Efficiency is the buzzword for the budget pumped around by the government. Do they even know what that word means? They invest (this year) in a 20-year preventative health plan that outlines alcohol as a major contributor to sickness, and every politician will be posting some alcoholic drink the same week on social media. And the same week, a business will be given government funds to promote and produce alcohol. It’s after 12 years on the plan that they are going to do something about that, what a joke! They need to be more efficient across the departments, not just within them. 35 per cent of state government’s spending on health is insane, where do people think that money comes from? And where does it go?

I made a claim recently that, watching how tourism has played out over the last 20 years, with big tech taking over, I could now believe that the healthy food pyramid was in fact written by big food — and they found that claim confusing. Here is an attempt to explain it.

It was less than 100 years ago that my nan lived on Bruny Island. She milked the cow, made the butter, preserved the fruit — that would be all the fruit you could get, all year. They grew or acquired a few sheep to eat every few months and collected muttonfish (abalone) from the beaches.

When she married and moved to town in the sixties, she had access to bread from a bakery, butter from a shop, and fruit in a can. After all the work involved in producing these things, why wouldn’t she buy them? They still had fruit trees in the yard and a small veggie patch. When she passed away in the early 2000s, she loved a Kiev from the Birds Eye box, always served with a plate of vegetables, always on a hot plate, and the peas and broccoli could not be touching, because that wouldn’t look as pretty.

Can you remember the excitement of the first McDonald’s coming to Tasmania? I can. It was a very rare treat, we were in the suburbs in a single-parent family, but I remember most families simply couldn’t afford it very often. I remember it being considered expensive. 

Now we have junk food on every corner. Oh sorry, can’t call it that? Their brands are printed on our sports teams’ tops. It’s perfectly normal for kids to only eat chicken nuggets; in fact, it’s abnormal for a bistro not to serve them. “Why don’t you have any kids’ food?” — you know, that stuff that should be in your freezer. Hungry Jack’s makes record profits because it’s now everyday food. Up to 60 per cent of the diet is ultra-processed. People can’t afford healthy food. What is healthy food anyway? Nobody really knows. America releases guidelines saying just eat real food (sounds pretty simple and easy to me), and every dietitian and nutritionist rushes to defend the packet food industry. A ketogenic diet is unhealthy they say, too much pressure on your kidneys, but how about you try this jab that has known side effects of blindness and stomach cancer, but that is approved and ok — ok!

Tasmania produces 11 times more food than it consumes, so why can’t people access it? Why don’t they? It is there and EASY to access, but we are continually told it’s expensive and hard to access. 

A lunchbox full of plastic-wrapped, toxic food is not only normal — do not say anything — it is very offensive to suggest otherwise. A packet of Doritos, a packet of BBQ Shapes, a sugary yoghurt thing, some dried-fruit lolly things, loaded with additives and preservatives and devoid of actual nutrients, is a perfectly normal lunch, thank you very much. Don’t say anything; that’s the kids’ only “safe food.” It’s a disability now, apparently. Even retired child health nurses I speak to have never heard of some of the food aversion diagnoses being handed out. People don’t have 50 seconds to cut vegetables; they need six hours a day on their phone and TV.

Now it is front-page news that the health of our kids is a crisis, but we don’t need another study to tell us what we already know. And yet another new study tells us we need to eat a few serves of seafood. Study after study telling us the same things every few years. More conferences on preventive health — one recently in Hobart — and nothing is mentioned about teaching cooking. It’s just all about how expensive and hard it is to access good food. Go to A-One in Glenorchy and look at the prices — fruit and veg in season are not expensive. That is a lie told by the corporations, and all levels of government continue to tell that lie. It doesn’t help anything or help change; it just keeps people stuck in a victim cycle.

How the hell did we get here? It’s genuinely disgusting, and it’s getting worse. Mega-corporations have corrupted the food system, the health system, and captured government, and the worse it gets the harder it is to come back from, or how we will ever afford to pay for the diseases these foods create. No wonder the NDIS had to be cut. We are heading into a recession and, mark my words, Hungry Jack’s will be posting record profits in a few months as people opt for their “cheap food.” How they have convinced a population that $80-plus on a nutritionally void family meal is cheap is beyond me.

The government-funded Healthy Lunch Program — sadly an extraordinary waste of government funds. Teach parents how to make a sandwich and put an apple in a lunch bag. Bare minimum parenting expectations. The model is a perfect example of how to waste the most amount of government funding you can. $10 for a school lunch with $8.50 of it probably going into multiple levels of management, packaging and delivery. It is actually disgusting.

It’s not just the people in government offices that are wasting resources — the politicians, too. One day, promoting some domestic violence fundraiser, as if a post on social media is going to solve the problem. And then the next promoting whisky — alcohol being identified as one of the major root causes of domestic violence. Action is needed.

Where is the actual health? All I see is medicine — funded by the same pharmaceuticals that profit from the food making us sick in the first place. Healthcare is now $20 million for women’s health that turns out to be purely about accessing the oral contraceptive pill. Not good food, exercise, fresh air, community. And let’s not mention the statistics on how many women start on the pill and end up on antidepressants. Our health system is run by pharmaceuticals — the same companies that own all the shiteateries.

At what point did convenience food and ultra-processed products become too much? Whose responsibility is it to manage them? Personal responsibility? Or should governments have stepped in somewhere along the way? Because it only gets worse each year. And at what point did it shift so that health became the government’s responsibility anyway? Or when it is the government that recommends or even mandates it, as we’ve seen in recent years?

We are now at the “occasional Kiev with a plate of veggies and a rare trip to McDonald’s” stage of mega-corporations destroying the tourism industry, just like they’ve done with food and health. Like convenience food, they arrived softly and we welcomed them. Why wouldn’t we? What a brilliant addition to the industry, we thought. But once they’re in and settled, just like the food system, they don’t care about tourism or Tasmania. They’re profit machines. And we’re already at the stage where no one in industry management is listening to local businesses, because these corporations are already sitting at the table as “partners.” This new fee is not just five per cent on top — it’s locking in a relationship with the corporations, making it harder to break away from them. Like with food and health, they start calling the shots and have far too much influence. Surely no one could doubt, that trillion-dollar pharmaceutical profit machines have their health as their best interest at this point in time.

I nearly laughed listening to the ministers talking about the NDIS. “It has become a magnet for shonks and rorters” — and here we are with the tourism industry just sitting there waiting to get destroyed even further.

Higher commissions, fake bookings, cybercrime exposure, undersupplied and underinsured businesses — and worst of all, the death of the direct relationship between host and guest, which is the very thing these platforms pretend to champion. A market even more oversaturated with no counterbalance to the advertising spend, lower quality product with no compliance, and visitors who never actually get to know the place they came to experience.

We can keep going around in circles with more funding for another educational program, or we can start telling the truth and facts. The most frustrating thing to watch with all this is how government departments don’t seem to work with one another.

These are questions I have that I would love to discuss and have answered:

If the Tasmanian Health Department launches a 20-year strategy for preventive health that calls out alcohol as a major problem, then why is the Premier, Jeremy Rockcliff, drinking beer on social media on the same day? Surely he has read the preventaive health stragery and we really dont need to wait twleve years to start making changes.

Why is alcohol served at breast cancer fundraisers when it is one of the major causes?

Why is cooking your food from real ingredients (meat and veg) still considered expensive, yet fast food is considered cheap, and recent preventative health conference has nothng on teaching cooking, yet continuing the lie that the packet food industry has told that it’s hard and expensive to get healthy food and cook it, when it is not at all. And that the university qualified nutrition experts are so defensive of the packet food industry.

On the same day we are reading about a domestic violence prevention strategy that identifies alcohol as a major contributor, a whiskey distillery receives government funding.

A domestic violence awareness fundraiser has all-you-can-drink alcohol yet the politician promoting it talks about meaningful action. With the sparkling wine in her hand. Oh, that’s right wine is posh, so not the same thing hey? let’s keep our heads buried deep in the sand on that one, no-one wants to talk badly and honestly about Australia’s favourite (and most destructive) addictive drug.  

A type 2 diabetes commercial is highlighting ultra-processed foods as a major cause — at least they are saying that honestly now, it’s taken 15 years — and a KFC is newly built adjacent to three schools in Hobart.

Why does $20 million for women’s health just mean access to the oral contraceptive pill and not anything actually healthy, like good food, exercise or community? When we now know a significant number of women who start the pill will then go on to antidepressants and have fertility issues — but luckily the Tasmanian government is now helping fund IVF? Fuck me, we couldn’t even make this shit up at this point— it’s insanity.  

Councils and state government wages are continually wasted going around in circles discussing ways to fix short-stay and housing — study after study. Meeting after meeting, just get rid of the multinational corporations Now, it’s only going to get harder. Build a great big Book Tasmania website. There was a 49 million dollars spend on some tech in the government that equated to nothing recently. It’s so frustrating to watch.

Ok this is a big one and a sensitive topic, BUT, a man recently got let off child sex charges relating to pornography, in Hobart. Due to a misdiagnosis of ADHD and the medication he was taking. How come this drug is the FASTEST increasing selling drug in Australia, and we are not having a massive enquiry into NOW after that result in court?? How come there is not a massive investigation into the misdiagnosis? As we all know, the diagnoses are also increasing; 27 per cent of children in schools in some age groups have learning adjustments. If this drug did, in fact, create the bigger problem (OCD), like the judge decided in this case, then how much more of this is going on? Highly doubt it would be an isolated case, and I know of plenty; there are entire support groups now dedicated to psychiatric drug harm. So how would we ever have enough money to fund this, the mental health crisis we now have, if the solution (the medications) is in fact creating more problems (other illnesses)?