The SST have a story on New Zealand supermarket shopping habits; as you’d expect, the best sellers are highly unhealthy. (And thanks to the Nat’s baffling decision to allow state schools to sell junk food again kids can now give themselves type II diabetes at home AND in the classroom).
With the certainty of the tides, Sue Kedgley pops up in the story demanding the state take a stronger role in curbing the advertisement of junk food:
Kedgley said the packaging and placement of foods could exert a powerful influence on shoppers buying decisions. She said broadening the advertising code would allow shoppers to take complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority if they felt retailers and manufacturers were not being “socially responsible” about how they advertise and sell food.
This is what drives me crazy about the Greens; their gut level reaction to any problem is a form of state coercion. In this case changing the rules around advertising probably won’t work; there have been numerous studies showing that consumption of junk food is rational on a short term basis – food-like products such as Coke have the greatest amount of calories/dollar of any product available. The sensible things to do would be (a) to inform the public that by drinking something like Coke you’re basically consuming a low grade poison, and (b) tax junk food the way we tax cigarettes, to reflect the massive cost that these lifestyle choices inflict on the health system.
I guess you could argue that the taxes are also a form of state coercion, but we do have a public health system and drinking coke and eating white bread has massive hidden costs to the taxpayer who have to pay to treat the diseases caused by these products, so a junk food tax would merely mean that the consumer was paying the real cost of the item instead of having their lifestyle subsidised.
Historically, using incentives and disincentives to influence the market is almost always more effective than direct state control; people don’t like being told what to do (especially by Sue Kedgley) but they will generally respond rationally to changes in market value. I think the big problem is that the Greens have a fundamental distrust of ‘the market’ and see it as a problem, rather than a very powerful tool and source of solutions.
The Green Party did actually propose a ‘fat tax’ on junk food before the election. http://www.greens.org.nz/node/13381
Although they didn’t do a very good job of selling it.
Comment by Mike — February 22, 2009 @ 11:32 am
[...] from the Dimpost has an excellent post about the kind of legislation the Greens could push for on junk food, without totally alienating the right, and a good portion of [...]
Pingback by This is exactly what I mean about the Greens : Tono (and his Finance Company) — February 22, 2009 @ 5:35 pm
This is Sue Kedgely’s approach more than anyone else, but yes it is frustrating if only because when things do need to be outright banned, such as toxic sprays on playing fields, no-one pays all that much attention.
Actually, I think that your suggestion isn’t such a bad one, and isn’t far from what the Greens endorse. They want higher taxes on things they consider social harms (like carbon emissions) which in turn are balanced by a tax free bracket on first $X earned (which disproportionately benefits the poor). If they’d managed to get this out of the last Labour Government, then you could be seeing them advocate this position now. But that will have to wait until there’s a Government who wants to restructure the tax system in such a way, if such a thing can ever exist.
Sometimes I just wish that Sue Kedgely would shut up though. As you say, her reaction to any given problem is entirely predictable… And her and the reactionary anti-technology yuppies are also quite wrong on vaccines and GE as well.
Comment by George D — February 22, 2009 @ 6:30 pm
“And thanks to the Nat’s baffling decision to allow state schools to sell junk food again kids can now give themselves type II diabetes at home AND in the classroom”
Yep, some folk find freedom of choice baffling.
Comment by Clunking Fist — February 23, 2009 @ 6:14 pm
“And thanks to the Nat’s baffling decision to allow state schools to sell junk food again …”
You mean when National decided (and out right stated) that, while providing only healthy food in schools may be a good thing, having the state force schools to do it was both heavy handed, wasteful, and impractical.
But hey, its not as if you never have let your ideological biases blind you to the full story before.
Comment by Kimble — February 24, 2009 @ 10:57 am
“some folk find freedom of choice baffling.”
Yeah. Those bastards giving my tax money to schools try to force the schools to make the kids learn stuff, and grow and be healthy, instead of just letting the schools and kids choose to do whatever they want. How awful!
It’s as if the bastards expect some accountability and results in return for the tax money that they dosh out. How dare they oppose freedom of choice in that way!
Comment by icehawk — February 24, 2009 @ 12:39 pm
“I think the big problem is that the Greens have a fundamental distrust of ‘the market’ and see it as a problem, rather than a very powerful tool and source of solutions.”
The Greens’ policy tends to be very focussed on market incentives. Eg, they want to put an import tax on vehicles that get poor miles/gallon. Then let the market handle the issue. Typical green thinking: based on market incentives and considering long term effects rather than short term effects (because it is changing the types of cars that make up your vehicle fleet that largely determines petrol usage in the long run). The Greens wanted a simple carbon tax instead of this complex govt-administered-emission-targets mess that is the ETS. They want pollution charges more generally for similar reasons. It sums up as: tax bad stuff that you want people to do less of.
Some greens are more market focussed than others: I think *Kedgley* has a fundamental distrust of ‘the market’. And I won’t defend her, she’s inexcusable. But she’s not all there is to “the Greens”: she’s only one of their MPs.
Comment by icehawk — February 24, 2009 @ 1:02 pm
<>
And it could be argued that it shouldn’t be about influencing the market – if “the market” wants to eat/drink themselves into an early, oversized grave then let them. But they should do it at THEIR cost, hence the tax is simply to raise the money needed to treat them directly from their decisions, not change the behaviour (which may be a beneficial side effect of course).
Comment by Gareth — February 24, 2009 @ 2:42 pm
Not sure what happened in that post sorry – I had tried to “quote”:
“Historically, using incentives and disincentives to influence the market is almost always more effective than direct state control…”
Comment by Gareth — February 24, 2009 @ 2:44 pm
Of course, it’s not strictly true that Kedgley never met a ban she didn’t like. She did vote to legalise prostitution, and is on the record as supporting the legalisation of cannabis.
Comment by kahikatea — February 24, 2009 @ 3:47 pm
The government gave the decision of whether or not junk food should be sold at school to the individual schools board of trustees. While it was a good idea to sell only healthy food, it required several premises for it to work:
1) Students did not bring junk foos to school from home.
2) Most students did not bring a cut lunch
3)If they bought food, it was only at the school tuck shop.
When I was at school, my mother either made me a cut lunch or gave me the food to make a cut lunch in the morning. At most I would use the school tuck shop once a week. Surely the cut lunch needs to be promoted above any school tuck shop. Then again as both my parents were motivated enough to work, they we probably motivated enough to make sure their children had good food to eat at school. On the other hand School rely on profits from their school tuck shops. Kids are resourceful. If they cannot get their pies and cookies at school, they will get them from the dairy down the road. Hence what I am saying, is that while it was a nice policy to have, in reality it is difficult to carry out. Rather than tackling school tuck shops, it would be better to focus energies on the quality of a goot cut lunch.
Comment by Helensphotogenicimposter — February 24, 2009 @ 6:07 pm
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to get to the heart of the problem? I’m sick of stupid taxes/bans/removals of responsibility.
NZ society/culture has serious issues. We have social responsibility issues, a waning sense of community spirit and national pride, problems with obesity, teen pregancies, alcohol and drugs.
I’ve been living and working in Switzerland for the last year, and Swiss culture is healtier in nearly everyway. I don’t think I realized how bad NZ was until I experienced a decent culture of respect and moderation.
We (New Zealanders) have serious issues.
Comment by Dan — February 24, 2009 @ 6:36 pm
They want pollution charges more generally for similar reasons. It sums up as: tax bad stuff that you want people to do less of.
You should have mentioned their sometime-desire to lower income taxes as a result of their pollution taxes. This was most notably a feature of their carbon tax idea. I find the whole idea of letting the market work with pollution taxes and lower income taxes quite appealing…
Comment by StephenR — February 25, 2009 @ 8:40 am
“I find the whole idea of letting the market work with pollution taxes and lower income taxes quite appealing…”
Sure, once we’re all agreed that carbon dioxide is a pollutant…
:^0
Comment by Clunking Fist — February 25, 2009 @ 9:30 am
I wasn’t necessarily referring to CO2. I find the idea appealing, but must confess I haven’t really seen an examination of the flow-on effects for an economy.
Comment by StephenR — February 25, 2009 @ 9:36 am
I think the tuckshop ban was meant to address the fact that kids would buy unhealthily even if there were a ‘choice’ of healthy options available – the choice is thus that of the kids, and not their parents (thus taking away the choice of the parents).
That, however, assumes that parents aren’t actually parenting their kids properly – where cut lunches should be the norm, combined with a ‘Friday buy-day’ to keep it real. Even then, the parents should be able to rely on their kids to make wise choices in the tuckshop, given the attitudes to food and trust which have been fostered at home… Is that too long to fit on a Tui billboard?
Comment by Sam — February 25, 2009 @ 10:39 am
Helensphotogenicimposter wrote:
“it required several premises for it to work:
1) Students did not bring junk foos to school from home.
2) Most students did not bring a cut lunch
3)If they bought food, it was only at the school tuck shop.”
It doesn’t require students not to bring a cut lunch from home – it’s intended specifically to influence the lunch choices of those students who don’t bring a cut lunch. I wholeheartedly agree that it’s good to encourage kids to get in the habit of making a lunch at home and bringing it to school, and this policy didn’t get in the way of that.
It is true that there will be some smuggling of junk food into school, but there’ll still be less junk food than if it were sold there.
When I was at high school, people smuggled cigarettes into school quite often. If they have to go to that trouble just to get junk food into the school, maybe they won’t bother with cigarettes as well.
Comment by kahikatea — February 25, 2009 @ 10:20 pm
George D – you shouldn’t tax something juist because it’s a social ill. The way that something is tax should actually be coupled to a real taxpayer expense. Currently, as you’re probably aware, things like petrol, alcohol and tobacco are taxed at a very high level that is actually not tied to any budgetary justification around the financial burden to society associated with those things.
Indeed, those who seriously advocate that these taxes should actually reflect the taxpayer’s expense associated with these ills, they get braded as “far right” for suggesting such a big tax reduction.
Comment by Glenn — April 3, 2010 @ 7:48 pm
braded = branded
Comment by Glenn — April 3, 2010 @ 7:49 pm