A general site mainly for journalists.

Stewart Fist, journalist, columnist and film-maker.
 
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1. Confederation of Australian Sports

This organisation was created by lobbyist Andrew Whist (both Philip Morris and Telstra) with Wayne Reid who was initially the CEO of Australian Lawn Tennis Association. This was set up in 1979 with salary and office expenses paid by the three Australian tobacco manufacturers.

The idea of the CAS was to co-opt major sports associations to act as third-party lobbyists for the cigarette companies in order to retain rights to accept tobacco company sponsorship funding; they would provide administrators willing to lobby their local politicians and major political parties in order to retain this sponsorship. The brand naming-rights (Marlboro Grand Prix, Benson & Hedges Test Cricket, Virginia Slims women's tennis) were especially important to the companies. Under these banners, the top sportsmen and women could then be recruited as role-models for the young sports enthusiasts, and be paraded before the TV cameras smoking brandname cigarettes, or featured in advertising in suggestively-romantic situations.

Health and environmental activists had succeeded in banning cigarette advertising on radio and TV, and they were attempting to limit prime-time advertising of alcohol and gambling during the hours when children might be watching. However, by sponsoring the major sports, various industries (tobacco was only one) had a backdoor form of radio and TV exposure linked to the sportsmen and women who were role models for adolescents.

Local sporting clubs inevitably had close associations with their own local politicians, so this lobbying strategy was important on many fronts.

Whist and Reid were very successful at recruiting some of the umbrella sporting associations as lobbying channels for the tobacco and alcohol industries (Philip Morris was also a major alcohol company), and the program was so successful that they took the idea overseas and established the International Assembly of National Organizations of Sport (IANOS) which in Latin America was later converted to the Inter-American Sports Association. IANOS ceased to exist in 2009.
 

          EXPLANATIONS
Andrew Whist, Bill Webb and Wayne Reid were all Australians: Reid was a famous tennis player. Whist was working in PM's New York office running numerous international scams, especially in Europe. He specialised in creating phantom organisations and 'astroturfs' which were used to channel benefits to politicians (often junkets to exotic locations). He also funded and ran many pseudo-scientific organisations and political/economic policy groups.

He worked with Sir David L Nicolson, the UK Chairman and PR executive for Rothmans by running the American end of the trans-Atlantic organisation known as AECA (American-European Community Association), which lobbied on behalf of a number of industry groups within the European Parliament. (Don't confuse this David Nicolson with the Conservative party MP and Research Director David J NicHolson).

Whist was later forced to admit in a court-room (Oklahoma vs US tobacco companies) that the AECA division that he ran in America was no more substantial than a "chair in his New York apartment". It was only one of many phantom operations he controlled.

Nicolson and Whist very obviously ran the AECA for lobbying purposes, but the others who are named here as being involved could well have just been gullible. Of course there was no way that anyone in Philip Morris could confirm that Whist and Nicolson had enrolled 38 member of the European Parliament. Whist is just impressing his superiors here with a bit of name-dropping.


The Source of this document is at: https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/docs/myyy0042
Further Notes:

Brussels probably refers here only to the European Parliament. However it was also the office of INFOTAB (Information on Tobacco) which was the global lobby set up by Whist's immediate superior Bill Murray. It was run originally (then known as ICOSI) by ex-Victorian Liberal MP Julian Doyle, and later by Bryan Simpson, the ex-advertising executive and marketing manager of Melbourne's Herald & Weekly Times.

Simpson had been President of the New Zealand Amateur Swimming Association, then manager of their Olympic Swimming Team at the Tokyo Games. He later ran for Rupert Murdoch the Media Accreditation Authority and the Media Council of Australia trying to retain advertising of tobacco products in newspapers ... then briefly, the Tobacco Institute of Australia (TIA) for the cigarette companies, before being transferred to Europe.


See Wayne Reid and Rupert Murdoch also in attendance at the infamous Boca Raton strategy conference for Philip Morris run by the later Australian CEO of the global Philip Morris Companies, Geoff Bible. https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/docs/lzxn0108


There is many more documents in the tobacco archives on the creation and use of the Confederation of Australian Sport and on the activities of Andrew Whist and Wayne Reid. See this longer document:
 

          EXPLANATIONS
This an overview document dated February 1978 created by the Australian Philip Morris's Corporate Affairs department (run by Andrew Whist) for the New York company headquarters.

This was the period of the Fraser Liberal Government in Canberra after The Dismissal of Whitlam and the scandals of WA Inc. However Liberal Health Minister Ralph Hunt was anti-smoking, and the Ministerial Council on Drug Control (MCDS) was dominated by Labor states, generally with active anti-smoking ministers. Neville Wran (NSW), John Cain (Vic), Carmen Lawrence (WA) and John Bannon (SA) were all in favour of advertising and sponsorship bans.

Amazingly, right through the period of the Brian Burke Labor's WA Inc corruption, the state remained the leading anti-smoking force in Australia, while Australia itself was recognised globally as the leading anti-smoking nation in the developed world.

The main opposition to this came from the media proprietors, with Rupert Murdoch very obviously in the lead. He later joined the Philip Morris board, and it is likely that News Corp. was rescued in 1990 (his annus horribilis) by his friends holding the three top positions at Philip Morris: they also controlled the subsidiary Philip Morris Credit Corporation.

The leader of the PM triptch, Hamish Maxwell, gained a board position with News Corporation, and the two Australians next in line in the PM conglomerate, Bill Murray and Geoff Bible, receive positions on News Corporation boards which had generous stipends. Murdoch ran the Remuneration Committee at PM ... It was all very cosy.

Source https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/docs/ykbh0111

In addition to the Whist/Reid nation-wide Confederation of Australian Sports, another organisations known as COMPASS (Confederation of Major Participant and Spectator Sports) ran its own separate campaign against sports-sponsorship bans in Western Australia. It took out full-page ads in the newspapers with the slogan: "THINK. Is it best for the West?". It was clearly also funded mainly by Philip Morris, but it carried the credit of John Dollisson of the Tobacco Institute of Australia.

They trotted out sporting heroes like Australian Test wicket keeper, Rod Marsh.

The West Australian government hit back with a matching newspaper ad campaign with the theme "Give Kids a Chance" and "Quit for Life". The government won. https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/docs/gkmh0143


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