Page 2365 - Week 07 - Thursday, 17 August 2006
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
health officer’s report. That is the position before children are even getting to school; they are coming to school with their weight presenting challenges for them.
Whilst I think all of us here would acknowledge that there is not one single cause or one single solution to this problem, I believe that links can be made between TV advertising of junk food and the increasing levels of childhood obesity, as with restricting the amount of physical activity children are participating in. Also, as Dr Foskey has spoken about, there is peer pressure on children to consume products that are constantly being foisted upon them by supermarkets, on TV, on the internet or by friends. The pressure is constant. Any parent would know that and needs to respond to that, but it is hard work to do so. It is hard work when you have worked a full day, whatever that may be, and you come home tired and need to deal with tired children and make ends meet. It is a very difficult job and the difficulty should not be underestimated. That is why it is not as simple as blaming parents or saying that parents need to lift their game, as Mr Abbott has said.
A child who watches an average of 2½ hours of television each day will, over a year, watch around 22,000 advertisements and, on average, around 34 per cent of those will be for food, mainly junk food. So we do need to look at TV advertising of food and the truthfulness of that advertising. There is always going to be advertising. We need to look at the content of that advertising and some of the claims that are being made, such as that the product is 97 per cent fat free or that it will give nutritional values in certain areas. We know that some of those things can give misleading advice to parents. Saying that something is 97 per cent fat free is one thing, but you need to look at the sugar content, which is the actual problem, and the calories being consumed.
TV is very crafty in the way that it does get into children’s heads. One of my daughter’s favourite TV shows at the moment, one which I am having a battle with, is about the bad diet of other children and their need to lift their game to improve their health. I do not know what it is called, but it is a one-hour program during children’s TV time, around 7.30 pm, which encourages families to sit down and watch other families which are struggling with diet and bad food choices. I guess you just sit there and eat your dinner while you are watching someone else eat a bad dinner. That is something that was brought home to me last night when it was on.
The health ministers had discussions with Minister Abbott at their meeting in July of this year on the need to look at this problem. I do not think that the answer is as simple as just saying that we should have a ban on TV advertising of junk food. I think more work needs to be done and the content of that advertising needs to be looked at, but we cannot restrict any ban to TV advertising because the majority of the advertising and the place where a lot of the major junk food retailers are going now is on the internet, where a ribbon comes across the screen over and over again. It is not just the short, sharp ad that you get on TV; it is on constantly time. You can actually play games on the internet in which you can win nuggets and take those nuggets to wherever you want to go to redeem them.
The extent to which the internet is getting into targeting of and marketing for children is quite amazing. I was told recently about an SMS capacity through the internet whereby you can sign up for some competition by putting in your mobile phone number and a week later walk down the road and get an SMS saying, “Do you feel like a chocolate bar
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .