The lates push to ban junk food advertising appears to be at least partly based on an unsustainable interpretation of fairly mundane research by the Cancer Council NSW.
I can’t be quite sure of this, because incredibly in this day and age the research doesn’t appear to be up on the Council’s website. However, this is what the SMH report says:

“SNACK and fast-food companies routinely flout guidelines on television advertising to children and deliberately encourage a junk-food culture in which children no longer know how to eat healthily, according to Australia’s most comprehensive study on advertising content.
Nearly a third of all television advertising is for unhealthy or non-essential foods, according to the research by Cancer Council NSW…
Cancer Council NSW’s nutrition manager, Kathy Chapman, said the food industry targeted children with messages that they did not have the sophistication to reject.”

So what is this damning research based on?

The findings are based on an analysis of more than 10,000 ads from 645 hours of television screened in Sydney, Brisbane, Tamworth and Ballarat in June last year. Weekday ads for unhealthy foods peaked at an average of five an hour between 6pm and 9pm on commercial, free-to-air channels, according to the analysis. Nationally, 25 per cent of advertising across all categories was for unhealthy foods. The effect was magnified by a lack of promotion for basic, healthy foods — which accounted for only 19 per cent of total food ads.

It would appear that by monitoring compliance to Commonwealth Laws it is possible to not only determine that the industry is trying to “encourage a junk food culture” rather than sell their own products, but to work out that children don’t have the ability to understand what is going on. Unless this survey is supported by interviews and proper surveying of children and manufacturers these conclusions are unsupportable.
My observation of advertising for these sorts of foods suggests that children aren’t necessarily the target at all. As the report says:

Weekday ads for unhealthy foods peaked at an average of five an hour between 6pm and 9pm on commercial, free-to-air channels, according to the analysis.

I noticed that earlier this week in the gym when I was watching ads for LCMs and some cheese cracker biscuits long after kids would have gone to bed. They weren’t targeting kids at that time – it was whoever was packing the lunch boxes for tomorrow morning.
Time to stop blaming the evil corporates for flogging their wares and time to demand responsibility of those whose job it is to teach kids the difference between junk and quality. The problem’s not with the advertisers but the parents.

Peter Beattie’s “threat” to hold an election on recycling sewage for drinking water is a classic Beattie gambit. Take a problem for which you are responsible, or at least share the guilt, pick an aspect of the issue that your opponents can’t or won’t deal with, announce yourself as the only person who can fix the problem and then run to the election on your solution.
It’s a variation on the strategy that Beattie used in 2001 when he took on his own party over the corruption the Shepherdson Inquiry found in the ALP. Logic would suggest that the Opposition should have been the beneficiary of the corruption. If you wanted to punish the ALP you would normally do it by voting against them. Instead voters returned them with a larger margin. Why? Because Beattie convinced Queenslanders that he was the only one that could fix the problem. As a result not only did he receive a larger mandate but those who he cast out of the party went not so much into the wilderness, but into a cosy symbiotic relationship peddling influence with the now even more powerful government. It’s what the management gurus call a “win win” solution.
The sewage recycling issue is similar. In this case the problem is not internal ALP corruption, but Labor’s 17 year failure to deliver the services to south-east Queensland that it needs to sustain its current population. In the 21 years since the Wivenhoe Dam was constructed south-east Queensland’s population has grown by approximately 70%, but water supply hasn’t grown at all. Indeed, one of the first things that Labor did when it won power in 1989 was to cancel the Wolfdene Dam, a dam, which if it had been built would have done relatively well out of last season’s wet because it’s catchment would have been in the right place.
Worse, if there is no significant rain this summer, and by significant I mean at least one cyclone or severe rain depression that penetrates down to Brisbane, none of the “solutions” that Beattie has put in place will be implemented in time. The desalination plant is behind schedule and the dams that Beattie has just announced won’t be completed until 2010 or later, and his idea of a pipeline from the Burdekin is scheduled for sometime later this century or early next!
It is highly likely that sometime in the next two to three years the state government will have to start shutting-off water to industry to ensure that citizens have enough to drink. There’s the pub with no beer, but in Brisbane’s case it could well be the town with no breweries!
Recycling sewage for drinking offers Beattie a way out. While he’s previously ruled it out, over the last weekend, after meeting with Michael Gorbachev and Malcolm Turnbull he appears to have had a Damascus Road conversion. It’s a conversion that is going to be very difficult for the Coalition to share because they have opportunistically opposed a decision by the Toowoomba City Council to solve their own water crisis by doing this very same thing. They’re even campaigning against the policy in the referendum that Toowoomba is holding at the moment despite the fact their federal colleagues are supporting it.
Indeed, it’s likely that Beattie knows what the polling says in Toowoomba, thinks the referendum will get up, giving him a guide to what would happen in a Queensland-wide election, and has made his U-turn now so as to lock the Opposition into their position. They can’t change their mind until Sunday morning, at the earliest.
When Beattie raises the issue in an election context the Opposition will likely say that people should vote against him because the water crisis is all his fault. I agree -it is all his fault. However, Beattie will likely respond that it is all to do with climate change and the “worst drought in 100 years” (I’d like to see the rainfall figures to prove the last assertion) and if you vote for the Opposition then you are condemning yourself to dying of thirst!
Faced with those alternatives I know what I would do.
You’ve got to hand it to Peter. He’s a master tactician. Pity he appears to be unable to organise anything as simple as a p*ss-up in a brewery, or at the least the water needed for one.

Just when Labor appeared to be getting its act together Beazley decides to run off on an extraneous excursion on uranium mining. John Howard must be happy.
Howard has elevated the debate on nuclear power for a number of reasons, one of which is undoubtedly that it raises strong passions amongst the paranoid left. It’s the left that guarantees Labor stays out of power by villifying it anytime it tries to move to the centre. This has two results – it makes centrist Labor policies suspect to a large body of mainstream opinion, and it frequently sees Labor shifting its position towards the left (think Tasmanian forests), thus re-inforcing the first.
Hence, Beazley’s policy shift on uranium won’t win him any new supporters (even if there are any uncommitted Australians who will decide their vote in the next election on uranium mining anyway). It will also bring out those in his own party who will want him to revoke the policy. The resulting dust-up will take everyone’s attention away from the one issue where Beazley can win – industrial relations.
Howard’s a master of the sucker punch, and you can see that on this issue, but then, to play that gambit properly, you need a sucker. There was no need for Labor to play along.

Observing the shambolic, some would say comical, efforts by the parliamentary, and media, supporters of Peter Costello to extricate John Howard from the Prime Ministership took my mind back to the last genuinely successful transition of Prime Ministers during the term of a Government in Australia.
Exactly forty years and six months ago, Sir Robert Gordon Menzies, ended his seventeen year unbroken term as Prime Minister, and was succeeded by his long serving heir apparent, Harold Edward Holt.
Holt had served as a Minister in the Menzies Government since it was first elected in 1949, as Treasurer from 1958, and Deputy Liberal Leader from 1956. He had earlier served in the Menzies and Fadden Governments, 1940-41.
The circumstances surrounding the Menzies retirement and Holt’s succession are set out in Bishop Tom Frame’s excellent biography on Harold Holt titled “The Life and Death of Harold Holt”.
Reports that Menzies would retire had appeared on a regular basis since the mid-1950’s. From the time of his election as Deputy Liberal Leader in 1956, it had been assumed that Holt would be his successor.
By late 1965 there was still no evidence, let alone certainty, that Menzies would retire before the election due at the end of 1966 even though speculation in the media had been more frequent than usual.
The first Cabinet meeting of 1966 was held in Canberra on 19 January. By lunch time Menzies had given no indication whatsoever about his future, and Frame reports that there was a sense of despondency around the Cabinet table and that “Holt had his head slumped almost on his chest in despair”.
But at the end of the meeting Menzies simply said – “Well, gentlemen, this is the last time I will be with you.” And that was pretty well the end of a record seventeen year Prime Ministership, and a party leadership that extended right back to the 1930’s. Neither record will ever be broken.
The next day the Liberal Party Room elected Holt unopposed as Leader and Prime Minister designate. He was 58 – only Chifley and McMahon assumed the office at an older age. And he had been an MP for 30 years, 9 months and 5 days….and a Minister for just over 18 years when he was sworn in as Prime Minister.
It had long been assumed that Menzies wanted Holt to succeed him, but he never indicated so publicly. Menzies had “offloaded” a few potential successors who he did not favour by making them High Commissioners and Ambassadors, and he gave Holt a very influential role in his Government from the mid 1950’s.
And even though Menzies was, and remains, the most powerful and influential leader in the history of the Liberal Party and its predecessors, he was not able to secure the election of his favoured candidate, Paul Hasluck, as Deputy Leader on his retirement. The position was won by Billy McMahon who Menzies barely tolerated.
How different that history is to recent events? Holt never once tried to prod Menzies into retirement. He never claimed that it was “his turn”………though it is arguable that he had been the logical and expected successor since the early 1950’s.
The only similarity is that the current, and probably somewhat diminished, pretender, holds the seat of Higgins – the seat Harold Holt had held for 30 years 9 months and 5 days the day he was sworn is as Prime Minister!

“Bomber” could present a problem for the Queensland Coalition. Not “Bomber” Beazley, but affable Queensland TV sports commentator Chris Bombolas. He has nominated for, and will receive, ALP preselection for the marginal Liberal seat of Chatsworth, slimly held by Liberal leadership aspirant, Michael Caltabiano.
Chatsworth was won by the Liberals in a byelection at the height of the crisis in Queensland’s health system. Sources say they spent around half-a-million dollars to win it. The swing to them was in excess of 17% in 2 PP terms, but the margin of security is still only 2.5%. Bomber will be gambling on a swing-back, as well as conditions improving for the government. He’s probably safe on both counts. His problem will be that Michael Caltabiano is an effective campaigner, and could well counter those two factors, but at what cost?
As I said, the Liberals shelled out somewhere in the vicinity of $500,000 to win the seat last time, including broadcast advertising. In 1995 when I was campaign chairman the total state Liberal Party contribution to the joint state campaign was somewhere in that vicinity, underlining the magnitude of the spend. If they need that sort of money again to protect Caltabiano (who according to our polling is one of their star performers, so has some claims on protection) then it means that someone is likely to go without.
That “someone”, more likely plural than singular, will be in a seat that the Coalition needs to win to form government. By backing the Bomber, Beattie is having an each-way bet, which might even turn into a double.

“Disunity is death” – like all cliches it’s just as likely to be wrong if applied in the wrong context. Today’s Newspoll provides arguable proof that the Liberal Party leadership tussle might actually be helping the government.
There are a number of possible explanations for the poll result. One is that the positive move to the Coalition in the two-party-preferred vote of 1% is well within the margin of error of the poll, so nothing has changed. But even nothing changing is news in itself if you think the disagreement between Howard and Costello is going to effect the vote.
Another explanation is that “disunity is death” only when the leadership of your party is perceived as weak. Howard’s challenger is seen as having no chance, and this actually enhances Howard’s leadership standing. And it is Howard’s perceived ability to deliver what he promises that most people value when they vote for him.
The conflict also makes people think harder about their voting choices than they might normally, making a poll taken in these circumstances a bit more like the real thing. Most observers think that Howard will win the next election (as indeed do the betting markets), so perhaps the polls are just measuring things more accurately because of current events.
And as Oscar Wilde said, “The only thing worse than people talking about you, is when they’re not talking about you.” The Costello non-challenge has directed attention back at the Liberals and away from Labor, taking the focus from IR, where Labor was winning the battle.
Labor has a good chance of winning the next election if they keep clear of discussion of leadership (an issue which Howard owns, compared to Kim Beazley) and keep the debate on IR (an issue which Howard can’t win). When Parliament resumes they’d be best advised to resist the temptation to stir Peter Costello and get back on message.

According to the AC Nielsen survey in today’s Sydney Morning Herald, 46% of Australians believe Peter Costello’s story on the leadership deal compared to 35%who believe Howard, yet 63% prefer Howard as prime minister compared to only 25% for Costello.
It’s the relationship between these two figures that explains why the deal was no deal. There may have been a deal, or there may not have, but that is of minor consequence to most Australians for whom the question of whether the country is well-run is more important than whether John Howard is telling the truth.
Indeed, it goes a bit further than that. In the world of political deal-making a promise to do something in the medium future, like the one that Howard may have made to Costello, is moderated by what the circumstances are at the time that the promise matures. No reasonable front-bencher would expect to be able to hold Howard to a promise if the effect of doing that is that the government would lose the next election, yet that would have been the likely outcome of Howard relinquishing the leadership to Costello at the nominated time, 6 years ago, and would still be now.
And this is a condition which needs to be read into the fine print of any “deal” that Costello and Howard were making 12 years ago, and is in fact embodied in the Treasurer’s recollection of Howard’s words which were prefaced with the phrase “It is my intention that…”.
The public sense this, even if they don’t articulate it. Hence, even if they think Howard’s view is wrong, they still back him for Prime Minister.
It’s another variation of the argument between “truth” and “trust” that ran through the last election. While some, like Costello, put their faith in words, others, like Howard, put theirs in action. Most of us do.