Background: Harmful industries use many strategies to undermine public health policies that threaten commercial profits. Industry associations and peak bodies play a key role in corporate political activities such as lobbying. Associations can help to shield their members from reputational damage. But, little known about who associations represent - who are their members, sponsors and/or funders? Given the role associations often play in challenging public health policies, it is important to build our capacity to understand and monitor the corporate political activities of harmful industries.
Design: This project mapped the associations representing the ultra-processed foods (UPF), alcohol, gambling and tobacco industries in Australia and assessed how transparent associations and their sponsors were about their relationships. We systematically searched for Australian industry associations representing those four harmful sectors and assessed whether they disclosed their sponsors. We then assessed whether the sponsor disclosed their relationship with the association. We used PowerBI and GEPHI software to map relationships between associations and sponsors.
Results: We identified 247 industry associations, with less than half (43.3%) publicly disclosing their sponsors. Of the approximately 2500 unique sponsors that were disclosed, 25% were UPF companies, 9% alcohol, 3% gambling and 0.6% tobacco, with most from other industries. Some companies sponsored multiple associations, with Carlton and United Breweries and Coca-Cola sponsoring the most alcohol associations (n = 25), Tabcorp sponsoring the most gambling associations (n = 21) and Nestlé sponsoring the most UPF associations (n = 11). Out of 2,766 reviewed relationships, only 248 (9.0%) were disclosed by sponsors. Companies were often selective, disclosing some but not all sponsorships.
Conclusions: Poor transparency from both associations and their sponsors makes it challenging to monitor the resources and influence of industry associations. By mapping the universe of currently active associations and sponsors, this study establishes a baseline for future monitoring efforts.