We’re calling on the next Australian Government to take sustained steps to ensure fewer people get sick, including acting on obesity. Find out more on PHAA’s 2025 Election Priorities site.
This is part of an ongoing series explaining our 2025 Federal Election asks. Read the other articles in the series here.
Malcolm Baalman
Australia’s biggest killer is now simply what we eat and drink. Major food and drink retailers won’t stop or change, because they’ve made the ‘obesogenic environment’ very profitable.
In 2024, the decades-long reign of tobacco as the factor causing the most sickness and death to Australians came to an end. It was overtaken by overweight and obesity.
Just as has always happened with nicotine-based products, unhealthy food and drink industries pursue easy profits by willfully creating an environment where unhealthy food seems easier and less expensive, as well as often being addictive.
In our daily lives, it’s hard to notice that the likely outcome – preventable disease – is more damaging to us long-term, as well as far more expensive.
Major unhealthy food and drink categories include ultra-processed food, products with far more calories than our bodies need, products with needlessly added sugar (to addict people), and food with dangerously high levels of salt.
Manufacturing and supply of products is massively propelled by advertising, with children often the targets, so that lifetime consumer habits are formed.
The data came through late last year, in the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s biennial Australian Burden of Disease Study report. The AIHW is a specialist ‘bureau of statistics’ for health topics. Their data goes back decades, and their analysis is detailed and consistent.
In 2024, as protective measures kept driving down the mortality and sickness impact of tobacco, overweight/obesity took the lead as our nation’s ‘leading risk factor’, and it is unlikely to lose that deadly lead for the foreseeable future.
A separate category of specific dietary risks takes up a distant third place, emphasising the massively important role of diet in determining our health and our lifespans.
Getting our health back is no easy matter, and individuals cannot hope to do it alone.
The ‘personal responsibility’ narrative, created by unhealthy industries, fails to acknowledge the myriad ways our environment influences our food choices – in which advertising, availability, price, and addictive content are used to train us into profitable but unhealthy habits.
Bringing us back to health must involve efforts to change these shaping forces.
We, and our governments, are not helpless. There is lots we can do.
We need to stop the problem at its start – when producer sectors advertise heavily, targeting children with messages to take up unhealthy food and drinks. Unhealthy advertising to kids must stop as soon as possible.
We need regulatory constraints, especially on food and drink products for infants, who don’t make their own consumption decisions.
We need to change the composition of unhealthy foods using price incentives, including levies on the needless addition of sugar to food and drink products.
We need much better information, through clear and effective labelling on products about energy, calories, sugar, salt and other health-affecting contents.
And we need effective health-focused campaigns, promoting good diets and helping shift food choices away from unhealthy products and towards healthy eating.
This needs to be done positively, rather than through negative messages that have a counter-productive effect of shaming people and making them reluctant to embrace change.
Our governments and health agencies know what to do. Cross-government, multi-partisan strategies already exist in Australia, setting out evidence-based ideas and options.
There’s a National Obesity Strategy and a National Preventive Health Strategy, both full of evidence-based directions and plans. But governments don’t deliver on them.
A new National Nutrition Strategy would also help – if governments can show their commitment to deliver on it.
Governments, parliaments, and political parties also need to deal with their own addiction – to industry lobbyists, donations, and influence campaigns. Strong rules and transparency systems would help break the lobbying cycle in politics.
Australia’s public health community is vigorously pursuing all these issues.
The Public Health Association of Australia launched its Election Priorities for 2025 campaign in January, and will be pressing all contesting parties and candidates to make Australia healthier, through reforms that fight against the biggest threat to Australian lives.
Malcolm Baalman is PHAA’s Policy and Advocacy Manager.
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