Health fascism in Australia.

Cartoon by Ramirez.

From the Institute of Public affairs.

This week parliament will debate a bill to establish a national Preventive Health Agency, reminding of that classic Mark Twain observation: nobody is safe while the legislature is in session.

On The Punch Federal health minister Nicola Roxon insisted that she was no nanny statist, and that the purpose of the Agency was about saving lives and reducing health costs.

Most modern governments understand the follies of outright bans, such as the failed US Prohibition movement from 1919 to 1933. However, the Agency plans what it sees as the next best thing.

With a total budget of $133 million over four years, it intends to tax and regulate your booze, ciggies and fast food that it's more expensive or harder to get.

Minister Roxon denies that the Agency will embark on a nagging agenda. However it plans to spend $2 million this financial year on marketing campaigns about stuff you know already. (Really? Over-indulging in junk food has health consequences?)
So if that's not nagging, then exactly what is it?

The following year, in 2010?11, the proposed Agency intends to go into a healthy living ad campaign overdrive with the marketing budget lifted to $33.8 million.

That would represent a seventeen-fold increase in taxpayer-financed spending devoted to hectoring and cajoling you to skip your Friday night pizza and Tim Tams with coffee.

From The Preventative Health Nazis:

Food, physical activity, alcohol and tobacco are all consumables trading in our market system. When markets work efficiently, and consumers and producers act with full information, markets contribute significantly to community wellbeing. However, markets are imperfect and do not always produce optimal outcomes from a societal point of view.

Thus it appears that our health is not our own anymore in the eyes of these arrogant bastards but should only be seen as a little microcosm of their socialist empire and has to be seen from a "societal" perspective. There is already enough information out there on food, physical activity, alcohol and tobacco, for even the most ill informed among us to make fairly well balanced decisions in relation to how much exercise they should do, what types of food to consume, and what sort of substances to abuse and how much.

These fascists really need to lighten up, take something for their delusions of relevance, and understand that we are entitled to make choices for our own bodies, for our own reasons, for our own good, and butt out.

Public health is collectivized individual health, and is only relevant because medicine has been socialized in this country.

Those who gleefully accepted the governments largesse and voted them in on the promise of free medical treatment missed the downside, that being that he who pays the piper calls the shots. Well they don’t actually pay, we do in taxes, but government see it as their own to do with as they see fit.

Allowing the state to take responsibility for our health costs has effectively given them the idea that they now have the right to dictate our behavior to us.

Take note, USA.