Cancer Council war on wine is predictable – and pointless | Caleb Bond

Perhaps the health campaigns would be easier to take seriously if they hadn’t been so wrong in their past predictions, writes Caleb Bond.

Death, taxes and public health wowsers wanting to take away all your fun.

Now that they’re done with tobacco, which they’ve completely ballsed up given Roy Morgan just found an uptick in young people smoking, they’ve moved on to alcohol as the new devil substance.

Fellow columnist Jess Adamson wrote in these pages on Wednesday about the Cancer Council’s national “Spread” campaign, which currently has trams painted up with red wine and the message that “alcohol causes cancer in 7 sites of the body”.

They’re also now pushing for cancer warnings to be printed on the labels of alcoholic drinks.

Sir Keir Starmer’s government is looking into the idea in the UK and so the Cancer Council’s Nutrition, Alcohol and Physical Activity Committee chairwoman Clare Hughes says it should be done here, too, because “research shows that cancer warning labels on alcoholic products has the potential to increase public awareness of the link between alcohol and cancer risk”.

That’s funny because they seem to be fine with alcohol when it’ll make people more likely to donate to their charity.

And keep in mind that representatives of the charity have been quoted saying there’s no safe level of drinking – the same language that is used about tobacco.

At least two branches of the Cancer Council – NSW and Tasmania – host annual fundraising gala dinners.

Given all this business about alcohol causing cancer, and the Cancer Council being a cancer charity, you’d figure these would have to be dry events.

I mean, you wouldn’t host people at an anti-cancer event and serve them up the finest 2022 McLaren Vale liquid cancer, would you?

It’d be a bit like campaigning against smoking and then giving your guests a free packet of durries.

So I was shocked to look up photos of Cancer Council NSW’s POSH 2025 fundraising dinner and find not only tables laden with bottles of wine but people drinking the stuff.

Robert Oatley Wines is thanked on the menus as a sponsor/supplier.

An Adelaide tram warns us to steer clear of one of South Australia's biggest industries as part of a Cancer Council campaign. Picture: Jess Adamson

Does the Cancer Council want these people to contract cancer or something?

Or do they know this is all a bit overblown?

It is commonplace for charities, including cancer-related ones, to ask wineries to supply bottles for events – either to serve or auction.

My mail is that a number of wineries are so incensed by the Cancer Council’s latest campaign that they will no longer donate their products for the benefit of cancer charities – and fair enough. The hypocrisy is rank.

This is the same mob that helped drive massive increases in the tobacco tax, which has created a burgeoning market of illicit cigarettes which nearly one in 10 people aged 18-24 now smoke, according to new Roy Morgan research.

Consequently, the smoking rate for those people is virtually unchanged from a decade ago.

It’s the same mob that opposed legalising and regulating vapes in the same way as cigarettes, creating another huge black market.

By doing so, they not only opposed the sale of a product much safer than cigarettes which is proven to help smokers quit – something I thought a cancer charity would support – but also helped drive vapes into the hands of kids through dodgy, unregulated shops.

But everyone already knows smoking is bad, so there’s not as much money to be made saying it.

The Cancer Council, like any other lobby group, needs funding to survive so it’s moved on to a new target in alcohol which, by the way, is linked to 3.8 per cent of new cancer cases compared to 13 per cent for smoking.

And a hell of a lot more people drink than smoke.

Maybe we’d take them more seriously if their public policy hadn’t been so consistently wrong.

Originally published as Cancer Council war on wine is predictable – and pointless | Caleb Bond