The government’s place is not in the kitchen, or the lunch box

An expensive scheme to engineer our diets is exactly the kind of misguided project health busybodies love to sink their teeth into, writes James Morrow.

We know, we know... we shouldn’t eat rubbish and watch too much TV, but we don’t need a tax to tell us.

The life of a public health busybody must be a very strange and exhausting one indeed. Imagine going through your entire day not only thinking about what to have for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but fretting about what millions of your fellow Australians choose to have as well.

With all that time and effort spent worrying, it is no surprise that they keep coming up with the same idea over and over again: they don’t have the energy to think of anything original.

That’s why it should come as no surprise that when researchers at the University of Melbourne dropped a study this week offering a solution to Australia’s health and obesity problems, it looked an awful lot like every other research team’s fix.

No prizes for guessing that they called for a suite of new taxes, to be paid by consumers, on saturated fat, salt, sugar, and sugary drinks.

Generously, they also called for subsidies to make fruits and vegetables cheaper. But given policy makers’ preference for taking rather than forsaking funds, there’s no prize for guessing which measure is more likely to get up.

A scheme to add taxes to junk food might make health busybodies feel useful but it won’t deliver much in the way of benefits. (Pic: iStock)

The problem with studies like this, and the often credulous way activists and politicians and pundits leap on them to call for more bureaucratic fiddling with peoples’ choices, is that no one ever asks the question, Is it worth it?

In the case of the University of Melbourne study, the headline message is that a mixture of taxes on the bad stuff and subsidies on the good would offer Australians increased lifespans of 2.1 years.

Which sounds like great news until you dig deeper and find that those gains are per 100 head of the Australian population.

Assuming the benefits are spread equally, that means the end result for most people of such an intervention would be an extra week on this mortal coil. In the context of all the other life-risking and sustaining choices one makes every day that is barely enough to rate — particularly if you’re trying to buy a load of groceries on a budget.

Twins Milla and Sophie Hannay, 8, look like they’d be pretty happy if healthy food was made cheaper. (Pic: Evan Morgan)

Likewise the suggested budget benefits — $3.4 billion in savings to the health sector — sound good when you’re thumping the table to a sceptical public that it’s for your own good.

Just don’t mention according to the most recent figures from the Australian Institute for Health and Welfare we spend over $160 billion per year on health as a nation, making these savings practically a rounding error.

Thrown into a local context, they would barely cover the cost of an on-ramp on the $16.8 billion WestConnex project.

And this is without diving into the messy business of how often the “settled” science on health and nutrition is overturned.

Of course, they could call for education programs, or even more personal responsibility.

But none of those options turn tut-tutting about others’ choices into cold, hard (government) cash.

James Morrow is Opinion Editor of the Daily Telegraph.

Originally published as The government’s place is not in the kitchen, or the lunch box