It has become a cultural norm to shun smokers and treat them as pariahs. It was made possible, not by the fact that smokers die younger, but because smokers impacted on those around them.
A fear of second-hand smoke allowed us to treat smokers as second-class citizens.
But obesity, whichis now overwhelming this country in terms of presence and impact on our health service, does not receive the same contempt and fear, possibly because of too many links to political correctness and the freedom to live your life your own way.
Basically, if a person gets obese, it's not something I breathe in. I'm not affected by it in a person-to-person sense. It does not affect my mobility, my quality of life. But figures tell me that two-thirds of adults around me are either overweight or obese. A million people in New Zealand are obese. That is going to impact on me as a New Zealand citizen at some point.
Diabetes, obesity and poor health affect productivity, taxes, health care and birth rates. Obese people are a severely negative impact on New Zealand society. If they allow their children to follow the same pattern, could that be called child abuse?
The question New Zealand needs to ask itself is a hard one: are we going to have to be cruel about this? We were pretty cruel to smokers. We talk generically about the "obesity epidemic", lumping in all the fatties in one gigantic impersonal mass, but God forbid we should actually lean hard and get nasty or rude with individuals like we did with smokers. It's not politically correct to let our disgust show.
If we cross that line to the realisation that obese people are detrimental to New Zealand's society, and a drain on our taxes, then maybe it is time to let our disgust show. Perhaps it is time to start taxing and penalising companies and food suppliers that perpetuate the epidemic, and reward those that do not.
It's bloody difficult to be a smoker in New Zealand. But it's far too easy to be obese and still enjoy every privilege of a free, civilised country. We took away a lot of freedoms from smokers, moves that would have been unheard of 30 years ago.
Perhaps, for the good of the country, there needs to be penalties, and loss of certain freedoms, for those who are obese.
