Podcast Transcript: Power Bite - Bronwyn King

Bronwyn King
But then he rolled his eyes at me and said, oh, look, there is this one special option for people who have a problem with investing in mining, alcohol or tobacco. And then there was silence and I sort of just absorbed what he said. And I said, did you just say tobacco? And he said yes. And I said, So, am I currently investing in tobacco? And he said, oh, yes, everyone is. And that was it. That was just this incredible moment where I thought, I just can't continue the.

Jenelle McMaster
Irony of sitting there in a hospital. Talking to you…

Bronwyn King
And that's it, that's it. And I thought, Gosh, you know, here I am. I knew absolutely what tobacco did to people. I've seen it so many times, not just dozens of times. Maybe more than a thousand of my patients had either died or suffered absolutely terribly as a result of tobacco. And then there I am, finding out that my own money invested in the companies that make the products that are killing them.

Jenelle McMaster
So what happened then? You go, OK, somehow, I'm inadvertently bankrolling this situation. How did you take that discomfort of the moment and turn that into, I'm going to do something about this?

Bronwyn King
Straight away at that exact moment, I actually had a little thought to myself where I just said, well, that's it, I just can't leave that. That has to be fixed. A few weeks later, I was the radiation oncologist who was set to present at our Friday afternoon meeting. I, instead of presenting an interesting case, I presented this discovery. I said to everybody, all of us at Peter McCallum, who know only too well what tobacco does to humankind, all of us currently invest our own super in these companies. The top holdings for me in that international shares portion was, number one, british American Tobacco, number two, Imperial Tobacco, number four, with Philip Morrison, number five with Swedish Match Company. So four of the top five holdings were tobacco companies. They said, look, you have to tell the CEO of the hospital. He then rang me back one day later and he said, look, I've booked you in to speak to the CEO and the investment team at the pension plan for the hospital and that then kicked off the very first conversation that I ever had with a big financial institution.

Jenelle McMaster
I'd love for you to kind of just set a scene here on what the changes that you're trying to make happen.

Bronwyn King
The World Health Organization predicts that the world is on track for 1 billion tobacco related deaths this century. So 1 billion. There's only seven and a half billion of us. So if we pause and think for a minute about the scale of this, it's an extraordinary problem and the world's health sector is really aware of that and is doing absolutely everything it can to try to help people who suffer as a result of tobacco and to try to implement better preventative health policy. Governments are on board. The only global health treaty that exists, that is the UN tobacco Control treaty and 181 countries have signed and ratified that, and we have everyone standing together to bring an end to tobacco except the finance sector. And that's the missing piece that we are trying to address at Tobacco Free Portfolio.