"[...] The “domino theory” i.e. that once a measure has been applied to tobacco it will be applied to other products is patently false."She was reacting to an argument which was first made against plain packaging by BAT Australia in their advertising campaign of May 2011 with images such as these.
Looks like they were acutely accurate to me. With the ink barely dry on plain packaging of tobacco - and the measures not even being applied till later this year - the upside-down branch of career gloom merchants has already marched on to their next logical step.
Plain packaging for junk food? Health experts call for govt interventionWhen walking through a supermarket? The only "imaginative marketing techniques" I've ever seen in supermarket aisles are the packets themselves. I think it's pretty clear which way this prohibitionist is thinking, don't you?
“What it is necessary to do is to create a neutral environment for consumers, because at the moment we have an environment that is obesity-promoting,” said Bebe Loff, director of the Michael Kirby Centre for Public Health and Human Rights at Monash University.
Professor Loff said stemming the tide of disciplines dedicated to the marketing of food was a huge ask, but controlling the portion size of sugary drinks was a good start.
She added that it took 60 years, and a decision by the government to ignore its own guidelines for regulating, to see the plain packaging crackdown on the tobacco industry.
“I’m not suggesting it be welfare-promoting, but suggesting that it be neutral so we’re not encouraged every time we turn around when walking through a supermarket, and being bombarded with all sorts of imaginative marketing techniques.”
So, it has taken one year and four months for BAT to have been proven correct with their warning. That is lightning fast and entirely contrary to the equally disastrous predictions of Arnott's antipodean counterpart, the oldest swinger in Sydney.
The tobacco industry and its stooges played the same slippery slope arguments over advertising bans, sports sponsorship bans and pack warnings . Ad bans started 35 years ago. No alcohol advertising ban and no momentum I’m aware of other than breaking the sport/alcohol nexus. So the slope ain’t very slippery folks ...All of which proves that if anyone in the tobacco control industry tells you it's going to be sunny, don't leave home without an umbrella.
Not that this slope's lack of slipperiness stopped Simon Chapman himself suggesting what a good idea it would be for plain packaging to be shifted onto other products when presenting to his fellow public health bores, mind [ppt].
Hmmm, I think I've heard packaging of sweets lambasted somewhere before, and that was laden with references to precedents elsewhere too.
Pursuit of a bland, colourless and risk-terrified world seems to be a very lucrative earner for some, doesn't it? May God rot them all.
