Dialogue: What these guys need is a fat lip

Just before I sat down to write this column I enjoyed a large plate of sausages, eggs and chips - all fried. And when I'm done I intend to sit down to a wide slice of ice cream snugly fitted between a couple of pink wafers.

At lunchtime I ate a hot meat pie and a custard square, which is my lunch at least three times a working week; on the other two days I enjoy a hotdog - a frankfurter liberally smothered with cheese, onions, mustard and various sauces.

On Saturday mornings I sit down to a brunch of bacon and eggs, perhaps accompanied by fried tomatoes, or a can of baked beans or spaghetti, or a fried banana, or fried bread.

And most weekends - in the cooler months anyway - our Saturday night meal is a roast - chicken, beef or lamb - accompanied by roast veges and gravy made from the scrapings of the roasting dish. In the warmer months it's probably steak, lamb chops, sausages, chicken or hamburgers barbecued on the deck.

I am a great lover of pizza, and the hamburgers, fish and chips and southern fried chicken which my highly valued local takeaway prepares impeccably and just to my taste.

Then there's the desserts, of which I'm inordinately fond, particularly since I partake of them only at weekends. This will be a fruit pie, fruit crumble or fruit sponge, rice or coconut custard, a bread pudding, steamed pudding, baked scone pudding with jam, trifle, or a banana brulée - a confection consisting mainly of bananas, lemon juice, cream and caramelised sugar.

And all of those will be accompanied by lashings of cream and sometimes ice cream, too. A bit of dessert with my cream.

So you can imagine my chagrin when I picked up the Herald the other day and read an article headed "Fat-tax plan to reduce disease." It told me that a couple of GPs had written a letter to the Medical Journal suggesting that a fat tax be slapped on foods containing saturated fats to reduce the country's high death rate from heart disease, and that this idea had received the approval of a medic at the Heart Foundation and another at the Auckland Medical School.

And the excuse for this outrageous and patently ridiculous proposal? Educational programmes had proved ineffective in preventing heart disease.

The whole story would have been a laugh had it not had such sinister connotations, for here is yet another attempt by people with a bee in their bonnets to impose their wacky ideas on the rest of us - and by legislation or regulation to boot.

And don't think I'm exaggerating. Just look back over the past couple of decades to the number of times some airhead has said publicly, "Wouldn't it be a good idea to ... ?" and in no time at all a whole lot of other nitwits have picked up the idea and run with it, legislation has been passed, and another chip has been taken out of the foundations of democracy - in which the rights of the individual are paramount.

I have no argument with preventive health measures. But what a lot of people don't seem to understand is that once the preventive advice has been given, it is up to the individual to accept it or not. If the individual chooses not to, that is his or her absolute prerogative and is no business of the state.

What these GPs are saying is that in order to save a guestimated 50 lives a year in New Zealand, the other 3,799,950 of us have to pay through the nose for any foods that contain fat.

Okay. GPs have been accused of overprescribing routine medications - antibiotics in particular - at a huge cost to the nation's drug bill. So why don't we slap a tax on GPs for every prescription they write? And don't let it worry you that thousands of meticulous GPs will suffer because of the prodigality of a few.

And let's slap a tax on all sexually active men because some get venereal diseases, which are increasing faster than arguments for more sex education; and on all sexually active women because some get pregnant and contribute to the soaring abortion rate; and on all the parents of schoolchildren because some kids wag school or disrupt classes.

Heaven knows our individual rights have been eroded enough by successive governments and self-styled "experts" determined to tell us how we should think, act and behave. No wonder calls for a return to individual responsibility are being made more and more loudly. But we have been under the influence of the social engineers for so long now that it's no wonder a lot of us have lost the ability to think for ourselves.

Thank God Health Minister Annette King still can. A fat tax, she said, "is not on my horizon." May her horizon grow ever broader.

* garth_george@herald.co.nz