No beer, no pies, no fags -- the future of Australia?

If the National Health Preventative Taskforce has its way, by 2020 Australians should be beer-refusing, meat pie-avoiding non-smokers.

Bottle shops will be increasingly rare across our cities because the government will have addressed the cultural place of alcohol.  Teachers will be routinely inspecting lunchboxes for fatty and sugary snacks.  Advertisements for popular foods will be rigorously vetted by government regulators to prevent them being appealing to children.

Vast new bureaucracies will be established with just one thing in mind:  To stop you from eating, drinking and smoking anything the government disapproves of.

This scenario is indeed a bleak vision for the future, yet is being fervently advocated by a band of public health academics, nanny state paternalists, medical activists and frustrated doctors.  Many of these coercive utopian ideas were canvassed at the 2020 Summit.  Instead of being locked in a vault never to be seen or heard of again, the Federal Government's National Preventative Health Taskforce has resuscitated the idea that governments control what we put into our bodies.

Nanny statism has a poor record both here and overseas -- remember the failure of US alcohol prohibition from 1920 to 1933?

Undeterred, proponents of paternalistic policies continue to march on by using new arguments to fit the same old policy prescriptions.

It is argued that governments need to get involved in people's consumption choices because of potential health problems that are borne by taxpayers through the health system.  There have been anecdotal reports both in Australia and overseas of medical professionals refusing to treat overweight people or smokers.

This argument runs the risk of degenerating into slippery slope arguments for even more prescriptive controls over individual choices.  For example, should individuals not drive cars any more so that public hospitals do not bear the costs of treatment if car accidents befall them?  The health system exists for people to use, and should be separated as far as possible from questions of individual choice.

New developments in economics, studying the psychological and cognitive underpinnings of behaviour, have also breathed new life into the nanny state push.  It is argued that governments should intervene to correct behavioural biases, like self-control problems or excessive discounting of the future costs of action.

However, there are real limits to governments being able to successfully push individual consumption in the supposed right direction.

Government health bureaucrats, like other people, have their own biases, and their knowledge of the preferences and circumstances of individuals are extremely limited.  These limitations raise the risk that nanny state policies have ineffective or even counter-productive results, where the costs of government policy errors are spread across society.

Fundamentally, people are best placed to make choices affecting their state of health every day, through the foods and drinks they consume and the legal substances they inhale.  On the other hand, the taskforce does not appear to appreciate any limits to government interference in individual choices.

If, by 2020, Australians can still drink alcohol, smoke tobacco and consume the foods of their choice, then we will know that our precious liberties will have been left intact.  Until then, it is almost certain that nanny statists will run with the Preventative Health Taskforce final report to agitate for bigger government in health, at our expense.

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