Maybe we don’t have a sugar tax because they don’t work?

The ODT reports:

The food industry in Australia and New Zealand has managed to hold off near-universal calls from public health experts for government to crack down on junk food and sugar through its influential lobbying tactics, says the co-author of an Australian study.

The study, published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, interviewed “high-level people, including former politicians and civil servants with first-hand experience of these corporate activities,” said University of Auckland’s Boyd Swinburn, in a media release.

“The main tactics used by the industry identified in the study included framing the solutions to obesity in terms of personal responsibility, using private dinners and other opportunities for lobbying politicians, cherry-picking and promoting the evidence to suit their case, promotion of deregulation and self-regulatory approaches, funding professional nutrition organisations, sponsoring children’s sport and nutrition education materials, and personal criticism of public health advocates,” Swinburn writes.

This is hilarious. A public health activist publishes a study which is basically a whine that Governments won’t do what the activists demand, and they blame everything for this apart from the fact that there is zero evidence that a sugar tax will reduce reduce obesity.

A tax on sodas in NZ that reduced consumption by 10% (which is highly unlikely) and resulted in no substitution (even more unlikely) would reduce the average calorie intake by 3 calories.

This is equivalent to walking for an extra 45 seconds a day. So they want a costly and pocket hitting tax that will rake in tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and have the same impact (at best) of 45 seconds of walking.

And they think the reason the Government hasn’t jumped at this stupidity is because of lobbying. It is because they are moronic.