Opinion & Commentary
No dignity for the individual in the war against the obese
Liberals champion limited government because they cherish the dignity of the individual. With every expansion of the role of the government, individuals lose control over their own lives and become increasingly powerless before the authority of the government.
In this country, we are sliding nearer to this servile state as the so-called ‘war on obesity’ heats up. This sounds dramatic, but consider this.
The day before Australia Day, the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the latest national obesity survey of 15,000 households. The survey reveals that over the past 15 years the number of obese or overweight Australians has increased by over 50 per cent to an estimated 7.4 million.
The ABS believes these figures underestimate the size of the obesity ‘crisis’. They say that a significant disparity has emerged between reported levels of obesity and the proportion of the population that considers their weight acceptable.
The problem, as a spokesperson explained, is that when the Bureau’s ‘surveyors’ come a-knocking on the front door, men tend to lie about their height, and women tend to lie about their weight. The propensity to understate their actual weight has distorted the ABS results.
Telling white lies seems an understandable response to the indignity of this situation. After all, a stranger, an impersonal agent of the government is interrogating citizens for their vital personal statistics. But the ABS isn’t backing off, and has decided to issue surveyors with scales and measuring sticks to ensure the accuracy of the height and weight statistics collected.
When asked to let the government pass its slide-rule to over them, surely many Australians will outright refuse. Does this mean that compulsory weight checks are about to sit alongside compulsory voting in the pantheon of Australia’s undeserved reputation for anti-authoritarianism?
Or - since we know that obesity is concentrated in lower-income, less well-educated suburbs - is the ABS plan to prey on the those members of the public who will submit to being weighed and measured, perhaps trusting that this is but a further obligation under the national census?
One can only imagine how humiliating a procedure this will be – in effect, the government will be stripping people of their (surely comforting) self-perceptions.
Since when, the outraged may ask, has people’s weight been the government’s business, anyway?
The short answer is ever since governments got in the business of providing ‘free and universal’ healthcare. Obesity is the government’s business because the ‘epidemic’ is a major cause of Australia’s rising chronic disease burden, and because the treatment of lifestyle-related chronic illness is overburdening public hospital and jeopardizing the long-term sustainability of Medicare.
What is sobering to think about is that a country that nationalizes its health system does more than just vest the government with the responsibility of providing citizens with healthcare. It also nationalizes the bodies of its citizens because, ineluctably, the government acquires a stake in their health or otherwise. ‘Surveyors’, ‘scales’, ‘measuring sticks’ – the language is revealing. These are terms of measurement usually associated with the market place – as what cannot be measured, cannot be bought, sold, or owned – the applications of which are entirely appropriate in relation to a nationalized healthcare system.
What the ABS’s new and exacting survey method signals is the extent to which the challenges confronting Medicare are driving the government to exert propriatorial authority over the bodies of Australian citizens. The harder the government prosecutes the war on obesity, the more determined it becomes to expose the naked truth about obesity, and the more invasive are the methods employed. And if the price of victory is the dignity of the individual, then so be it.
For 30 years, governments have frowned on unhealthy lifestyles by promoting healthy diet and exercise habits. But after decades of failed health education campaigns, the tone is changing. Increasingly, exasperated governments are moving to scold the burdensome obese, as any overweight person is liable to tell you. Humiliating people, by forcing them to realise precisely how fat they really are, crosses a line. It exposes the war on obesity for what it really has become – a war against the obese.
The apparent ease with which the government has decided to strike at the heart of people’s sense of self is a portent. A government forced by the scale of its collective responsibilities to care less about the dignity of the individual is surely a government prepared to take the next step. Does the day draw closer when the government will start dictating how much the obese must exercise and what they must and must not eat to lose weight?
Dr Jeremy Sammut is a researcher at the Centre for Independent Studies.
