The tobacco industry has a long history of utilising its profits to exert political influence. For decades, it has influenced Australian politics through donations to major political parties. While the Liberal and Labor parties have, in the past two decades, pledged to no longer accept donations from tobacco companies, no such promises have been made by other parties, such as the Nationals and Liberal Democrats, who continue to receive tobacco industry donations. In 2023, as the federal government announced a series of vaping reforms, Philip Morris International – which has a vested interest in these reforms due to its production of both vaping products and tobacco – made a timely donation of $75,000 to the Nationals. In the same financial year, British American Tobacco also donated to the Nationals, marking their first donation in over a decade. Their previous donation, in 2011, was made at a similarly strategic time, when the government was preparing reforms for cigarette plain packaging.