George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

No, it is true, Member for Riverina. I am going to echo some of the words that the member for Herbert said—and I am glad he is here. He went public with some of this. When Labor sees a fat person, they think, 'Oh, that person has a problem; let's set up a bureaucracy.' When they see someone smoking, they say, 'Oh, he's got a problem; let's set up a bureaucracy.' When they see someone having more than the standard number of drinks at night, they say, 'Let's set up a bureaucracy to deal with the person.'

But it actually has to come back to individuals making choices, sure with the help of some community support. I have to tell you something. When the Labor Party were in government, they eroded the community support there was for individuals. They established these things called Medicare Locals, which were, again, a creation of government, a quasi government department, and they stripped all of the health funding that was going to community groups running local, on the ground, preventative health measures in which people could actively get involved and they transferred them over to the Medicare Locals. Because of what Labor did, the Burdekin Centre for Rural Health is about to lose over half a million dollars in annual funding because all of their functions have slowly been transferred over to the Medicare Local and they will not be rolling out to the degree that the Burdekin Centre for Rural Health is engaged. That is a prime example of the rhetoric we hear in this chamber not matching the reality when it comes to what Labor actually does.

Ultimately, the individual is responsible for their own actions. That is why, when the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government legislated plain packaging for cigarettes, I spoke against that bill. I did not believe then and I do not believe now that inch by inch encroachment into our personal lives is what our society should be about. We, as Australians, have the right to make our own choices and every time the government makes that little bit more regulation to force a particular world view onto the choices we make, our personal freedoms are eroded. At the time I said that, if the regulators and the Labor Party felt so strongly about telling people what they can and cannot do, they should just ban it. If we honestly believe that smoking is that evil we should have the guts to ban it. If we do not feel that strongly about it, then get out of people's lives, let them make their own choices and let them live the way they want to live. We have seen regulation after regulation applied to the tobacco industry and still people smoke. I talk to local shops. They report that the number of people buying cigarettes is increasing.

The previous Labor government attempted to drive smoking underground, so much so that sellers are not even allowed to display their little olive green products. It does not appear to have made any difference because in the three years since the legislation was introduced, the nanny state advocates have produced no evidence to suggest it has changed smoking rates in Australia. That seems a bit odd, given there has very likely been some surveys done in the course of those three years. Surely there are teams of wowsers waiting for the opportunity to tell us, 'I told you so.' Given that smoking rates in Australia have been steadily declining since 2001, even business-as-usual decline could have been twisted into some kind of 'proof' that interfering with people's lives actually works. It is not news the nanny state wants to hear but there is at least some feedback on the Australian experience being presented in the UK. The Times reported on 3 February this year:

Cigarette plain packaging law a failure, tobacco industry tells UK. Putting cigarettes in plain packs has failed to cut smoking in Australia, led to record levels of smuggling and could be illegal in the UK, the tobacco industry has warned a British government review of the measure.

Was there an outcry about the claims? No. The usual suspects argued the toss about the sale of illegal tobacco. An article in The Age, on 12 April 2014 read:

Last week, Fairfax Media visited several retailers in Melbourne's west including gift shops, milk bars and liquor stores, with the ex-Purana Taskforce detective employed by British American Tobacco. Illicit tobacco products were freely available upon requests for 'cheap cigarettes' and pre-rolled 'tubes' of loose tobacco or 'chop chop'. Illegally imported cartons of Marlboro Red and Dunhill Red cigarettes were sold at half the legal retail price, while other brand-named packs of 25 cigarettes cost as little as $8, compared to the normal price of almost $20. One Asian grocery store in Sunshine was asking $90 for a 10-pack carton of Manchester cigarettes—a fake brand manufactured in the Middle East for the black market. None of the illicit cigarettes were sold in the plain, olive-green packs required by Australian law, and many had no health warnings.

So what is the score on plain packaging? I will tell you what it is: free choice 1, nanny state nil. Even more questionable programs have been the photo competition run through the 'Be the Influence' campaign, calling for entrants to submit photos of their 'memorable moments' from One Direction concerts and spending $200,000 on developing a cookbook. One Direction fans could win One Direction merchandise, so there is a great investment of taxpayer dollars. And the cookbook included such classics as baked beans on toast, chicken and avocado sandwiches and 'the daily snack, banana and yoghurt'. Apparently these measures are about preventative health and reducing tobacco consumption.

This year—and last year as well—we have seen the nanny state sticking its nose into alcohol consumption. In February, the Australian National Preventive Health Agency produced its draft report Alcohol Advertising: The effectiveness of current regulatory codes in addressing community concern. I have concerns with the whole concept of telling people how to live their lives. I also have concerns about the 'evidence' the agency has used to justify that interference. The agency needed something on which to base their interference. For the record, here is some of their recommended interference for the media in relation to alcohol:

Free-to-Air Television: Remove the exemption for free-to-air television that allows direct advertising of alcohol products before 8.30 pm as an accompaniment to live sports broadcasts on public holidays and weekends.

Subscription Television: Restrict direct advertising of alcohol products on subscription television before 8.30pm and after 5am.

Cinema: Restriction on the direct advertising of alcohol products on-screen in cinemas before 8.30 pm and after 5 am.

Outdoor and billboard: Increase the distance of advertising from schools from 150 m to 500 km.

Then there is the thought police recommendation:

Where an advertisement has a strong or evident appeal to children or adolescents, then it should be found to be in breach of the Code irrespective of whether the marketing is also appealing to adults or the community generally or whether the advertisement is deemed not to be directed to children.

On the subject of social media, the report notes how the agency has wrestled with control of the internet:

Many of the alcohol-related fan, event and group pages on Facebook are accessible to users of any age. The video viewing site YouTube also allows alcohol companies to develop their own pages and there are seemingly no age restrictions on viewers. YouTube provides a platform for companies to display recent and previous television advertisements, which may include older advertisements that do not satisfy current codes.

So next batter up on the nanny state hit list is YouTube. That is no surprise. But if there is concern about old advertisements 'that do not satisfy current codes' being accessible to children, then burn down the library. Burn it down. Burn down all the books and the microfiche that documents our history. Burn the old newspaper archives, the magazine archives. Don't leave behind any trace of a culture that was once great and things that were done in the past because they do not satisfy the standards of the day. Because that is what this is really all about: the nanny state trying control society, trying to manipulate our lives, our actions and our thoughts.

According to an article in The Australian on 14 February this year, it goes even further: fizzy drinks. 'Fizzy drink tax could save 67 lives: study'—that was the headline. It is a pretty specific outcome for a tax. The story kicks off with:

A 20 per cent tax on fizzy drinks would save about 67 lives a year, a new study says.

Researchers at the National Institute for Health Innovation at Auckland University, aided by Otago University, estimate such a tax would reduce energy consumption by 20 kilojoules a day, or 0.2 per cent.

This would be enough to help avert about 67 deaths from cardiovascular disease, diabetes and diet-related cancers a year, according to the study, published in the New Zealand Medical Journal on Friday.

I have got to tell you: if the greatest Treasurer in the world could not get the mining tax right, I do not know about these guys with their 67 lives, either. As one commentator said about the tax:

If there are 67 people out there so close to death yet so bent on avoiding even the measliest of changes to their eating and drinking habits that they could save their own lives by cutting just one diet soft drink from their diet every day then the cost of soft drinks is not the problem—those people are, and that’s not a problem you can attack with a tax on all soft-drinkers.

Another blogger lamented:

Through laws and taxes and regulations they try to consign us to an existence instead of a life; and this is not because the decisions they would make for us are necessarily bad decisions, but because they are not our own.

Society is not determined by some herd of hand-wringing heifers and steers in a departmental subcommittee's focus group. Culture is not ordered off a left-wing menu like some half-strength double decaf soy latte in a recycled paper cup. Society and culture are about people. Our culture is the function of our people—all the people, not just a select few. It is a combination of the lives, the actions, the thoughts and the choices of individuals. Some individuals will choose to drink alcohol. Some will choose not to. I do not believe the non-drinkers have any moral right or obligation to enforce their view and their personal choices on to anyone else's. This is not your culture; it is our culture. And our culture evolves individual by individual. We do not need a pseudo health agency to manufacture a culture for us; we need a health department to look after health.

And, sure, there are a lot of things that affect our health—drinking, smoking, eating, sugar, salt, caffeine, fat, carbohydrates, protein, gluten, wheat, vitamin supplements, water and air. If anyone holds strong convictions about any one or more of those things, that is fine. They can choose to consume or not consume. If they have scientific evidence to support it, that is fine. They can report those findings. But if we listened to every bit of advice about what not to consume, we would all be dead. Somewhere in the middle there may be a truth, but the question is this: for whom is it a truth and who has the right to impose their interpretation on everyone else?

According to the Australian Taxpayers Alliance, the interpretation should not be with ANPHA. They said in a media release earlier this year:

ANPHA was an uninspired tax sinkhole that a power-drunk wowser elite used to advocate banning, taxing, and taking away consumer’s choices ...

They have taken every chance to promote policies of control, because they are the only way to meet ANPHA’s increasingly neurotic standards of acceptable quantity of life.

They’ve wasted millions of taxpayer dollars on feeble, nagging media campaigns for no measurable benefit …

I support the bill.

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