Dr Bronwyn King, anti-tobacco campaigner
Despite launching her global campaign against “Big Tobacco” a decade ago, Melbourne radiation oncologist Bronwyn King says she still works “every second of the day” to bring about the downfall of an industry that the World Health Organisation (WHO) says causes one death every six seconds. Her team at Tobacco Free Portfolios, a not-for-profit organisation aiming to eliminate investment in tobacco globally, has since made significant advances. Yet she doesn’t hold her breath that cigarettes will disappear any time soon.
“It might be that we are able to escalate tobacco control awareness and policy during a time when the whole world is focused on health,” says King. “Everything else is being disrupted and re-imagined, and everybody is talking about building back better after Covid-19. It would be very nice to build back a world that is tobacco free, rather than one that just expected eight million incremental deaths a year.”
King now has plenty of clout. Her campaign has galvanised support from local and global heavyweights, including finance groups AXA, BNP Paribas, AustralianSuper and AMP. In May, she organised a launch with WHO at United Nations headquarters in New York and called on young people to become a tobacco-free generation. A webinar was held instead.
WHO’s director-general, Tedros Ghebreyesus, pledged support for a new campaign that zeros in on youth smoking. Some 138 signatories from 26 countries have joined the cause, which means they refuse to invest in tobacco, lend the industry money or issue insurance policies. Backers have $US10.9 trillion ($15 trillion) under management and corporate loan books of $US2.6 trillion.
Long favoured by big investors for paying fat dividends, Big Tobacco is certainly feeling the heat.
Covid-19 is hitting cigarette sales at all tobacco companies, including leaders like British American Tobacco (BAT) and Altria. BAT recently reported that it expected sales to sag by 3% this year, partly because duty-free sales to travellers had fallen and also because sales bans had been imposed in some emerging countries.
But Altria, the parent company of Philip Morris, which makes Marlboro, now claims the sales slump is easing as lockdowns in the US give smokers more time to indulge at home. The pandemic is also harming acceptance of alternative products such as vaping and e-cigarettes. Forecasts are for an annual sales drop of 7% this year.
But King isn’t celebrating. “WHO predicts that the world is on track for one billion tobacco deaths this century,” she says. “There are only seven and a half billion of us. It is a problem … that simply can’t be fixed by just the health sector or just by government. We really need everybody to stand side by side from all sectors to deal with this,” she says.
Some of the early government sanctions against tobacco date back more than 20 years, including in Australia and the US. But the industry has found new markets with fast-growing revenue streams in the developing world, where controls are lax. A determined campaigner like King still has a critical challenge in bringing down the industry.
Her first job after her intern year was on the lung cancer ward at Melbourne’s storied Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre.
“Nearly all of my patients were smokers or ex-smokers, and nearly all of them had started smoking when they were children or teenagers. Many of them had tried to quit but, despite living in a country with an exceptional medical system and all sorts of sophisticated medical technology, nearly every single one of them died. It was very confronting. Even though everyone knows that tobacco is bad, it was quite a shock for me to see that upfront. It’s something that has never left me,” says King.
The spur that caused her to become such a strident anti-tobacco campaigner came when she met in 2010 with a representative of Health Super (which later merged with First State) to review her finances before buying her first house.
“We had a coffee in the cafeteria, and he showed me how much money I had and we had a nice chat. As an afterthought, I rushed back to the table to ask whether I was meant to tell him what to do with that money? He said no, it was all in the default option. I asked what did that mean? Were there other options? He rolled his eyes and said there was one greenie option for people who have problems investing in mining, alcohol or tobacco. I said, you are telling me that I am investing in tobacco? He said, oh yes. Everybody is.
“Right then and there, I realised that everything I was doing by going to the hospital – treating people, trying to care for them – was being completely undermined by the fact that my own money was being invested in the companies that made the products that were killing my patients.”
King needed to know more about how superannuation worked. She found that the vast majority of workers chose the default option. She wanted a more comprehensive choice than one “greenie” option.
“I was hoping that my super fund would put a blanket exclusion across all of their offerings. It’s a position that needs to be taken by leaders of an organisation, so I went about helping them consider sustainable investment options,” she says.
“There are a lot of contributing factors. There is alcohol, there is sugar and guns, a whole raft of issues about climate change, there is cannabis, there is ocean plastic, human rights, palm oil, executive compensation – all very challenging issues.
“They [super funds] really need to examine all the tools that they have at their disposal. That includes engaging with companies. It includes vector sector investing, ESG integration, thematic investing, impact investing or, in exceptional circumstances, where none of those other techniques are relevant that is when you might apply an exclusion.
“We built out a sustainability framework, and use tobacco as a case study because it’s such a good example to explore.”
This strategy gave her a tool to talk to large investment managers in terms they could understand. It provided them with a clear sense of what tools they needed to deploy to assess their tobacco investments and risks, and why tobacco was different to many other sustainability challenges they confronted like climate change and slavery.
“A lot of organisations are building sustainability frameworks as we speak,” says King. “They are refining them, and constantly seeing them evolve as issues either move up the agenda or new ones arise.”
By schooling them about why tobacco bans were important at a time when many other issues were emerging, it has made King very hard to ignore.
She says 45 major superannuation funds in Australia now have a tobacco exclusion on all of their products. They have a combined $1.5 trillion under management. Over the past four years she has been
working in more than 20 countries with banks, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, pension plans, asset managers and ratings agencies to put the issue on the agenda.
“We try to work with the finance sector,” she explains. “Our mantra is that we name and fame. We work very quietly behind the scenes for as long as it takes.”
But King is concerned that the problem has become so large that it can’t be fixed by just the finance sector, or even by government. “We really need everybody to stand side by side from all sectors to deal with this issue.”
She says there are many risks that tobacco companies face, including regulation, litigation, supply chain, environment and reputation. Then there are the signs of financial uncertainty. King says that shares in tobacco companies are now looking shaky financially. “The idea that you absolutely need tobacco in your portfolio to do well is broadly disputed. Since 2017, we know that if you had tobacco in your portfolio or had been tobacco free, overwhelmingly being tobacco free has produced a superior outcome,” she says.
High level fund managers are increasingly prepared to publicly support this view. Mark Fawcett, the chief investment officer of the UK’s Nest pension scheme said that the investment sector until recently acted as if it was too hard to sell tobacco investments because of fiduciary restraints. But Nest examined the pros and cons and pledged in June 2019 to sell out. He told the magazine European Pensions that Nest had signed tough social responsibility principles and it needed to advocate for the cause. “We concluded … that this was an industry that is effectively going to run into the ground, and we decided to divest while we had the choice.”
Still, King doesn’t believe tobacco companies will disappear anytime soon. At least four countries banned cigarette sales during the Covid-19 lockdown.
“We might be able to escalate tobacco control awareness during a time when the whole world is focused on health. It would be fascinating if that happened. Everything else is being disrupted and re-imagined and everybody is talking about building back better, and I think it would be very nice to build back a world that is tobacco free rather than one that just expected eight million incremental deaths a year,” she says.
King learned some life lessons from her love for swimming. She yearned to be a champion, but at 17 suffered a bad shoulder injury that forced her to retire and turn to medicine. But for about 10 years, she was team doctor for the Australian swimming team, including during the 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth Games.
“I still use some of the lessons from that. I watched swimmers do things that I genuinely thought were impossible, but they did it in front of my eyes. That changed the way that I thought about the world. It made me think that the word ‘impossible’ was not very helpful because it turns out that nearly anything is possible if you really want to do it.”
She developed a yearning for travel after taking a gap year, when studying medicine, to travel in Europe. She became a nanny for a family in France, and still stays with them every time she travels there on business. “I had a fantastic French teacher at school, and she made me completely obsessed with the food, the art, the history and the language.”
King is fortunate also to have had several powerful mentors at important times of her life. “My swimming coach, Leigh Nugent, taught me about hard work, dedication and how to pick yourself up if you have a bad race.”
There was also the professor on the cancer ward at the PeterMac Cancer Centre, David Ball. “The day that the first super fund went tobacco free, there was a joint press release and it got a really good public response. That night, he sent me an email and said: ‘Keep it up. By doing this work, you will save more lives in a lifetime than you would as a clinician.’ ”
“I realised that my super was being invested in the companies that made the products that were killing my patients”