KEY POINTS:
There's only one Siimon Reynolds. The extra i sees to that. Appointed creative director of a major Sydney advertising agency at 21, the precocious Reynolds went on to win an array of domestic and international advertising awards.
Along the way he founded and sold several agencies, thus ensuring
he has a personal fortune, and a mantelpiece crowded with plastic statuettes, to show for his glittering career. As if his wealth, fame, bland good looks and full head of hair aren't annoying enough, he finds other ways to provoke us.
There's that name. We can be pretty sure it isn't spelt that way on his birth certificate. A personalised number plate may be an attention-seeking device but it's the height of bashfulness compared to a dandified name.
There's his thriving sideline as a motivational speaker and author of self-help books for people who've reached adulthood without growing up.
The springboard for the rise and rise of Siimon Reynolds was his 1987 TV ad for Aids awareness which featured a cowled Grim Reaper scattering men, women and children with a giant bowling ball.
"That ad had a very clear brief to scare the hell out of Australia and put Aids on the list," said an industry bigwig in 2002 when pronouncing the campaign one of the best ever created by an Australian. "Prior to that, no one knew about it. That ad is once seen, forever remembered."
Perhaps only an advertising man could discuss that campaign without wondering whether, with the benefit of hindsight, scaring the hell out of Australia and encouraging the belief that Aids would cut a swathe through the most wholesome suburbs was such a worthwhile achievement after all.
This month Dr Kevin de Cock, the unfortunately named head of the World Health Organisation's HIV/Aids department, confirmed what some had suspected all along: outside of sub-Saharan Africa, heterosexual men, women and children are not ten-pins waiting to be flattened, because Aids is confined to a few high-risk groups, notably men who have sex with men, injecting drug users and sex workers.
Contrary to what we've been told for years in government-funded scare campaigns, non-African heterosexual men and women who aren't resolutely monogamous are not playing Russian roulette.
The threat of heterosexual Aids, which has hung like the sword of Damocles over the general population for a quarter of a century, had no foundation in scientific fact. The strategy of general - as opposed to targeted - prevention was based on an entirely false premise.
Why did this happen? There was probably an unwillingness, derived from political correctness, to single out the at-risk groups. Sections of the gay community argued, with some justification, that if Aids was pigeon-holed as a gay disease, it would be met with public indifference which would translate into government reluctance to give the fight against it high priority.
Then there were social engineers on the left who saw it as an opportunity to extend the state's reach into its citizens' sex lives, and the religious right entranced at the thought of an unforgiving God striking down sinners. Despite their differences, these groups share - with al Qaeda - a puritanical view of modern Western society as materialistic, self-indulgent and decadent.
It sometimes seems as if the technique of inflating the threat to encompass virtually everyone who isn't an abstainer has become the blueprint for all health and safety campaigns.
Last year the British Government launched a campaign to shame middle-class wine drinkers into cleaning up their acts, an initiative eagerly parroted by the mouthpieces of our very own Nanny state.
The fact that the drinkers in question are law-abiding taxpayers exercising their legal right in the privacy of their own homes doesn't seem to enter into it.
Now Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council has reportedly redrafted its guidelines on safe drinking to classify more than three glasses of wine a night as binge drinking.
There are a couple of obvious problems here. The first is it's so far removed from what sensible people know to be the case that they simply won't pay any attention. Secondly, it renders a useful term meaningless and therefore makes it harder to alert the public to what may well be a genuine problem.
Nanny state treats us like idiots who can't grasp any concept that doesn't fit into a tabloid headline and can't act in our own best interests unless we're terrified into doing so. In effect, our taxes are being used to insult us and we shouldn't stand for it.
