Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I second the motion. I also support the member for Mackellar's bill, the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Healthy Kids Advertising) Bill 2024, to prohibit the advertising of junk food to Australian children.

Today's children consume multiple types of media, often simultaneously. Some spend more time in front of computer, television and game screens than in any other activity other than sleeping. It's extraordinary. Twenty-four per cent of Australian children spend more than 20 hours a week watching TV or online.

Most children aged less than six can't distinguish between programming and advertising. Advertising directed at children this young is by its very nature inevitably exploitative.

Children have a remarkable ability to recall the content of the advertising that they see. They develop product preferences after as little as a single exposure to one ad. This strengthens, though, with repeated exposures. Ads affect what kids ask their parents to buy. They affect what we buy our children.

Some of our children are seeing as many as 170 junk food advertisements every week on TV, or hearing them on the radio or seeing them online, and they do pay attention to them. Online advertisers use algorithmic networks to create a sense of community, engagement, fun and friendship related to junk food advertising. Then they add scarcity marketing, which generates a fear of missing out.

We don't allow tobacco or vape advertising, but we allow our children to be exposed every day to repeated advertising for addictive and harmful products which increase their risk of obesity and childhood-onset diabetes. As the member for Mackellar has already noted—and as a member of the Standing Committee on Health, Aged Care and Sport, which has recently called on the government to outlaw food advertising—we have to act to protect our children. They are our most precious natural resource.

In my previous career as a paediatrician, I promised to first do no harm. As a politician, it is again my duty to act in the very best interests of my constituents—all of my constituents. This bill will protect our children from harm, and therefore I commend it to the House.

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