Taxing the rich to feed victims of fat

I’ve long assumed my fluctuating weight was my responsibility. Turns out it’s yours.

It seems our waistlines and our personal struggles with them are, like so many other things, being collectivised by people who live on the taxpayer dollar.

Wonderful news for me this week, providing a much needed feeling of relief. I may be a bit too fat but it’s all your fault, which totally lets me off the hook — phew.

Now that’s settled, instead of getting up and forcing myself to run on the treadmill every day, I am going to lie around in bed, slurping coffee with sugar and cream and gobbling down rich croissants, loaded up with butter and jam — yippee!

This grand idea — the one that my bulging belly and wobbly thighs are other people’s doing — comes from the considered opinions of our top public health experts.

It is fleshed out in two reports, one released by the Collective for Action on Obesity this week and the other, a Senate document, from the Select Committee into the Obesity Epidemic in Australia, released last December.

Both reports make me feel rather silly. I have long assumed that my fluctuating weight was my own responsibility.

However, both reports and the wise words of Greens senator Richard Di Natale — “It’s not that people just became irresponsible; the environment around them has changed” — indicate how misguided I was.

The “obesogenic environment” is the culprit here, apparently. It has made us too fat and — as both reports point out in language that is crafted to avoid holding individuals responsible in any way — in the past 10 years the number of people “living with obesity” has more than doubled, from 2.7 million people in 2007-08 to 5.8 million today.

Our weight is a problem, but it is a problem inflicted on individuals by a cruel and heartless society. And, boy, are those individuals paying the price. Evidence shows that people who are morbidly obese have health problems, depression and tend to experience unemployment.

We are fortunate to have researchers on the public payroll, so they can conduct studies to arrive at such previously unimaginable conclusions.

Anna Peeters, director of the Institute for Health Transformation at Deakin University, says: “We need to be very careful not to just blame individuals. It is not just a lifestyle choice or due to a lack of willpower … there are strong social, biological and environmental drivers of obesity that are outside of people’s control.”

One of the main factors is where people live, which is determined by the terrible economic inequality present in our country.

“There are major equity considerations here with indigenous, non-metro and people living in lower socio-economic status communities being impacted more.”

People who don’t live in trendy inner-city areas are likelier to find themselves struggling with obesity, which can drop suddenly — like a python from a branch overhead — on to an unsuspecting victim.

The creators of the obesogenic environment are government, society in general and the harbingers of all evil — corporations, specifically, companies in the food and beverage sector, now being referred to as Big Food.

Here is where obesity becomes a terrific excuse to take more tax out of the economy.

Behind the scenes, those close to the Senate inquiry say the Greens have an agenda for a sugar tax and did a deal with Labor to give them a vehicle to make the recommendation.

The final report makes recommendations that no one supports, other than Di Natale and one other senator. Di Natale is regarded as having been on a mission from the beginning, and of organising the witnesses to give him what he wanted.

It is asserted that the public health lobby wants to paint the food and beverage sector in the same light as the tobacco industry and is constructing a narrative that the industry meets with government behind closed doors to do dirty deals to make us all fat so they can profit.

The answer to private greed is people power for the common good. In an article in New Scientist from last May titled “Collective rather than individual action can beat obesity”, the author says “corporations will always aim to privatise profits while socialising the risk” and “our new understanding of the causes of obesity makes it clear we need to socialise the solution”.

It seems our waistlines and our personal struggles with them are, like so many other things, being collectivised by people who live on the taxpayer dollar. If we follow their narrative then I am not responsible for my own weight, and you are not responsible for yours, but somehow I am responsible for your weight and you are for mine. OK, whatever, but the upshot is, someone else should pay more tax.

If we really wanted to fix the problem we would offer income tax concessions or other incentives to individuals who keep themselves in a healthy weight range, but that doesn’t play into our national “poor bugger me” victim mentality, and, as such, will never happen.

Now, will someone pass me the cheese.