Geoff Hogbin

Geoff Hogbin is a Chicago educated Hayek economist based in Sydney, Australia, who also worked for the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) and its sister organisation, the Melbourne-based Institute of Public Affairs (IPA). Both of these organisations received annual tobacco grants, and they also took commissions from tobacco companies to run special operations -- usually without revealing that the tobacco industry was, in anyway involved.

In December 1993 Hogbin set up a Regulatory Review Unit at the Sydney Centre for Independent Studies headquarters (nominally run by the IPA) and in 1994 he had a hand in setting up the Melbourne Regulatory Uni and its parallel operation, known as "OverRuled" which was designed to generate a coalition of companies with regulatory problems to coordinate the fight against some State and Federal regulatory agencies. [1]

In 1998, Hogbin was also commissioned by the tobacco industry to act as an organiser and tour guide for W. Kip Viscusi from the US Duke University (where he held a chair endowed by the tobacco industry) on a tour of the main Australian east-coast centers, talking to academics and the media. [[2]]

Viscusi was promoted as an expert on 'risk analysis', and he actively promoted the idea that passive smoking did not represent a significant risk to non-smokers, and that smokers were not a financial burden on the non-smoking population ... and therefore cigarette excise tax increases were not justified. The Harvard Law Review later took Viscusi to task with an article 'Bias and Manipulation in Viscusi's Survey Evidence' [[3]]