Another Outbreak Of Common Sense In New South Wales

Those with a good memory might remember Peter Phelps, an Australian politician and Member of the New South Wales Legislative Council. Phelps is notable for being incredibly principled in defending liberal values in such an illiberal environment as NSW, and in a chamber which is situated in nanny state central Sydney. As such, I was thrilled to unexpectedly meet him in July during a coffee break at a Royal Society of Medicine event on over-regulation of pleasure.

Last year - when he was government whip no less - I wrote about how he casually entered a chamber packed full of variously ignorant prejudiced prohibitionists armed only with insults, smears, innuendo, wild assumptions, and downright lies, and placed in front of them simple incontrovertible facts about e-cigarettes.

And arguably won hands down.

I love it when the Left is outraged by what I say, but can offer no evidence to counter my arguments #stillwinning

— Peter Phelps MLC (@PeterPhelpsMLC) May 27, 2015

Well, on Monday he was delivering more common sense, this time at the NSW "Inquiry into childhood overweight and obesity", colloquially known as the 'Fat kids' inquiry.

As expected he was sound throughout, but his exchange with Jane Martin - Executive Manager of what appears to be a turgid authoritarian organisation called Obesity Policy Coalition - was as amusing as it was accomplished.

Ms MARTIN: They should not be advertising to children so they should be happy to set that aside.
The Hon. Dr PETER PHELPS: Why not? What is wrong with children who have high calorific outputs exposed to advertising which gives them high calorific inputs?
Ms MARTIN: Because children who do a lot of exercise need more healthy food, not junk food.
The Hon. Dr PETER PHELPS: How you achieve your calories is a component part of that. If a child has a diet which only gives the child 8,000 kilojoules a day and the child is expending 12,000 kilojoules a day that child is manifestly unhealthy.
Ms MARTIN: Elite athletes who do a lot of sport do not eat more unhealthy food because they need more calories. We need to eat a nutritious, healthy diet. If you are exercising a lot you get your calories from nutritious food.
The Hon. Dr PETER PHELPS: But no-one—certainly not McDonald's or any other company—is suggesting that your only diet be McDonald's.
Ms MARTIN: But it does make it a more normal part of life. It also associates sport with—
The Hon. Dr PETER PHELPS: Having enjoyable food is not a normal part of life? 

The denormalisation of McDonald's, eh? Rings a bell doesn't it?

Ms MARTIN: I suppose if McDonald's is called a Happy Meal then maybe that means it is but it means that having these associations—as a mother, I know what it does. You go to play sport and then the kid thinks that they deserve a McDonald's or it creates that affiliation, it creates that association, it creates the pester power. That is exactly what it is designed to do. We need to protect our kids and support parents who have to deal then with the demand that is created by those associations. That is what it is designed to do.
The Hon. Dr PETER PHELPS: But parents should be in a position to say, "No, you can't have that. You had a McDonald's yesterday. You're not having one today."
Ms MARTIN: But kids pester a lot because there are a lot of promotions that they are exposed to. Much more so than when you were young or I was young, it is a very different sort of environment. I saw some research the other day which talked about the amount of times that parents are pestered in the supermarket. It is massive. Why should parents be the ones to fight this marketing and promotion?
The Hon. Dr PETER PHELPS: Because they are parents, Ms Martin. 

This!

The Hon. Dr PETER PHELPS: Are you saying that sweetened beverages in Australia are an increasing problem for people?
Ms MARTIN: I do not know that we said that in our submission. I think we said that what is acknowledged is that there is very high consumption of sugar-sweetened drinks. Most of the added sugar in the diet comes from sugar-sweetened drinks and some subsections of the population are very high consumers of sugary drinks, particularly young men.
The Hon. Dr PETER PHELPS: Would you agree with the Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS] figures which indicate that the proportion of people aged two and over who have consumed sweetened beverages decreased from 49 per cent in 1995 to 42 per cent in 2011-12?
Ms MARTIN: Yes, that is true, but that is all people including people who do not necessarily drink sugary drinks.
The Hon. Dr PETER PHELPS: Would you also agree that the ABS statistics show that the greatest decrease in consumption of sweetened beverages was seen among children, with the proportion of children aged two to three who consumed sweetened beverages decreasing by more than half, from 67 per cent down to 31 per cent?
Ms MARTIN: Has that taken into account the under-reporting in that survey? 

Ah, the old 'public health' under-reporting excuse, they trot this out occasionally. It's shorthand for "we can't argue with that so we'll try to pretend the data are flawed somehow". Phelps is on it, though.

The Hon. Dr PETER PHELPS: It certainly mentions under-reporting; however, I am sure that a survey taken some almost 20 years afterwards has better reporting mechanisms than the 1995 survey, which was more likely to be under-reported.
Ms MARTIN: My understanding is under-reporting was a bigger problem in that survey. However, it does appear there has been a decrease but that does not mean that sugary drinks are not a problem.
The Hon. Dr PETER PHELPS: Do you also agree with the ABS statistic which showed the overall consumption of soft drinks and flavoured minerals waters decreased from 33 per cent in 1995 to 29 per cent in 2011-12?
Ms MARTIN: Yes.
The Hon. Dr PETER PHELPS: And, moreover, the only age cohort which showed an increase in intense sweetened soft drinks was the ages 51 to 70?
Ms MARTIN: That is one subsection of the sugary drink market. I do not know what an intense—
The Hon. Dr PETER PHELPS: Presumably regular Coke and the like. Is it not true that in fact this supposed sugary drink menace is grossly over-reported whereby you have a situation of level or diminishing levels of sugary drink consumption in Australia over the previous 20 years and more particularly significantly lower levels of sugary drink consumption amongst children?
Ms MARTIN: I think you could still argue it is a serious problem ...

I suppose she will always have to say that no matter the statistics, considering it is the current approach of anti-obesity professional worldwide to lobby for taxation. They're not that interested in what works in so much as what is simple so they keep their highly-paid positions by producing 'results'.

And Phelps addresses this too.

The Hon. Dr PETER PHELPS: Ms Martin, is it ever legitimate for a parent to feed their children McDonald's?
Ms MARTIN: We have all fed our children McDonald's. The problem is that these kinds of treats are everywhere now. I ate one chocolate a week when I was a kid; now there are three packaged foods in children's lunchboxes and they are basically all unhealthy. That is the problem.

"One chocolate a week"? I suppose there's a hint there as to why she's grown up to work in such a miserable, joy-vacuuming industry.

The Hon. Dr PETER PHELPS: Children do not buy their own lunches and put them in their lunchboxes. Their parents buy it for them. Again it comes down to this: Are you saying because we do not think particularly working-class parents are very good parents that it is government's role to step in and stop them being parents and it is government's job to be parents for them?
Ms MARTIN: I think it is government's job to support parents and that parents are undermined a lot. I think a lot of parents, including myself, thought that things like Nutrigrain were healthy foods for my child. It has just been reformulated to 26 per cent sugar, but it was 33 per cent sugar. I did not know that was not a healthy product, because that is how it is promoted. A lot of people would think that Milo was a healthy product. The Olympics was sponsored by McDonald's and Coca-Cola, because being affiliated with health makes the products appear to have healthier attributes than they have. I think that governments should support parents.
The Hon. Dr PETER PHELPS: They should, but they should support them not in a sense of prohibiting or using draconian powers to stop things from happening and rather to encourage greater participation in sport, surely?
Ms MARTIN: I think there are a lot of nudges, like taxing sugary drinks, like removing things that create the demand for these products in children, which is the incredible barrage and wallpaper of unhealthy foods marketing that our children are exposed to. We need to see the Health Star Rating made mandatory on all foods, and some improvements made in how the rating is applied so that Milo does not get 4½ stars.
The Hon. Dr PETER PHELPS: That is simply because it is easier for governments to ban things rather than have effective behavioural change—you do not like the behaviour and so you ban things.

Bravo! Yep, that's about the sum of it. Well played again, Sir!

You can read the full transcript here, The excerpts above come from pages 10-14 of the PDF. Also look out for an appearance by Skype from Snowdon on pages 62-66.

H/T Catallaxy Files

Charge!

Phew, that was a close one!

A longstanding 'public health' lie came close to destabilising the NHS over the weekend.

A move that could have seen obese patients refused surgery in an attempt to save money is to be reviewed after national NHS bosses intervened. 

A proposed restriction by the NHS Vale of York Clinical Commissioning Group would have seen non-life threatening procedures delayed by a year for those with a body mass index exceeding 30. 

The rule would also apply to smokers. 

NHS England, which can intervene as the CCG is under special measures, said the group had agreed to rethink the move.

As Snowdon has already noted, this is not how most people would expect the NHS to operate.

Rationing healthcare on the basis of lifestyle was never part of the NHS's plan in 1948. It it had been, there would have been even more resistance to the nationalisation of the industry than there was. But after years of wrongly scapegoating smokers and fat people for the NHS's spiralling budget, it's no surprise to find the service being turned from a free-at-the-point-of-need Ponzi scheme into a tool of outright coercion and punishment.

Indeed.

It's what happens when health nazis torture statistics in order to play on bigotry and prejudice and pretend that smokers and the overweight are taking more than their fair share of NHS resources. Because that's exactly what this is all about, as alluded to in the BBC article.

"They are trying to lose weight in the vast majority of cases and to deny them treatment that they need on the basis of their weight, without then offering them effective help to help them lose weight is rather like discriminating [against] a segment of the population on the basis of their colour or religious persuasion."

Besides which, it has, quite simply, never been true (like almost everything you ever hear from 'public health') that unhealthy lifestyles unnecessarily harm NHS finances. Whenever economic costs of socialised healthcare are calculated, it is always the 'healthy' - and not those who choose riskier lifestyles - who put the most burden on health services.

It should be obvious, especially since 'public health' wants to simultaneously tell us that smokers and the obese live far shorter lives. Healthcare costs for those who are considered healthy are more expensive to the system both short and long-term, and the largest financial commitment any government commits to - pensions - are hugely more costly too.

When tobacco controllers, or any other 'public health' charlatan, tell you that x costs the NHS y amount of money, they are lying by way of only giving you one side of the equation.

It's not hard to understand really.

While smokers and the overweight are often criticised for the financial impact of their unhealthy lifestyles, an obese person's medical bills actually average 10 per cent less overall than those of a person of normal weight. 

Smokers require even less treatment, say the researchers. 

The reason is that the healthy tend to live longer and so, while they might not have to battle lung cancer, heart disease or diabetes in their fifties, they may need long-term care for illnesses of old age such as Alzheimer's. 

As a result, any "savings" made by them being healthy when young are more than offset by their being ill in old age.

Tobacco controllers - who know better than the rest of us that smokers don't actually cost the NHS more than anyone else, quite the opposite - usually counter this incontrovertible fact with shrill straw men such as "so you're saying that governments should encourage smoking because it's good for the country's finances?". Well no, we are just arguing that 'public health' lobbyists should stop using outright lies to push their agenda.

The result of all this wholesale lying by health lobbyists is daft policies like that proposed by the ignoramuses at NHS Vale of York. To save money, they have taken the stance that the best thing to do is penalise the people who cost them the least amount of money in the long run. It's why they are not handling budgets or performing actuarial calculations in the private sector .. because if they were they'd be sacked.

Restricting treatment is just one stupid policy recommendation that 'public health' lying creates, the other is the regular call - which you may have heard from the most easily-gulled in society - to charge smokers, drinkers and the obese for NHS treatment. You know, because it's self-inflicted, innit, and why should they pay for the healthcare costs of others.

This is very dangerous ground for the NHS. Once you get into that line of thinking it renders the NHS unworkable. There's little need for those lucrative sin taxes now, is there Mr politician? Just think of all those treatments the NHS provides which the public regularly object to, and there are very many. If we can pick and choose who is treated and who is not, there are going to be a lot of green ink letters from Mr & Mrs Disgusted of Cheltenham.

There are also dozens of dangerous activities anyone could name that might end in long-term and incredibly expensive palliative care, why should the public collectively pay for extreme risk-taking? And you know that unwritten contract we have whereby we pay our taxes and you promise to treat us accordingly? Well, there is just the taxation now, if the benefit is being withdrawn for large sections of the population, we'll see those taxes dramatically cut so we can source healthcare elsewhere at our own cost, Mr Politician Sir, or we'll see you in court.

You can't have a protection racket without the protection, now can you?

It only takes one successful case and the NHS could be holed beneath the water line. Imagine the free-for-all as those most able to negotiate the red tape and best-placed to afford it opt out of a portion of their taxes and go private. Oh joy!

I've written about this kind of backward thinking from NHS administrators (who ironically are the biggest direct drain on the NHS) before, and whenever I do I find myself thinking "bring it on!", just before health service grandees intervene and tell the local idiots to shut the fuck up and stop trying to derail the gravy train.

Just like this weekend.

Oh well, these instances are becoming more and more frequent, so better luck next time, eh?

As a footnote, Snowdon also mentioned the appalling 'nurse' Jane "They'll just have to die" DeVille-Almond in his piece. If you've not heard her contribution to the "do no harm" principle of the medical profession before, you can listen to it below.