If you truly believe what you are saying then you will of course stop advertisers from telling me why I should spend my money trying to buy their products. What is the difference between one group trying to tell me how to use my money and another group doing the same thing?

You will argue that I do not have the buy the products. I will argue with you that if I want to watch a TV program then I have to endure the ad or if I want to read the newspaper then I have to put up with all the inserts and go to the trouble of throwing away unnecessary stuff.

Of course governments and other community groups should be able to pass messages to us and of course we should pay it because we pay for other people's advertising both in the products they sell us and in the time they take for me to ignore their messages.

It is about being an informed community - not being a nanny state.

Of course governments should try to counter the advertising for say "fat foods" and they should increase taxes on fat foods to pay for the ads so that the information passed to our children is balanced.

Fickle, your post is flawed from the outset. "What is the difference between one group trying to tell me how to use my money and another group doing the same thing?" you ask.

Taxpayer funds are different to profits redirected into advertising as a form of investment. The goals and means of this process are worlds apart.

That being said, I agree with you after a fashion - the role of government is indeed to look after its citizens. To me, all governments are a nanny state to a degree, and the entire art of governance is about where this line is drawn with respect to personal freedoms.

I suppose this approach allows me to support moves to ban areas such as restaurants from being smoking areas. My view however, is that the central goal of government advertising campaigns should only be to inform, rather than persuade.

As for an issue such as smacking, if it's something the community is so clearly divided on, which doesn't have a simple cost-benefit analysis that can be applied (smoking on the other hand, does) then I don't believe it's justified and is going too far.

This is a waste of taxpayers money. I doubt these advertisments benefit anyone. Tax would be better spent on real welfare, education in schools and hospitals. 2 million is not that much alone, but with all the other government advertising that have limited outcomes, it really is a waste of money.

This is silly market fundamentalism. Producing health messages to the public about the dangers of smoking or not wearing seatbelts are a perfectly legitimate use of taxpayers money.

The outlay is relatively small compared with the huge strain on the public health system and lost productivity from smoking-related deaths and poor vehicle safety.

Mr Saunders and other tunnel-visioned anarcho capitalists have been trying to convince us for years that the common good is always best served best by market forces and that governments get in the way.

I am sorry Mr Saunders, but common sense and experience suggests otherwise. People understand instinctively that corporate profits and the public good are not necessarily the same thing.

That is why we elect governments and erect public institutions to express our choices about the society we live in.

This argument that the market is the answer to everything and that governments mess things up has proved conclusively wrong by events in recent years, including the unequivocal failure of market-based solutions to economic crises.

Ironically it is the "free-hand" liberatarian zealots who are the first to put their hand out for government help when the same market forces they worship threaten their own prosperity.

Your time has come and gone.

The government should have the right to dictate how it's citizens live, work and play. People need this to know that they are living correct lives. Otherwise how would they know. We can't all depend on our neighbour to set us straight. I especially like the one about tobacco. How bad can it really be if our ever so caring parental government continues to allow the importation and manufacturing of tobacco products. Some other day we'll discuss the taxes collected from tobacco sales. Then there is alcohol consumption, the manufacturing of alcohol, selling alcohol and that taxation. These are just two products in a long list of dangerous products. Gasoline? Nuclear energy? Herbicides? Pesticides? Automobiles? Burning coal? Animal fats? Fish products, mercury? Guns? Farming implements? Air pollution? Sugar? Etc, etc. It's funny how selective Nanny can be and how she implements her corrective Laws. Personally I think the government could benefit from a good smack. My neighbour made me say that. He lives at....Owww. That smarts.

And another thing. We notice that some of you are not looking after your teeth properly, so we are going to put chemical fluoride into your water supplies. We are not sure that it works, because almost no European countries use this forcible medication procedure and yet many of those countries achieve lower rates of tooth decay than the great fluoride champions, USA.
Forget that the fluoride we will use is cheap, nasty industrial waste fluoride from fertilizer manufacturing plants, and contains some arsenic, lead and other contaminants. It must be done for your own good. Those of you in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and many other cities have been consuming the chemical for years, but in Brisbane, Geelong, Ballarat and Byron Bay it has never been implemented because naughty, recalcitrant citizens have said NO to it. You are wrong and must be medicated.
You complain that it might build up in bones and other tissues and harm you, as it does when used as a rat poison. We reject that - a little damage to other organs in order to reduce tooth decay rates is quite justified. Take your medicine, we are health experts, trust us!