Ursula Stephens (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to contribute to this debate on the Protecting Children from Junk Food Advertising (Broadcasting Amendment) Bill 2010. I was smiling to myself as I was listening to Senator Siewert talking about pressures on parents shopping. I had my two grandchildren in the supermarket on the weekend and went through the painful process of finding the checkout that did not have the lollies at the checkout to tempt them. Trying absolutely to teach two children aged under four that ‘no’ means no is no mean feat, but it is an important role for parents to be able to do that. The real issue that we have today is that while we commend this effort and this debate around childhood obesity and the issue of television advertising that targets children, the government does not believe that this is the way to actually achieve effective change. Just banning advertising to children does nothing about changing parenting skills, understanding behaviour modification, understanding the complexities of obesity and actively developing good habits.

Since the inquiry took place, following the bill’s referral to the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs in 2008, the debate has actually moved along quite a lot. One of the purposes of such an inquiry is to push the debate on, to move public opinion, to move the responsibility of the industry and for it to step up to the plate and do something about this issue. The government has some role to play. The work that we are doing in addressing childhood obesity involves ramping up our investment in research and development, supporting organisations like the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and looking at the whole healthy children’s initiative through the COAG process. All of this is part and parcel of addressing the fundamental issues of unhealthy practices, unhealthy foods, food additives and junk food marketing.

One of the things that I have noticed is that food is quite a challenge for parents whose child is attending a childcare centre. They have to observe so many rules and regulations around the child taking their food with them. There are so many specific obligations on parents around packaging their children’s lunches and ensuring that, for example, their lunch materials are not contaminated by peanut butter or other things that might create allergies in children. What we are seeing is a real shift to pre-packaged food. As Senator Siewert said, when things are marketed as very healthy products—such as fruit bars, which are concentrated fructose; or a juice box, which has 15 per cent juice, lots of sugar and plenty of water—the challenge for us is to understand that those things are not necessarily marketed to children; they are actually marketed to parents in the guise of being healthy foods. So the challenge here for us is to understand what so many people who made submissions to the inquiry said—that is, that we have to take a much more comprehensive approach to these things. Food marketing is just one element of a very complex debate.

In the dissenting report from Senator Siewert and Senator Brown, the issue was about acknowledging the growing challenge of obesity in this country, especially childhood obesity and how that sets people up for a lifetime of poor health outcomes. So the government has decided to try to do something far more constructive in this way by investing through COAG to bring together a national approach through our national health ministers and our national sports ministers and through trying to understand the regulatory environment that we are in and to engage in health prevention rather than health control. We all know that our health budget is only going to grow exponentially unless we start to address these fundamental childhood issues and set people up for a healthy adulthood. A most comprehensive investment of $872 million into that COAG process is just the tip of the iceberg.

If you look at the agreements that underline all of those COAG initiatives, you will see a raft of things. There are issues around research. There are issues around prevention. There are issues around activity. There are issues around education for parents. There are activities around education for community workers and for those who are engaged with and who support families. There are great initiatives around our health workforce in helping parents and children to deal with these issues. We are trying to be far more interventionist at an early age and to look at prevention rather than cure. When you think about that and about what is happening in targeting at-risk groups—Senator Moore has been very concerned about the growing levels of obesity in Aboriginal children—and when you look at what is happening in the Closing the Gap initiative, which is about trying to get fresh foods to community stores and alternatives to deep fried, pre-packaged foods, you see that none of that has anything to do with advertising. It is really about making sure that people have access to a variety of healthy food options, and I think that is a much more sensible approach, and we have worked very hard on that.

An initiative we funded is the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden program, which is part and parcel of a growing community garden program across Australia. This program is really vibrant and dynamic. It goes to the heart of children and families having access to fresh foods. There are lots of conversations about food miles, farmers’ markets and social enterprises that are being developed around ensuring that children from low-income families have an opportunity to access fresh foods of all kinds. We have a revitalised health and PE curriculum in our schools that focuses on educating children at the pressure points of the targeted marketing that Senator Siewert and Senator Brown are so concerned about. We are really trying to find some healthy options. We have school breakfast clubs. We have all of those things happening that are about children educating themselves and each other about healthy food choices.

Going to the nub of this debate, the government have strengthened junk food advertising restrictions. We are limiting the use of popular characters and proprietary characters in advertising during the children’s programming hours. I remember the Milky Bar Kid from my youth, which was a very early challenge in this whole debate. The Milky Bar Kid was very healthy because it was milk. We know the subtle pressures that come into marketing. We know the subtleties of advertising. We know the skills that advertisers use in targeting their markets. Whether it is about junk food, whether it is about environmental programs or whether it is about something else, it is consumer advertising.

The Children’s Television Standards were reviewed in 2009 and they now require food product advertisements to not mislead or provide incorrect information about the nutritional value of the product. In May last year we released our response to the National Preventative Health Taskforce, noting the recommendation to reduce the exposure of children and others to marketing, advertising, promoting and sponsorship of junk food. We believe our challenge is in educating parents. Our challenge is in ensuring that we do not take the easy option—the fast food option that parents, children and adults and grandparents like me do not go to the cupboard and try to reward. That is another whole issue—a mentality about rewarding children for good behaviour. What we really have to do is take up the challenge and teach children that no means no.