Page 2364 - Week 07 - Thursday, 17 August 2006
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about the range of products that are available so that people can make an informed choice, but a president of an American advertising company has observed that advertising, at its best, is making people feel that without their product you are a loser. Kids are very sensitive to that. If you tell them to buy something, they are resistant; but if you tell them that they will be a dork if they do not, you have their attention. You open up emotional vulnerabilities, and it is easier to do that with kids because they are the most vulnerable. Of course, you set in train eating habits in children early in life and they are going to be yet another of those addictions, like smoking, that they find hard to shake later.
The supporters of the ban on TV advertising of food, especially junk food, include bodies such the Australian Consumers Association, the Australian Dental Association, the Australian Medical Association and the Public Health Association; as you would expect, nearly all the organisations that care about children’s health. Mr Abbott stated recently—I guess this exemplifies the federal government’s approach—that if parents are foolish enough to feed their kids on a diet of Coca-Cola and lollies, they should lift their game and lift it urgently.
That is, of course, the nature of a government that is so focused on families that it actually expects families to do everything, ignoring the context in which families have to operate. Parents, as I think most of us know, do not actually have a lot of sway after a certain age when their children consider them to be dorks and are very unlikely to take any notice of them. The only influence parents have is the food that they put on the table, and many of them do not have the time to put the right food on the table, however much they try. Also, they cannot prescribe what a child does with his or her pocket money.
I reject utterly Mr Howard’s statement that it is nannyism to put a ban on junk food advertising. We have banned tobacco advertising. We have banned alcohol advertising during certain hours of the day, but not totally. That is nannyism, too, but we know it has worked. That is why we should do it in relation to junk food in children’s viewing hours.
MS GALLAGHER (Molonglo—Minister for Health, Minister for Disability and Community Services and Minister for Women) (4.47): I will be brief in adding a few comments in support of the comments of my colleague Ms Porter and the other contributions from around the Assembly today. This has been an area of concern for me for some time. One of the first motions I moved in this place after being elected in 2002 called on the federal government to restrict the amount of television advertising, particularly of junk food, aimed at children and to review the amount. That was over four years ago.
The thing that all of us have spoken about here today is that, as a community, the health of our children should be and is very important to us and that if we spot a problem developing in the health of our children we should respond to that problem, treat that problem and try to prevent further problems. We do with every other aspect of child health.
We know that 27 per cent of the children in Australia are currently overweight or obese. The position in the ACT is no better. The 2003 kindergarten screening survey showed that 14.4 per cent of boys and 18.3 per cent of girls—five-year-olds, children of kindergarten age—were obese or overweight. That has been confirmed by the ACT chief
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