KEY POINTS:
Ever get the feeling you are being wrapped in cotton wool by a Government determined to mummify you with a swathe of new laws and tighter regulations designed to protect you from yourself?
The Public Health Bill is the latest example. A parliamentary select committee is looking at
ways to combat obesity and, aware that public education campaigns have yet to breed a new svelte nation, it is considering giving the Government power to control where and how supermarkets display unhealthy food.
It is a small clause in the bill and the Greens' healthy food campaigner Sue Kedgley is adamant it would be unlikely to be used. Much.
In my experience, however, if you give Governments an inch they tend to take a mile.
It is entirely possible one day, like dirty old men hunting X-Rated DVDs at a video store, we will be forced to scuttle down dark, curtained aisles at the back of the shop furtively looking for that illicit pack of lollies and bag of fatty crisps.
Who will decide what is healthy and what is unhealthy? Presumably a new department of food scientists and enforcement inspectors will be formed to ensure the evil white bread is hidden at the back and the high-fibre wholegrain loaves up front.
Eventually, I suppose, like the new cigarette packets, unhealthy foods will be forced to carry ugly pictures of the medical effects of their ingredients. Packets of Mallowpuffs will feature a stern health warning and a nasty photo of a huge fat bum.
The fact is the multi-million-dollar public education campaigns on obesity have worked. We know if you get too fat you will suffer a range of health effects, from erectile dysfunction, through heart attacks to getting your backside irretrievably stuck in an Air New Zealand economy class seat.
People know the ugly truth of what unhealthy foods can do but some choose to gobble that Moro bar anyway. They have made a reasonably informed choice. It may not be the right choice or one that Matron Kedgley would advocate, but it is their choice.
The Government can try to control the sale of foods it dislikes but people will go on eating it. All this bill will do is create still more bureaucrats to administer it.
John Key was on target earlier in the week when he promised to cap the number of public servants. Labour and the unions accused him of fiddling with figures but the National Party leader scored a direct hit with voters when he pointed to a 37 per cent growth in the numbers of "core bureaucrats" compared with an increase of only 22 per cent in state servants who provide frontline services.
He tells us there are 28 per cent more doctors and nurses in the District Health Boards but 51 per cent more bureaucrats in the Ministry of Health. Labour disputes this but anyone who has dealt with the state sector in recent years can testify to the plague of policy analysts, communications specialists and advisers now running amok in Wellington. These folk are needed because, before providing any service, the public service is obsessed with ensuring its own compliance with a tangle of rules, regulations and restrictions.
Key's pledge to cap numbers won't endear him particularly to the PSA's 55,000 members but he delivered the policy in a direct and common sense sort of way that will get the approval of the wider community of taxpayers. He is at his strongest when he takes this approach and at his weakest when he gets trapped in more traditional mudslinging politics.
Caught by Labour on tricky ground over the airport sale and, before that, National's policy on settling Treaty claims and abolishing the Maori seats, Key squirmed and performed a series of intricate back-flips that led to Government MPs gleefully labelling him "Slippery John".
While he is neither charismatic nor black, Key has some of the advantage that Barack Obama enjoys. He is relatively new to the political scene and is not perceived by voters as being wedded to the old school political game of bickering one-upmanship and weasel words.
But he can be sure that between now and November Labour will lay a minefield of traps for him designed to highlight his lack of experience.
Helen Clark's hard-won experience is Labour's biggest asset in the coming campaign and the Government will seek to exploit this through contrasting her usually safe pair of hands with every fumble Key may make.
It is extraordinary, but probably a measure of Labour's increasing desperation, that a left-wing columnist last week called for Clark to go and be replaced by a new leader.
That is not only extremely unlikely, it would be suicidal for the party. The Prime Minister is the only thing the Government has going for it.
