Dont let the farce get you !

When I was 10 Star Wars had just come out, Labour was in power in New Zealand, and the peanut farmer Jimmy Carter was causing havoc as US president. Raquel Welsh was still hot.

Helen Clark was at Auckland University, involved deeply in the communist movement on campus, not shaving her pits, burning her bra, trying to organise things and people and probably unsuccessfully trying to get some.

Star Wars was the first movie to come out with dozens of different products you could buy with ties to a movie and its promotion.

One of these products was an ice cream on a stick that sold for 10c . Along with the multi coloured ice cream came a sticker of a scene from the movie. One ice cream, one sticker.

I remember buying as many ice creams as my meagre budget from collecting coke bottles would allow. I ate quite a few. I was a child of average weight and there were few fat kids at our school, in fact only a handful. I remember them all.

My parents wouldn't buy these ice creams for me and I'm glad they didn't.

I was also limited by the fact my mum would probably have scolded or possibly smacked me for eating too many and that it was wasteful. She would have been correct!!

A little break here for some Duran Duran from the 80s and Nirvana from the 90s.

Skip forward to July 2008 and I read today that the Health Department, or the food police, as they are more commonly known, have had a complaint by them to the PC Advertising Standards board upheld over a Bluebird chips All Black cards promotion, where every pack of chips held a card of an All Black , there were 50 different ones and that this encouraged "unhealthy eating".

Am I missing something?

Where are the parents in this equation?

This silly little wasteful exercise by the Clark government is nothing more than the Nanny State overreaching their boundaries and levels of expertise.

If this sort of Leninist stuff works, then how come there are more fat kids today than there were 30 years ago when you could count them on one hand?

The answer is of course is that it only makes things worse. Removing parental responsibility from the eating equation by having food Nazis telling us what to eat isn't a good way to teach children what to eat.

10 year olds will know where their boundaries are when their parents tell them what they are NOT the State. That is not the the State's job.

I am waiting for a knock on my door in 2009 if Labour should overcome humongous odds and win the 2008 election, the Food Police will kick in my door while I'm watching the Special Edition of Star wars on DVD, with guns drawn and confiscate my extra large KFC Quarter Pack because I have reached by fat quota for the month.

It could happen, Helen Clark became Prime Minister, anything could happen.

Related Political Animal Reading

Labour's Socialist Peril
Labour's State Control out of Control
What happened to risk?
Helen Clark's words ring hollow

c Political Animal 2008