This opinion piece first appeared in the Sunday Age on 22 March 2009.

A better deal for the health of Australians has been sacrificed in favour of the spirits industry and alcopops – cheaper, high sugar soft drinks loaded with alcohol and popular with kids. How on earth is this a good outcome?

Cheap alcopops will deliver a hangover for young drinkers but the lessons may be more serious for the rest of Australia as it grapples to come to terms with an enormous and expensive disease burden.

Preventable cancer, heart disease, poor mental health and diabetes ensure there will be many more challenges for Australia’s leaders in our efforts to improve Australia’s health, but are we up for the challenge?

Put together, smoking, obesity, harmful use of alcohol, physical inactivity, poor diet and the associated risk factors of high blood pressure and high blood cholesterol cause approximately 32 percent of Australia’s illness.

Overweight and obesity in Australia has been steadily increasing over the past 30 years –  in only 15 years, from 1990 to 2005, the number of overweight and obese Australian adults increased by a shocking 2.8 million.

If the current trends continue over the next 20 years, it is estimated that nearly three-quarters of the Australian population will be overweight or obese in 2025.

The picture isn’t much prettier when it comes to alcohol harms. Young people are drinking at increasingly risky levels – among young adults aged 20–29 years, the prevalence of drinking at levels for long-term risk of harm is significantly higher than among other age groups.

The damage goes beyond drinkers - alcohol is involved in 62 percent of all police attendances, 73 percent of assaults, 77 percent of street offences, 40 percent of domestic violence incidents and 90 percent of late-night calls.

While the alcohol industry takes the profits, we all share the costs of alcohol, including crime ($1.6 billion), health ($1.9 billion), loss of productivity in the workplace ($3.5 billion), loss of productivity in the home ($1.5 billion) and road trauma ($2.2 billion).

Given recent events and the enormous health challenges we face, the question now arises: are our attempts to create a healthier society doomed to fail?

Australia’s kids are infinitely more likely to see an advertisement for booze or junk food than they are an ad for water or vegetables. We need better labeling on alcohol and food products, to give consumers -particularly parents - better, easier to understand labeling on the fat, sugar and salt content on foods and credible health information.

However taking on these challenges will mean standing up to the alcohol and junk food industries and their advertisers, who so far seem to be taking the line of the tobacco industry in opposing such reforms.

Extremely low levels of tax on cask wine, even lower than for light beer, makes it the preferred choice of many with severe alcohol dependencies, but if we won’t protect our kids from super cheap alcopops, will we ever act to shut down this inequitable loophole on cask wine?

After the alcopops disappointment, it’s hard not to be despondent about our capacity and willingness to address the other health challenges we face and yet, when health triumphs over politics, the outcomes can be spectacular.

We witnessed visionary leadership by Victoria’s political leaders in 1987 when they endorsed the bold strategy to kick tobacco out of sport, ban tobacco advertising, tax tobacco and use the proceeds to create a foundation (VicHealth) dedicated to improving the health of Victorians. The proposal was championed by then Labor Health Minister David White but crucially, it enjoyed the support of Liberal and National Party MPs who ultimately decided health was paramount.

The leadership of the Coalition parties was significant: then Liberal leader Jeff Kennett had ties with the advertising industry, but despite the bans on tobacco advertising, the Liberals supported the package. The Nationals represented many tobacco growing regions in Victoria that would be affected if the anti-tobacco package worked, but they too put the health interests of Victorians first and also supported the bold move.

That non-partisan approach to tobacco has continued to the current day.

In the last 10 years Victorians have enjoyed bans on smoking in restaurants, bars and shopping centres, welcomed the banning of tobacco advertisements in milk bars, banned smoking in cars when kids are present and ended the ‘power walls’ of tobacco displays in shops. All of these reforms were unanimously supported by Victoria’s Members of Parliament – Labor, Liberal, National, Independents alike, who stood up for the health of their communities.

We’ve seen in Victoria the health benefits gained when politics is set aside.

If we are to truly tackle the rising tide of chronic disease facing this country, we need our MPs to be partisan to health, not politics because the failure of the “alcopops” bill has shown that political division is poison for better health outcomes.
I don’t know who won the politics of the alcopops fight this week but there is no doubt that cheaper alcohol products that are popular with kids, is a loss for health.

We must use these lessons to inspire a better outcome in the future for health because the past week is a poignant reminder that kicking politics out of health is perhaps the best health promotion strategy of all.