Food for thought in the battle over how to have a healthy Australia

A taste sensation

Jennifer Muller writes: I think that Bernard Keane has mistakenly attributed the suggested public health interventions that would reduce the influence of advertising unhealthy products as medicalisation of the problem (“‘Medicalise everything’: how progressives are implementing neoliberalism on health”). Nothing could be further from the truth. The all-pervasive advertising of fast foods and unhealthy drinks is a clear example of neoliberalism at work, meaning they are all about profits and have no interest in the harms they cause usually to the least advantaged populations. They are all about selling them cheap, unhealthy food and addictive sugary drinks, and that disadvantaged areas have more fast-food stores is evidence of their predatory approach.

Poor people don’t have much power to make individual choices or advocate for healthy environments to live in. We all have a responsibility, including government, to support public health interventions, such as a sugar tax, that have been proven to help make healthy choices easier. Blaming individuals or expecting them to be able to change without mitigating some of the external factors affecting them is not the answer.

Neil Halliday writes: A healthy diet is based on unprocessed food, mainly plant-based. The trick is to learn how to prepare and enjoy such a diet. But everywhere you go, junk (highly processed) food is usually the available option, supported by ubiquitous junk food advertising. Hence 50% of the population over 50 is chronically ill (according to the ABC program), maintained by medication, putting the lie to Bernard Keane’s contention that we are healthier than ever. 

Joe Nagy writes: The government can’t solve all our problems. Nor should it. Mandating what to eat and not to eat is one of them. This is what life is all about. As humans we can learn what to eat and how much to eat. It is an experience. It is up to us to decide within limits.

Roger N Wyndham writes: This is a very difficult and complex problem. I am a renal physician in Sydney. What has been very apparent for years is the difference in chronic kidney disease (CKD) incidence between areas of Sydney — there is vastly more CKD in Mt Druitt than in Mosman. This difference cannot be explained by genetics. It seems to be related to lifestyle, particularly diet and exercise. There is a direct correlation between socioeconomic status and health. Food choices are determined by childhood education and by the example of peers. If we are to influence these we shall need to support parents, especially mothers, during the first years of a child’s life.

I don’t agree with government intervention to reduce expenditure on fast or “unhealthy” foods. I think education is the key, giving young people the knowledge to prepare healthy, tasty meals that can be made quickly and easily. I understand that fruit and vegetables are sometimes expensive. Perhaps the government should subsidise fruit and vegetables (I jest).

Fernando Longo writes: This article makes a lot of good points about how society deals with health, but I got an overwhelming feeling that Keane likes the odd exaggeration regarding what proponents of healthy living are saying. That’s unnecessary really. Make your good points and possibly provide suggestions on a better way forward. People have egos — even those who are out to do good. What we need to do is enhance their message, helping them improve their communication. I’m pretty sure this is what Keane was wanting to do — just a little heavy-handed (for me anyway).

Paul Harris writes: The ABC feeds off the outpourings of the 130,000 staff employed at what are loosely termed Australia’s 43 universities. Advancement is the goal and academic papers are the means. Publish or bust. Any bollocks will do. As for excess weight, to quote Kingsley Amis: “No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home in Weston-super-Mare.”

Simon Smith writes: Every intelligent, thinking person should find this late-stage capitalism abhorrent. The drive to turn us into perfect producers and consumers is everywhere, driven largely by the completely unrealistic ideals portrayed on social media. I’m a husband and a father, I work 9 to 5, I love my wife and children (most of them), I’m overweight, I smoke, I drink and I don’t do enough work in the garden. I love people, I love my planet, I provide for my family, I’m generous and caring and I regularly feel that I am not good enough — I don’t have a six-pack, I don’t have the ability to save up a deposit to buy a house, my life is not perfect and there is more effort I could put into just about every area of my life. The media, Hollywood and social media all tell me I should be able to run a marathon, look like a model, be an A-class investor and a model citizen.

So I’ve turned off social media, tuned into the people who I love and who love me and to hell with the rest of it. As a result I’m a lot happier and able to wear trackies and ugg boots to the shops on a Sunday morning without giving a you know what.

Dr Simon Davis writes: I totally agree with Keane: it is medicalising obesity: “It’s easy to think this is a failure of individual willpower, on a macro scale.” That’s exactly right. People are not taking responsibility for their health outcomes i.e. obesity. As a doctor I hear excuses regularly. The government could step in and regulate food and sweet drinks and their advertising, and ban fast-food outlets in areas with vulnerable populations. It could regulate gambling and housing more too. But governments are dependent on money.

Adam Farrington-Williams writes: Keane writes a piece on the stealth neoliberalism inherent in Magda’s Big Health Check and then uses neoliberal phrases, myths and framing, like the idea of “[imposing] less burden on the taxpayer”, a neoliberal myth. It’s clear he doesn’t actually understand what neoliberalism is, nor how it pushes its agenda through new Keynesian mainstream economics. So it’s a bit rich he’s having a go at another for pushing neoliberalism.

John Downes writes: Amazing, Bernard Keane. Fancy predicating the health of a nation on longevity. Australians have the second-highest consumption of antidepressants in the world. “Health” is not how long you live, but the quality of life. Longevity is a victory of medicine; its dark side is medically proscribed antidepressant use. Australians are clearly a depressed people, nothing to do with ideological cringing about “progressives”. Why are we depressed? Atomisation, mate.

Kim Ribbink writes: This piece ties very nicely with the view held by the right, which is to let the individual decide (which really means let the market decide). There is so much knowledge about public health intervention. We have the lowest smoking rate in the world because of intervention, and the UK lowered children’s sugar consumption by intervention. A free-for-all, let the market/individual decide is exactly what late-stage capitalism would prefer. Let’s not have controls on fossil fuels — let the market/individual decide; let’s not have controls on tobacco — let the market/individual decide.

The idea that we’re all eating too much, drinking too much, etc, because late-stage capitalism makes life so intolerable is rather a grim view, given that in previous eras life was short, brutal and violent. There are plenty of people I know who are alive today because of modern medicine. Yes, capitalism in its current form is way over the top; yes, I would prefer a more socialist-leaning society. But what Keane is advocating is exactly what capitalism would prefer. It’s also pushing well into the far-right fringe.

You may have huge faith in the will of the individual. I don’t. I call that anarchy and with anarchy women are once again second-class citizens and those who aren’t physically strong won’t survive.

Jo Dangelo writes: Almost nothing makes us question the order of things in 21st-century Australia like the question of health. It’s complicated. It should not be the province of big business, and yet it has been one of the biggest growth sectors of the Australian economy for decades. Yes, multinationals pushing “food” items consisting of 90% sugar probably make all of us wonder whether that’s appropriate.  Balanced against that, suburban malls are now taken over by people peddling “wellness”.

The massive health bureaucracies at federal and state levels (the bulk of it probably duplicated to the nth degree) succeed in ensuring that more and more procedures are paid for from the public purse in the name of good health, lining the pockets of endless multinational health providers.  Who is leading whom? At what point did government make a contract with Australians that they need never worry again about any form of ill health? I’m not talking about emergencies, or extreme cases of ill health. I’m talking about almost any form of ill health.  And that’s before we even get to the question of aging.

Society’s pound of flesh

Dr Elizabeth van Ekert writes: As long as there is an attitude that welfare recipients are lesser citizens to be treated with scorn for being a burden on more worthy souls, the root causes of robodebt may again be used by another government — and that includes the current one (“Was the robodebt fiasco pure ideological bastardry?”). That there have been disclosures of dishonesty by a tiny few does not justify the draconian methods employed by Centrelink to ensure welfare recipients do not rip off the system. This includes not only ensuring they are not overpaid, but the assumption that they might be untruthful underwrites mostly every encounter they have with this “service”. 

That the current government has done little to address the extreme poverty of Newstart recipients indicates that it too is willing to use those on welfare as pawns to gain community support for being tough on the so-called less deserving, while retaining the stage three tax cuts for wealthier citizens.

Paul Recher writes: The problem was not the algorithms but the decision to assess everyone based on annual income rather than the legislated fortnightly assessment. Some person or people made the deliberate decision to act illegally in full knowledge that what they were doing was incorrect. I speak with “authority”. I was a self-employed businessman receiving a part pension when my income in August of that year went up significantly with the prospect of it remaining so. I advised Social Security and was told not to worry as I was assessed yearly off my ATO. At the same time, I knew many people working casually as teachers, in hospitality, as musicians, etc, receiving unemployment who were assessed fortnightly. If I knew the process how could the relevant ministers not? In fact, they were told! Then when you learn those devout Christian men Scott Morrison and Stuart Robert were the ministers one knows why there was such chicanery, lies and downright meanness. 

Pups of war

Margaret Hurle writes: I am very happy to know that Dr Jim is spending my tax money on labrador pups (“Just how many sniffer puppies is Jim Chalmers getting for $12m?”). Labrador sniffers are a vital defence against biosecurity risks — $12 million spent on the labrador program could save us billions. Most travellers have no idea of the damage that can be done by bringing organic stuff (food, seeds, etc) into our country. Let the labs swarm through the airports and bring down the smugglers! Our clean food image is under attack from many directions, and we must keep out as many pests and diseases as possible. Go doggie sniffers!

Toughen up, Jim

Dr Brian Astill writes: Our treasurer seems anxious to avoid causing offence to the extent that
essential boldness in a time of emergency is totally lacking (“Has Australia finally got over its embarrassing surplus obsession?”). Which is, in itself, offensive. The patient will die before Nurse Chalmers gets there!

I also have an issue with inflation — which it is said is too much money chasing too few goods. Clearly those working-class people cannot be trusted. Give them money and straightaway they will spend it on food or children’s shoes or other unnecessary purchases. Obviously it is better to give the well-heeled money which they will place at their bank’s disposal. Much better.

Contempt of court

Nanette Kerrison writes: I agree with everything Michael Bradley says (“The criminal ‘justice’ system is medieval in concept and medieval in practice”). I have been reflecting for years on how crap our court system is generally — it’s bloodless warfare/conflict in the same way Parliament is, for war and physical fights. I have always despised the way the “brutal binary” twists and deforms reality and impedes the search for truth and then justice. For decades I have been pondering what should replace it. Does anywhere in the world have a better system for trying rape and assault? Have there been any interesting ideas yet untested?

Bloody Yanks

Bill Thompson writes: My great dislike is the Americanisation of Australian spoken English (“It’s time again to remember — there are far worse American things than Halloween”). Hardly a day goes by when even ABC news readers are not guilty of the abomination. There are many examples but some I especially dislike are: changing the emphasis of pronunciation, as in “controversy” to “con-trov-ersy”; the erroneous belief that every letter in every word has to be emphasised, as in “resource” not “re-source” (witness the especially nasty “ve-hicle”; shortened words, as in “comrade” to “comrad”; the word “schedule’ does not have a k. We should reject American “soft power” and take pride in our Australian vernacular.

Leigh Howlett writes: The use of So, Like, Oh My God! Whatever! is up there for being annoying Americanisms. Another is someone who inserts into the conversation the word “like” as many times as possible. But that sort of conversational atrocity pales into insignificance compared with the damage inflicted by our adoption of neoliberalism from the Chicago school of economics (Milton Friedman) and has been called Thatcherism (UK), Rogernomics (NZ), economic rationalism (Australia), and Reaganism (US). The damage to society from the neoliberal mantras of low taxes, deregulation and privatisation is severe in the long term.

It’s grim up north

Colin Fitzpatrick writes: As a subscriber to Crikey over quite a few years and a recent arrival from Sydney to Trinity Beach in Far North Queensland, I am amazed and disappointed at the lack of interest by the Queensland government in the youth crime rate in Cairns over recent years. This calendar year there have been well over 1100 car thefts in the Cairns region plus innumerable break-ins and home invasions. It appears the south-east-based Queensland government has little or no interest in curtailing this epidemic.

Does this Queensland government only govern for south-east Queensland?

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