effect on 1 December 2012, the arbitral tribunal threw out the Philip Morris claim in December 2015, and in June 2020 the WTO Appellate Body rejected the last of five trade complaints.

The black market is where the industry's argument found its footing. Excise rose 12.5 per cent a year from 2013 under Labor and again from 2016 under the Coalition, then 5 per cent a year from 2023 on top of indexation. The Illicit Tobacco Taskforce was set up in 2018, and the parliamentary inquiry that followed relied on illicit market estimates from KPMG reports the manufacturers had jointly commissioned. By August 2026 excise revenue had fallen, from $16.3 billion to $4.1 billion. Philip Morris had by then given evidence to the Senate inquiry into illegal tobacco behind closed doors, unlisted on the witness schedule, and used it to argue for cheaper legal cigarettes. One Nation proposed a 75 per cent cut, a Coalition taskforce recommended at least 80 per cent and the convenience store lobby welcomed it, and after the Coalition adopted the policy that lobby urged Labor to follow in the December budget update. Asked on 9 September to guarantee there would be no cut under Labor, the Prime Minister said instead that the government would take on the criminals, and Labor answered the next day with new prosecution offences.

A second fight, over vaping, ran in parallel with the excise fight and ended up in the same 2026 Coalition policy. In 2020 the Coalition health minister delayed a ban on importing nicotine vapes by six months after a campaign by vaping advocates and Coalition backbenchers, and the regulator made nicotine vapes prescription only from October 2021. Labor ended retail vape sales from 1 July 2024, and the Coalition's 2026 policy would reopen a regulated retail market. Whether the registers can tell tobacco lobbying from vaping lobbying is taken up below; mostly they cannot.

That is the backdrop for the registers. The manufacturers hold 663 declared donation records between them and 7 recorded meetings; the retail bodies that now carry the industry's argument hold 5 declared donation records and 22 meetings; the vaping bodies hold 9 records in all. Federal ministerial diaries are not published, so the meetings that mattered most to plain packaging, to excise and to vaping, with the ministers and senators who decided them, are the ones this page cannot show. What it can show is who the tobacco industry is in the registers, who it meets at state level, who lobbies for it, and who it funds.

What happened, and when

What did not happen

No federal ban on tobacco donations was legislated. Labor promised one on 22 August 2013, lost the election three weeks later, and the Nationals' 2024-25 returns show the money still arriving. No court, tribunal or trade panel found for the industry on plain packaging: the High Court, the arbitral tribunal and the WTO Appellate Body all went the other way. No excise cut has been legislated. The Coalition's 80 per cent cut is an opposition policy whose effect on smoking rates it conceded it had not modelled, and the government has not ruled one out: asked to guarantee there would be none, the Prime Minister said only that it would take on the criminals. No transcript of Philip Morris's Senate evidence has been published; the committee chair said it would be released eventually in redacted form. And no legal retail market for nicotine vapes exists outside pharmacies.

Where the released diaries touch the timeline

• On 13 November 2015, two years into the excise rises and while the Philip Morris arbitration was still pending, the NSW Minister for Finance, Services and Property held one meeting with KPMG, Philip Morris, Imperial Tobacco and British American Tobacco. The database holds it as three rows headed Meeting; the diary records the purpose as Illicit tobacco market in Australia.
• On 3 December 2020, eighteen days before the regulator announced that nicotine vapes would be prescription only from October 2021, British American Tobacco and its lobbyist Strategic Political Counsel met the NSW Deputy Premier for an industry update.
• In 2021 the NSW Minister for Counter Terrorism and Corrections was briefed on tobacco legislation by Wells Consulting Group, British American Tobacco's registered lobbyist, on 28 April, and then by British American Tobacco itself on 10 June on issues surrounding the illegal tobacco industry, one of three meetings on this page whose diary subject names illicit or illegal tobacco, with the 2015 meeting and the convenience stores' 2025 meeting with Minister Park.
• On 19 September 2023, four and a half months after Labor announced the 5 per cent excise rises and the end of retail vape sales, Imperial Brands, through its lobbyist Cornerstone, met the NSW Minister for Small Business about portfolio matters. Ten days later two retailers this page does not count met ministers with the recorded subject Illegal tobacco: Metcash saw the Police minister and the Health minister, and the Retail Guild the Health minister.
• The Australian Association of Convenience Stores, whose chief executive has fronted the 2026 excise campaign, met the ACT Chief Minister on 22 November 2022 and NSW Health Minister Ryan Park on 16 June 2025, the latter recorded as Illicit tobacco and illegal vaping product enforcement, and its chief executive met Queensland Police Minister Dan Purdie on 4 December 2025 alongside the OTR convenience chain.
• Master Grocers Australia, whose members sell tobacco, holds 19 of the 30 diary rows here, most of them NSW small business and COVID briefings in 2020 to 2022. Its representatives are listed in two Victorian ministers' diaries in 2025, and on 28 October 2025 its chief executive, together with the shop workers' union, met the Queensland Premier about portfolio matters.
• The Australian Tobacco Harm Reduction Association, a vaping body, met the ACT Health Minister on 28 July 2022, nine months before Labor moved to end retail vape sales.

Most of those entries record a date, a name and a line such as Meeting or Portfolio Matters. Three name illicit tobacco as the subject and none says what was asked for. Whether excise, plain packaging or vaping was on the table is not something a diary can show, and every meeting sits beside an event here for the reader to weigh, not as evidence that the two are connected.

Who was involved

The organisations on this page are of three kinds, and it matters which kind a record is with. The manufacturers are Philip Morris, British American Tobacco, Imperial (Imperial Tobacco, later Imperial Brands) and Rothmans, which merged into British American Tobacco in 1999. The retail bodies speak for the shops that sell cigarettes: the Australian Association of Convenience Stores, Master Grocers Australia, the Alliance of Australian Retailers, the body formed for the 2010 plain packaging campaign, and the Cignall tobacconist chain. The third kind is the vaping lobby: AVATAR, the Australian Vaping Advocacy, Trade and Research body, Legalise Vaping Australia and the Australian Tobacco Harm Reduction Association.

The distinction matters for reading everything below. The manufacturers are the names in the donation returns: Philip Morris and British American Tobacco hold 659 declared donation records between them, and the retail and vaping bodies hold six. Meetings run the other way: the retail bodies account for 22 recorded meetings, the manufacturers for 7 and the vaping bodies for one. Lobbying registrations spread across all three, and several firms act for more than one of them: Woodhill Communication, Strategic Political Counsel, Wells Haslem Mayhew Strategic Public Affairs Pty Ltd, Capetal Advisory Pty Ltd, Cornerstone Group, RedBridge Group Pty Ltd, Australian Public Affairs, pCOMZ Communications and Advisory, Cornerstone Group Australia Pty Ltd, First State Government and Corporate Relations and H/Advisors APA.

Can the registers tell tobacco from vaping? Only at the edges. The three bodies whose names say vaping hold 9 records between them, 1 of them a meeting. Everything else is held against companies and retail bodies whose business is both: the manufacturers own the largest vape brands, the convenience stores sold vapes until July 2024, and the Coalition's 2026 policy bundles an excise cut with legal retail vapes. A lobbyist registration for Philip Morris does not say whether the client's interest that year was cigarettes, vapes or excise, and only one diary entry on this page names any of them. The timeline separates the two where the public record does; the registers do not.

Other retailers are left out. The newsagents' associations, the Retail Guild of Australia, the Australian Retailers Association and Metcash all sell tobacco, and two of them met NSW ministers about illegal tobacco in 2023 and 2024, but their recorded contact is about lotteries, supermarkets and retail generally, and counting it would swamp the tobacco specific bodies. Japan Tobacco International, the third manufacturer in the plain packaging cases, has no records in the database at all.

Records held against each named organisation follow below. An organisation appearing often reflects both its activity and how much the registers it deals with disclose.

Who in public office is connected to the tobacco industry

This section lists every politician and government body with a recorded connection to one of the manufacturers, retail bodies or vaping bodies on this page, and what that connection is.

Meetings and money: how the tobacco industry reaches government

The rest of this page uses those records to trace how the tobacco industry reaches government: the meetings that appear in released ministerial diaries, the lobbyists registered to act for it, and the donations declared to the parties. None of it shows wrongdoing. It shows the shape of a relationship between a regulated industry and the governments that regulate it.

Meetings that are on the record

Released diaries record 30 entries for these organisations between 2015 and 2026: 22 in New South Wales ministers' diaries, 3 in Victorian ministers' diaries, 3 in Queensland ministers' diaries and 2 in ACT ministers' diaries. 25 are meetings with a minister or office and five are diary listings that name an organisation's representative without recording a meeting. A meeting is worth counting even though a diary entry says so little, because it is the one channel open to everybody: a company need not donate and need not register a lobbyist in order to sit down with the minister who writes the rules. The entry records that the access happened; it is silent on what was asked for or given.

Registered lobbying and recorded ministerial meetings, the two non-financial channels, are shown together below, and it is worth comparing that picture with the donations further down this page, because the organisations that show up most in each are not the same.

Hover a dot for what is held on that entity, hover a line for the relationship it records, and click a dot to pull in that entity’s other connections from the database.

What the diaries say the meetings were about

Very little. 5 of the 30 entries carry no subject at all, and 9 more say only "meeting" or "portfolio matters". One entry names illegal tobacco in the database's subject field: British American Tobacco's briefing of the NSW Minister for Counter Terrorism and Corrections on 10 June 2021. The diaries themselves record two more, the 2015 Finance Minister meeting and the convenience stores' 2025 meeting with Minister Park, which the database imported with the subject Meeting. The rest are the retail bodies' small business, budget and COVID-19 briefings. The gambling case study on this site could show meetings about cashless gaming and poker machine reform because those diaries wrote the subject down. Here the subject line is empty or generic for the manufacturers, so the timeline above and the diary entries can only be laid side by side.

Where the money goes

The declared donations lean one way, and they stop. Across every register, 540 of the 669 records go to the Liberal, National or Liberal National parties and 79 to Labor; in dollars the returns add up to $4,014,934 to the Coalition side and $536,945 to Labor. Counted at the federal party level only, and not counting any state branch, they run 14 to the Australian Labor Party, 67 to the Liberal Party and 61 to the Nationals. The remaining 54 records name recipients the chart below does not carry: the 500 Club (VIC) (nine records), Liberal Democratic Party (seven records), Australian Labor Party (South Australian Branch) - SA (six records), National Party of Australia (WA) Inc (six records), 500 Club of New South Wales Inc (four records), Progressive Business Association (four records), Bayside Forum (three records), Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) (three records), Australian Labor Party (Tasmanian Branch) - TAS (two records), Liberal Party of Australia - ACT Division (two records), the Free Enterprise Foundation (two records), Add Lib, Corey Joseph Davis, Liberal Party of Australia (A.C.T. Division), Liberal Party of Australia - ACT Division - ACT, Matheson, Amalia and Richard Mulcahy Canberra Party. The Canberra Labor Club rows are ACT disclosure receipts to a licensed club, not donations to a party, and are counted here as neither side. The money is corporate: Philip Morris and British American Tobacco hold almost every donation record, and the retail and vaping bodies that now carry the argument declare almost none.

The dates tell the story the timeline tells. The manufacturers' last donation to a Labor branch is dated 2003, the year before Labor stopped taking tobacco money; the one Labor record since is a $5,500 gift from the convenience store lobby to the Tasmanian branch in 2025. Their last Liberal row is dated 2013, the year Tony Abbott told the party to stop. Their rows to the Nationals run unbroken to 2025, and the largest single payments in the set are the most recent. British American Tobacco's donor returns end in 2011, the year plain packaging passed; its later gifts to the Nationals reported in 2026 appear only in the party's returns, which the database does not hold.

Hover a dot for what is held on that entity, hover a line for the relationship it records, and click a dot to pull in that entity’s other connections from the database.

Declared donations from these organisations to party organisations. Node size is how many records name that entity; an edge is a declared donation, not a dollar total.

Most of the giving is old. 632 of the 666 dated donation records fall between 1998 and 2013, the busiest years being 72 in 2009, 65 in 2008, 63 in 2010 and 57 in 2001, and 34 fall in the twelve years since; 3 carry no year in the register they came from. The record thins after 2013 because two of the three recipients closed the door, not because the industry stopped giving: what it still gives goes to the one party that kept taking it.

One more caveat matters more than any other, because it sets the ceiling on everything above. Australia's donation disclosure regime is weak by international standards. Federally, an individual donation is only itemised once it crosses roughly $17,300 in a financial year, disclosure is annual rather than real time, and no cap limits what a party can spend campaigning, as the Centre for Public Integrity sets out in its analysis of undue influence in Australian politics. The Australia Institute reaches the same conclusion in its explainer on campaign finance. So this page shows only what crossed that threshold and was reported: a floor on disclosed giving, never a ceiling on what the tobacco industry actually spent. Those settings change from 1 January 2027, when a $5,000 disclosure threshold, caps on donations and electoral spending, and faster reporting take effect, as the AEC sets out in its introduction to the reforms.

What this case study shows

Three things stand out once the timeline and the registers are read together. The first is that the donation record follows the political decisions step by step. Labor branches take tobacco money until 2003 and never again after Labor's 2004 ban. Liberal branches take it until 2013 and never again after Abbott's instruction. The Nationals take it throughout, and the largest payments in the whole record are the most recent, in the years the party's Coalition partner was building an excise cut into policy.

The second is that the industry lost every fight it took to a court, a tribunal or a trade panel, and is winning the one it took to the public. Plain packaging survived the High Court, the Hong Kong treaty arbitration and five WTO complaints. The black market argument the manufacturers made against the 2013 excise rises has instead travelled: into KPMG reports the manufacturers paid for, into the evidence of the convenience store lobby, into closed Senate hearings, into One Nation and Coalition policy, adopted without modelling of its effect on smoking, and now to a Prime Minister who declines to rule a cut out. The registers show the retail bodies, not the manufacturers, doing the meeting.

The third is where the record goes dark. Plain packaging, excise and vaping were decided federally: by cabinet, by Treasury, by the health minister, by the regulator and by Senate committees. None of them publishes a diary. All 30 entries on this page are in state and territory diaries, because those are the diaries that exist, and only one of them names the subject. The level of government that made every decision on the timeline is the level at which contact between the tobacco industry and government is not disclosed, and the one federal hearing at which a manufacturer is known to have made its case was held in private.