Ban all ads that target children

Public health experts are right to bemoan the marketing of junk food to children. But we should not be arguing that marketing is only “bad” when it might make some children fat. All advertising to them, whether unhealthy or healthy, is potentially harmful.

What marketers attempt to do is more than simply sell products to children and teach them (and their parents) to be good little consumers. They saturate children’s everyday lives in increasingly stealthy ways.

They try to reshape young people’s identities, bodies, behaviour, wants, needs, fears, anxieties, desires and lives in ways that align with corporations’ financial interests. I am not “lovin’ it”.

Rather than focusing on increased regulation of unhealthy food marketing, perhaps our children would be better served by removing all advertising to them. Brazil has passed a resolution to make all types of advertising directed at children illegal. The basis? That persuading them to consume any product or service is tantamount to child abuse.

Or we could continue to sit idly by and allow advertisers fairly unfettered access to children, and to continue to try and create uncritical, docile, materialistic, individualistic, conforming consumers . . . as long as they are not fat, right?

Darren Powell, lecturer in health education,

Auckland University. with all its resources, to assemble and assess all possible information before drafting policy? Apparently.

Most other Western countries have foreign ownership registers. By not even trying for data on the foreign ownership of residential property, the Prime Minister can blithely dismiss opposing views and encourage the kind of stupid and pointless arguments based on prejudice and racism that have raged recently. Ignorance fuels anger.

Worse, Justice Minister Amy Adams says that even if the forthcoming law requiring bank deposits and Inland Revenue numbers provides information on foreign ownership, the Government may not make it public, thus depriving us of our democratic right to make informed judgments on its policy.

Gordon McLauchlan, Auckland Central. them was such that shotguns were not allowed.

Stewart Islanders told me that kereru was simply the tastiest meat conceived by nature. I wondered that if the meat tasted so good why they should not be farmed? Surely this could add another string to agricultural diversification; create jobs in the provinces, and provide the means to establish targeted funding to help re-establish kereru in the wild.

Martin Nicholls, Kerikeri.