Fat Accompli

The National Health and Medical Research Council claimed recently that within 10 years 83 per cent of Australian men and 75 per cent of Australian women will be obese.

Further, according to the NHMRC, obesity now costs Australia $21 billion a year and has overtaken smoking as the greatest risk factor for causing injury and disease.

Naturally, there were the usual immediate calls by the Ideologically Hidebound With No Sense of Humour Party – otherwise known as The Greens - for a “fat tax” to be levied, primarily on fast food companies.

It is a given that the Greens are motivated, not by a desire to address the issue at hand, but by a pathological hatred of corporations that dare to actually market and sell a legal product well enough to make a profit, so anything they have to say on the subject can be safely ignored.

What motivates others to mimic the insanity of Milne’s Moonbats is more problematic.

Apparently it is a totally non-political, non-partisan, non-ideologically motivated desire to defend the rights of society’s poor.

There is, apparently, a direct socio-economic correlation between income and lardarserry, in so far as rich people are skinny and poor people are fat.

This is because rich people can afford to eat better, while poor people, being poor, are forced to spend hundreds of dollars a week – more than rich skinny people do on healthy food - on junk food.

There is a flaw in this argument that I can’t quite put my finger on, but I’ll let it slide for the moment and come back to it later if I figure it out.

Of more importance, I am in complete agreement with the fat tax lobby, but differ somewhat on where and on whom it should be levied.

A fat tax should, in my opinion, be just that. A tax on fat people. That there is an urgent need for this is indisputable. As an example of the harm that fat people are doing to society, let us look at the airline industry.

If memory serves, RyanAir tried to go down this road a few years ago when it proposed charging fatties more for airline tickets on the basis that fat people weighed more than skinny people and were therefore more expensive to carry.

Although this premise seemed an irrefutable fact, the plan was dropped after a chorus of protests from an assortment of fat people and ’socially progressive’ types masquerading as citizen’s rights groups, play-lunch left political parties and manufacturers of sugar-filled edibles.

The primary argument of the naysayers was that it would be impossible to implement the policy without forcing people to reveal their weight when booking a ticket or lumbering onto a scale at the check-in counter.

Both of these options would cause said fatties untold humiliation and emotional harm.

Whilst ideologically sound, this argument assumed that the rest of us wouldn’t realise that the oompaloompa wearing the re-badged three-man tent was a fatso unless a scale provided us with the empirical evidence.

As somebody who, in a previous life, was obliged to fly often, I can attest that there was nothing more emotionally harming than being told that the penalty for exceeding the excess baggage limit by 300 grams was more than I earned in a month, while the mobile rotunda behind me weighing the equivalent of a small lead mine – but carrying only one suitcase full of cream doughnuts - was waved on through.

None of this, of course, addresses the emotional harm caused to me by having to share half my seat with some sweating behemoth.

Tax the fat bastards, I say. A $20/kilo for every kilo above an officially designated ideal weight would slash hundreds of dollars off ticket prices.

If they are fair dinkum about supporting the global warming scam, Milne’s Mung-bean Munchers should be all over this like a rash because - using the NBN cost analysis method - my back-of-the-envelope calculation reveals that the exclusion of 10 fatties from every short haul flight within Australia would save 197.2 tonnes of aviation fuel.

Further, banning all tubs of lard from flying would reduce global carbon emissions by 1,397 per cent, solving the non existent global warming problem in a stroke. If the Greens can’t support that, well, they aren’t worth the recycled toilet paper their policies are written on.

If just one initiative can solve hypothetical global warming, how much benefit could be derived from a few more minor adjustments?

I believe that a further six steps would solve the ‘obesity crisis’:

I: A 10km vehicle exclusion zone around all fast food outlets. If they want to shove burgers, fries and pizzas in their gobs, let them earn it.

2: Weighbridges, equipped with alarms, at all food retailers to alert staff to a lurking fatty. Any customer triggering an alarm would face an automatic fine of $1000 for every kilo above a mandated weight limit.

3: Deny fatties access to television, radio, internet, magazines and newspapers. According to Milne’s Mendacious Morons, fat people are unable to resist the mesmerizing effects of advertising. If they are so mentally defective that they can’t resist advertising, don’t let them see it.

4: Display graphic pictures of fat people on packaging of sugar/carbohydrate rich foods. Smokers have to put up with it, so why not the fatties? Pictures of naked fat people attempting to have sex, finding two-week old slices of pizza in their tummy rolls etc, would be appropriate.

5: As being a disgusting fatso is now a greater cost on the public purse than smoking, fat people to be banned from eating in pubs, clubs, retail outlets, alfresco dining areas, sporting venues, schools and all Federal and State Government buildings. Fat people should also be fined if caught eating in cars when children are present.

6: Obese people to be forced to learn that obesity is a lifestyle choice, freely made. You CHOOSE to be fat, why should I pay for it?