Budget 09: Mission off as youth anti-obesity programme scrapped

The Government has delivered the death blow to Labour's anti-obesity programme for young people, Mission-On.

Funding for the Sport and Recreation agency programme on children's and young people's nutrition and activity has gone from $15.7 million to zero.

Mission-On was launched in 2006 by then-Prime Minister Helen Clark with great fanfare alongside a World Health Organisation meeting in Auckland.

Aimed at everyone under 25, it was billed as a package of initiatives to give families the tools to improve nutrition and increase physical activity.

It included student health promotion events, lifestyle ambassadors, new guidelines on advertising food to children, youth-focused websites and even encouraging healthy nutrition and physical activity among state sector employees.

Prime Minister John Key panned schemes like Mission-On when he was Opposition Leader, saying they were needlessly bureaucratic and used expensive ad campaigns that told parents things like, "'Make sure your child eats fruit and vegetables'. As if that makes it easier to convince your 5-year-old to eat her broccoli."

Canning Mission-On is part of National's winding back of various Labour anti-obesity schemes, including scrapping the target for district health boards on increasing people's consumption of fruit and vegetables; ending state funding for the Obesity Action Coalition; allowing the daily sale of unhealthy foods and drinks at schools; and ditching the Public Health Bill's provisions that would have allowed the Government to rewrite food industry recipes and control placement of unhealthy foods in supermarkets.

The Government says some Mission-On money will be shifted to sport in schools. Funding for high-performance sport was maintained but listed as a separate output in the Budget. Overall, Sparc got about $9 million less.

- NZPA