Page 2363 - Week 07 - Thursday, 17 August 2006
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
If you look at the diets of the children who are watching more TV you will see that there is a strong link between the amount of TV they watch and their attitudes to diet and behaviour. I think that it is relevant—Ms Porter touched on a few of these things—that children, particularly younger children, do not distinguish between advertising and the program they are watching. In fact, often the advertisements are much more interesting than the program. As members would be aware, if you get a bunch of kids together in a car, for instance, and they start singing they will sing TV food jingles.
Thirty-eight per cent of the children who watched more than four hours of TV a day agreed that they find TV advertisements interesting, compared with 28 per cent for the children who watch less than two hours of TV a day. It is also true that children are susceptible to other forms of advertising, not just TV advertising. That includes billboard advertisements and advertisements placed on buses, interestingly enough. It has also been found that the children who watch the most TV are the most likely to agree with the statement that taste is more important than the ingredients and are least likely to agree with the statement that they like to eat healthy snacks.
We all know that, along with attitudes, there is the food that is consumed while watching TV, and that is more likely to be potato chips, twisties and similar snacks and is also likely to include sweet drinks such as lemonade and cola. Of course, those are things that do not require any preparation; they just require going to a cupboard to get them and then sitting them on a little table next to the couch.
That is to do with the material about the correlation between watching TV and eating junk food, but how about the advertisements themselves and their impact on children’s diets? It is interesting, by the way, that Bob Brown has been told that the government will not vote for his amendment. I would be interested to know how the Labor Party plans to vote on that.
Ms Porter: We would be very interested.
DR FOSKEY: Maybe this will all help. The Family First senator cares about the health of families—he certainly seems to care about their moral health; perhaps he also cares about their physical health—and might become active on this one. There is always Barnaby Joyce, who likes to tease everyone with the possibility of his crossing the floor, get lots of media attention and then often does something else. It is a really important issue because the data shows there is a correlation.
I read this morning in the Sydney Morning Herald that something like half of the children under six already have cavities in their teeth. Children are put in front of a TV from an early age. Their parents are now products of a generation that spent a lifetime in front of a TV and do not really see the difference between an unhealthy drink and a healthy drink. But when 1,600 Australians were surveyed recently, 86 per cent of them agreed that there should be more limits on advertising to children. I think that is a fairly definitive figure and, for a populist government like the Howard government, you would think it would be influential.
Advertising is a very cynical art. It is aimed primarily at increasing product sales. The argument usually put by the advertising industry is that it is about informing people
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .