Australia’s state governments may be about to restrict one of the few remaining marketing avenues for tobacco marketers, with several states considering severely restricting the display of cigarettes across all retail outlets.
This will have a huge impact on small businesses’viability, according to National Association of Tobacco Retailers secretariat Ken Henrick. Though he does not believe it will affect tobacco marketers, particularly as some display will be allowed.
“We don’t believe it will have any effect on overall tobacco sales—there’s no evidence for that at all,”Henrick says.
“What we do think is that it will shift sales from small businesses, which are the majority of points-of-sale, into the major supermarket chains because they can easily afford the financial and staffing resources to set up a point of sale within a big supermarket and have it staffed all the time.
“While for small business it’s just one part of the total picture, depending on the channel, tobacco sales account for say 30% to more than 80% of total sales, so it will have a huge impact on small business viability.”
Queensland, South Australia and New South Wales have made moves towards restricting cigarette displays.
“All of these tobacco control measures are part of the general strategy of an international World Health Organisation agreement called the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, and Australia is signatory to that…and as part of that process Australia is moving to stricter and stricter control,” Henrick says.
Under new laws to take effect in Queensland on December 31, 2005, the size of a tobacco product display unit will be restricted to one square metre, and there can be only one display unit in a retail outlet.
Queensland Health Minister Gordon Nuttall says at present retailers are free of restrictions.
“As a result, tobacco retailers can display more than 1000 packets of cigarettes, loose tobacco and cigars, amounting to a power-wall of tobacco products.”
“These displays, to which children are frequently exposed, are a powerful advertisement for a product which kills more than 3,400 Queenslanders a year.”
Henrick disagrees. “Basically we’ve argued that there is no evidence there is causal relationship between display of product and people’s decision to smoke.
“In many cases the decision to smoke is taken when they are kilometres away from the display—they’re sitting at home, they notice they’ve got three cigarettes left in the pack and they say ‘Oh, I’ll drop down to the shop and get some more cigarettes and get the milk and bread while I’m there’.”
The fight is not yet lost, he says. “We are still trying to talk to the Queensland Government about the issues, so until the legislation goes through we consider it’s a live issue.”
Henrick says South Australia has delayed until February a decision on restricting displays to three square metres. The situation is unclear in New South Wales, which six months ago was the first to makes noises about cutting back displays.
“We can’t get any sense out of NSW at all,” he says.
