Taking on Big Tobacco: Melbourne doctor Bronwyn King fights unethical investments
The doctor taking on
Confronted by the suffering that lung cancer inflicts, Melbourne oncologist Dr Bronwyn King made a shocking discovery – her super fund had shares in the
tobacco industry. So she decided to make waves, writes
The death sentences were handed out every day – and even now, 15 years on, Bronwyn King can’t forget the faces of the condemned. As a newly qualified doctor, Bronwyn’s first three-month placement was in the lung cancer unit of Melbourne’s Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, where she discovered up close the heartbreaking limitations of modern medicine. A lot of her patients were in their 50s and 60s, some even in their 40s, and nearly all of them were sick thanks to cigarettes – an addiction most were saddled with when they were children. Almost every one of them died.
One patient, she recalls, came to hospital with a lump in his neck. “His wife was laughing and saying to the doctor, ‘He’ll live another day, won’t he?’ and I could see the doctor’s face and could tell it was serious,” she says. The doctor took a biopsy straight away and 10 minutes later had to tell the man he had advanced, incurable lung cancer. “This man was about 52 – that’s what lung cancer does to people – it robs years off their lives. Seeing that played out day after day is devastating.”
For Bronwyn, those three months would alter the course of her life. “It was a very confronting way to start my medical career – it was deflating. I didn’t want to tell my patients I couldn’t cure them,” says Bronwyn, who notes 86 per cent of people diagnosed with lung cancer die within five years (compared with just 10 per cent of those with breast cancer). “I felt the public didn’t realise how bad it really was – of course, they knew tobacco was dangerous, but the reality was even more alarming than I could have imagined.”
Now 42, Bronwyn is a measured, articulate woman whose work as a radiation oncologist demands some emotional detachment, but she is visibly moved as she struggles to describe the effect the lung cancer ward had on her. “I still can’t even find the words,” she says, “but it left a very deep impression on me.” A deadly investment
Something had to be done, but it wasn’t until 2010 that she found her chance to act. Sorting out her finances to buy a house with her husband, also a radiation oncologist, she met with a rep from her superannuation fund. Bronwyn had paid no attention to her super over the past decade; like three-quarters of Australians, she was in the “default” investment option, the rep told her – as opposed to the “greenie” option, which screens out tobacco, alcohol and mining company shares. That meant that, unwittingly, she was investing in the tobacco industry. Bronwyn was dumbfounded.
“The reality is, the majority of Australian workers are owners of tobacco companies and don’t know it,” she says. “It was something I could not accept.” And so her project was born. For the past six years, almost single-handedly, she has bridged the gulf between the health and
finance worlds and become a thorn in the side of Big Tobacco. Over countless coffees and presentations, she has convinced more than 30 Australian super funds (controlling nearly half the funds under management) to dump tobacco stocks worth $2 billion. With the support of the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC), her Tobacco Free Portfolios initiative went global in 2015, with the world’s second-biggest insurer, AXA, announcing its tobacco-free investment mandate earlier this year. This month, Bronwyn celebrated one of her biggest wins to date when Medibank announced it would divest its tobacco shares, and she has recently been nominated for Australian of the Year.
The University of Sydney’s Professor of Public Health, Simon Chapman, calls the mild-mannered Melbourne doctor “a force of nature”. Armed with her medical credentials and strategic, affable approach, she is fast becoming a mighty threat to the tobacco industry. “She’s one of the new vanguard in global tobacco control,” he says. “She’s starting to make massive waves.” Shares of shame
In this country, where less than 13 per cent of the population smokes, you could think the war against cigarettes is all but won. Australia has set a new global standard with its plain-packaging legislation – but as the developed world has toughened its anti-smoking laws, the tobacco industry has turned its attention to poorer countries, targeting the young. Not only that, the industry relies on child labour, with under-16s making up 60 per cent of tobacco farm workers.
With huge markets such as Indonesia and Pakistan, where there is little tobacco control, it’s a lucrative industry and investors do well. Traditionally, the finance community would argue it has a duty to make as much money as possible for its members or shareholders, making tobacco shares okay, but there has been an increasing focus in recent times on socially responsible investment. When big pension funds or insurance companies divest tobacco shares, someone else will buy them, which means the tobacco companies don’t immediately suffer, but it is a powerful public statement. “That message percolates out,” says Professor Chapman. “The obvious analogy is with things that used to be legal, like the slave trade … The most important impact is in the publicity it generates and people having ordinary conversations at dinner parties and on the soccer field.”
Intent on disentangling the finance sector from the tobacco industry, Bronwyn meets with four or five executives every week, and at least one will have lost a parent to cigarettes. “The finance leaders today are the children of a generation in Australia where almost everyone smoked,” she says. “I’ve had many of them in tears telling me their family story about tobacco. I’m sure that’s motivated some to seriously look at this issue.”
Yet even if an executive is resistant, Bronwyn is not deterred. “She won’t take no for an answer,” says Sydney-based colleague Clare Payne, a lawyer who joined Tobacco Free Portfolios last year after the UICC provided seed funding. “We just have to bring people around.” Drive and resilience
Perhaps the most powerful weapon in Bronwyn’s arsenal is her personality. She is focused and persistent, but disarms business leaders with her collaborative approach, avoiding words like “fight” or “campaign” to describe her work, preferring the more neutral “project” or “initiative”. As Professor Chapman says, “She doesn’t come across as this crazy anti-smoker.”
Bronwyn’s drive and resilience developed early. The middle of three sisters, she was a champion junior swimmer who competed for Australia, and won the Lorne Pier to Pub openwater race as a teenager. By 14, she knew she wanted to be a doctor. Bronwyn still recalls seeing the muscles of the human body on a poster at the Nunawading Swimming Club and taking home a copy to learn the names of each one. When a shoulder injury stopped her swimming, she threw all her energy into getting into medicine and became dux of Fintona Girls’ School.
When it came time to choose a specialty, radiation oncology – which uses giant linear
The tobacco industry has turned its attention to poorer countries, targeting the young.