The Australian government is bent on making fat people slim in the most condescending way possible.
Last month, an incredibly juvenile media campaign was launched to encourage Australians to make healthier lifestyle choices.
The “Swap it, Don’t Stop it” campaign is a multimedia extravaganza, featuring television, print and radio ads, an iPhone app and Facebook page.
I feel stupider for receiving healthy lifestyle tips from a simple-minded balloon called Eric. Some pearls of wisdom from the portly blue balloon include swapping “big for small” portions on your plate and “often for sometimes” in regards to naughty treats.
The campaign reaches its nadir with the audacious promise that you can “lose your belly without having to lose out on the things you love.”
Eric doesn’t want to end up with cancer, type-2 diabetes and heart disease, much like a non-balloon person. But diet and exercise is a personal choice and I would be staggered if anyone adopted a healthier lifestyle because the government tells them to.
With the budget bottom-line looking perilous, the taxpayer shouldn’t be funding an enormous health campaign imploring us to swap four scoops of ice-cream for a calorie-light two. It’s an expensive way to inform Australians of the completely obvious.
A utilitarian might rationalise that a costly public health campaign is justified if a healthier public reduces the burden on the government-funded health system. As the saying goes, prevention is cheaper than a cure.
Health Minister Nicola Roxon referred to the cost of obesity when announcing the “Swap it, Don’t Stop it” campaign—claiming that it cost Australia $58.2 billion in 2008 alone. Fat people are not only cardiovascular time-bombs but, according to these figures, economic vandals too.
Roxon’s claiming, in effect, that a healthy society is responsible economic management. But the obese aren’t a great burden on the government’s finances—simply because unhealthy people tend to die prematurely. A healthy pensioner, after all, costs the government more than a dead one.
I’m not saying that a healthier society isn’t an end in itself but that economic considerations shouldn’t be used to justify government health campaigns when all the data isn’t included in their headline-grabbing figures.
The “Swap it, Don’t Stop it” campaign also raises the important issue of whether the government is overreaching, especially when we presently have all the information we need that eating junk food is bad for you and exercise good.
Even the empty-headed understands the virtue of brown bread over white, a regular morning walk and pitfalls of a KFC Double Down burger. There is no information vacuum around these simple lifestyle choices and no such thing as an unwitting glutton.
A constant criticism of Labor is that it doesn’t know what it stands for but I would argue it does.
Since the Rudd government was elected in 2007, Labor has demonstrated an ideological commitment to big government. It’s a uniquely Labor trait for the government to impose itself on the country.
The Labor government suffered from delusions of grandeur in economic management, stimulating the economy in 2008 with malfunctioning pink batts, overpriced school halls and cash handouts for everyone; it intends to build; operate and monopolise a $36 billion national broadband network; it re-regulated the workplace via the Fair Work Act; it imposed a gratuitous new tax on the mining industry without consultation; it hiked taxes on cigarettes and is legislating to deprive smokers the right to choose an aesthetically pleasing brand—for an entirely legal product, mind you; it’s seeking to de-carbonate the economy; and now wants to protect us from ourselves in relation to diet and lazy lifestyles.
Maybe the government should stick to its core functions and leave people with the responsibility to lead relatively healthy lives.
If people want to be gluttons, so be it—they’ll suffer the consequences.
Anyway, few people are going to eat less or exercise more because the government says so, especially when its spokesman is a balloon.
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