I have no idea if the tobacco companies are behind this reversal in some way. It certainly is possible. However, it’s also possible that these are political choices of the coalition parties: would it really be a surprise if a party of the right was concerned about lawlessness and the impact on small retailers, a populist party supported smokers, and a libertarian party saw these measures as state overreach? It is quite possible, therefore, that these are legitimate political choices made by parties in forming their coalition. Tobacco control colleagues might not like it, but tobacco industry influence is not necessary to explain this reversal. The coalition is not doing anything out of the ordinary for an election-winning, right-wing, populist, libertarian alliance. And remember, the endgame measures are a policy of the coalition’s defeated predecessors deliberately designed to take an outlying position relative to all other countries in the world.
One of the more pernicious trends in tobacco control is to see every doubt or opposition to extreme and outlier policies as support for the tobacco industry or resulting from tobacco industry influence. As I discussed above, it is possible to object to such measures on pragmatic or principled grounds. No one has a monopoly on righteousness.
