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!

Turnrightandthenleft,

There is no difference between the money I give as taxes and the money a company uses on advertising. If there was a difference then you would have an argument. One of the problems with economics is that it has not recognised that we can have different forms of money and the money can be tagged and these differences that you are so concerned about are made explicit.

Let us take advertising and the application of tagged money.

Perhaps one way we can "solve" the problem of unhelpful advertising of products that opponents (concerned citizens) consider damaging is to give opponents equal time. All companies that advertise could give an equal amount of money to the people who did not purchase their goods because they disagree with the product and have registered their opposition. If a company spends $X per person on each purchase then opponents should also get $x person objecting but they must spend the money on advertising against the product.

Assume I have an objection to advertising to my children about fast food. I would now be able to register my objection and I would receive an amount of money that I can use for advertising against the product. The way to do this is with tagged money that is different - that is it can only be used on advertising to tell children why I and others object to the product. How much I personally get for this purpose is the average amount spent by advertisers per person per sale.

If we get a lot of people registering then the companies will have to come up with higher costs on their products. If however, it is a non controversial product then few will register.

This now saves the government the trouble of having to guess which things it should advertise against. What we do is to give the community a say.

Before dismissing this as impractical let me assure you it is practical and could be implemented for a cost of about 5% of the money spent on advertising.

Sorry I accidentally put this comment over here http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=5703

On the article itself, yes the government does interfere in a lot of things that should be left to individual choice, however as Nicholas Gruen argues some use of our money is efficient. You give it to the government and they give it back where you need it which prevents you the stress of spending forever working out (budgeting) whether you need various insurances, have to pay certain bills, and doing a budget on hundreds of services you use everyday but don't tend to think about - it is easier for the government to do it for you and less stress upon the individual / family.

“For I am your government and I am here to tell you how to live your lives.”

Of course! People are always bleating (including here, on OLO) for the government to “do something”; to provide more and more money for them to lead the good life.

The more we demand and accept from governments, the more freedom and control over our own lives we hand over to them

Dearest Nanny

I am doing my best not to smoke those filthy cigarettes though I use only filtered ones and afterall, you haven't made it illegal to smoke, have you? And aren't you enjoying the pleasures the revenue brings in?

I know dear Nanny you would much prefer we inhale the smoke from your unregulated, unmonitored industrial stacks which surround many of our communities. That's a better way to contract the many cancers from the chronic inhalation of those pollutants because it's so good for the economy - isn't it? The more we smoke the more we can please you, Nanny.

Please dear Nanny....... will you show us kiddies photographs of the innards of those who smoked from industrial stacks? We love looking at your pictures.

Fickle Pickle, you said

"There is no difference between the money I give as taxes and the money a company uses on advertising."

I think that there is a massive difference. Each fortnight my employer hands over a significant proportion of my income to the Australian Government, likewise almost every purchase I make includes a component that goes to the government. In most cases there are no viable legal alternatives - if I wish to earn an income then I pay income tax.

If I don't like a particular company I can generally choose to avoid their products (and thereby avoid giving them money), I may choose a company which spends less on advertising or who advertises more ethically. Which bank thinks gender violence is funny (and seems to like long queues)?.

The whole thing might be more palatable if the issues targetted were a bit less selective, we are in yet another round of government spending on the Violence against women campaign with not a sign of any advertising against violence against men, even if the 2 to 15% figure was accepted (http://www.health.qld.gov.au/violence/domestic/default.asp) I should still see the occasional add telling men that they don't have to accept violence at the hands of a female partner(http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/170018.pdf, http://www.fact.on.ca/Info/dom/heady99.htm, http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/ID41E2.pdf, http://www.ncfmla.org/gelles.html for an alternative view on the rates)

R0bert

I notice in his sarcastic diatribe on taxpayer funded government ad campaigns Peter Saunders overlooked Workchoices. Quite an omission considering the relentless ad campaign accompanying its introduction late last year. If you want to talk about a "nanny state" then government feather-bedding of rich mates would surely fit the bill.

An article in the Courier mail today with some bearing on the topic.

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,21579659-27197,00.html

R0bert

R0bert, he forgot to mention that this generation of children were raised by the one just before who themselves were raised under direct state influence and the policies of the state knows best. Hard to blame parents for being overly liberal with their children's discipline when they were never taught different.

"I am doing my best not to smoke those filthy cigarettes though I use only filtered ones"

Ah Dickie, there ya go! Given your worry about pollution, but your
trust in nicotine filters, one cigarette filter up each nostril
might just do it for you :)

aqvarivs, can you expand on that please. Not sure if it's the Sunday morning slowness but I'm missing some of your point.

I have the impression that my own parents were raised under a much stricter regiem than I was. I've not had the opportunity to look back at what was on the bookshelves as my parents were being raised but there were no government TV add's (well no TV), from what I've been told their radios were battery driven and only used rarely. The old books I've seen around did not seem to include much government material.

My impression was that the nanny state bit for that generation was the church. I also suspect that the level of material presented was fairly minimal.

R0bert

R0bert, Children of parents from the sixties raising todays children.

Robert,
Still trying to understand your response to Fickle. Do you know anyone who survives in our modern economy without consuming at least some goods/services advertised on radio, newspapers or television? The compulsion might not be legislated but in practical terms it's very, very difficult to avoid paying, just as it's difficult to avoid paying GST. Many of us get no benefit from commercial advertising of products/services apart from listings of providers. Do you recognise the costs to taxpayers of the consequences of at least some non-government, commercial advertising? I suggest Peter give us a similar article on this issue too.
I also think the waste of taxpayers money on advertising is a scandal, but I wouldn't have been so selective as Peter about the examples.

Henery, there are exceptions but in most cases I have some choice about who gets my money. If I don't like a company for some reason I can choose to take my business elsewhere. Not so with the government.

No absolutes but thats life.

R0bert