Terry Barnes: Wowsers’ turn eyes on cereal packaging
IF nanny state policies lead to more smokers, why would we let them dictate what we eat and drink, asks Terry Barnes.
Opinion
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IMAGINE a town of 21,000 people, the size of Goulburn or Armidale. That’s how many more Australian smokers there were in 2016 than just three years earlier.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s latest National Drug Strategy Household Survey shows that our national smoking rate of just over 12 per cent barely changed in three years, while the United Kingdom and United States have experienced their biggest drops ever over similar periods.
Now the self-appointed supervisors of what we eat and drink want to bring the policies that brought you a rising smoking rate to your supermarket and bottle shop.
You must hand it to the Obesity Policy Coalition.
Funded indirectly by government, through their sugar-daddies (geddit?) the Cancer Council of Victoria, Diabetes Victoria and VicHealth, and supported enthusiastically by NSW health bureaucrats and public health organisations, they get ready traction for their outspoken, puritanical views.
Obesity activists castigate breakfast cereal manufacturers for having the temerity to box their products in colourful packaging featuring cartoon characters.
The Obesity Policy Coalition’s CEO, Jane Martin, recently declared war on Tony the Tiger, Sam the Toucan, Coco the Monkey and any cartoon character appearing on a cereal packet, claiming these critters drive kiddies’ pester power over poor mum as she wheels the trolley down the supermarket aisle.
That mum has a responsibility to her children, of course, doesn’t occur to Ms Martin.
Childhood obesity is all Big Junk Food’s fault. In Wowser-land, a corporate Big Something is at the bottom of everything.
Public health nannies have long called for sugar taxes, especially on sweetened soft drinks.
Now they’re demanding advertising restrictions and plain packaging for the likes of Coco Pops and Fruit Loops, just as for cigarettes.
Only government regulation and targeted taxation, they claim, can save vulnerable kiddies from capitalist exploitation.
And it’s not just pleasurable foods in wowsers’ sights. So are beer, wine and spirits.
A recent report for Public Health England urged the British government to legislate plain packaging and increase excise on alcohol products.
In Australia, the National Health and Medical Research Council has entrusted reviewing guidelines to reduce health risks from alcohol to a working group dominated by activist experts, including some with links to temperance groups.
Most have affiliations with anti-alcohol activist organisations equivalent to the Obesity Policy Coalition. Industry is shut-out.
That means more expensive plain packaged beer, and health warnings on beer mats and coasters could soon be coming to a pubs or bottle shop near you. If the lockout laws don’t get you first, that is.
Food and alcohol killjoys and zealots are inspired by their anti-tobacco soulmates’ success with successive federal governments.
It was activist political pester power that a few years ago brought about tobacco plain packaging, and cheered Labor and Coalition governments hitting smokers with huge excise hikes to force them to quit.
It’s worth reminding those same killjoys and zealots that the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s latest report was the first such survey fully covering both Australia’s plain packaging for tobacco products, and annual 12.5 per cent rises in tobacco excise that started in 2013.
If the anti-tobacco lobby’s confident predictions about these supposedly demand-suppressing measures were right, smoking rates should have dropped to near zero.
At best, it seems plain packaging and savage excise hikes merely held back the new smoker figure from being even higher.
And as for that population of Goulburn estimate of 21,000 new smokers, it’s an understatement, because it doesn’t count people buying durries on the black market.
On those numbers, plain packaging and punitive taxation are not public health triumphs.
So far, they’ve achieved nothing. All pain, no gain.
Their only actual beneficiary has been the federal government’s projected $40-billion budget windfall from the punitive tobacco excise.
If applied to Coco Pops, Maccas and your humble middy, these measures would fail just as dismally, probably even more so.
Going by the results with smoking, if enough determined people want to buy and consume yummy stuff, they will despite official disapproval.
Anti-obesity wowsers should face facts. If too many kids are becoming lard-arses, it’s because they don’t run around enough while stuffing whatever they and their parents choose into their young mouths.
It’s not food manufacturers force-feeding children, it’s parents not taking responsibility for choices made by their kids and themselves.
In this snowflake age, it’s too easy to blame others for our own failings: parents raising fat kiddies need to look in the mirror, not at a cereal box.
In related news: Plain-packaging laws for cigarettes
Just as for nicotine and alcohol, the correct message for any food and beverages is enjoy them in moderation, but use the brains God gave you to make informed choices rather than blame everyone else.
Supervise your kids’ diets and, above all, push them off their flabby bums and get them active.
Plain packaged food and alcohol, sugar and higher alcohol taxes, and holier-than-thou puritanism from patronising public health activists, will achieve nothing.
The likes of the Obesity Policy Coalition should stop wasting taxpayers’ money with their self-righteous indignation and anti-capitalist conspiracy theories and instead help people make informed choices about diet rather than bully them.
Indeed, they shouldn’t get any taxpayer funding at all.
Terry Barnes is an Australian fellow of UK think-tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs
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