With massive public displays of fireworks set for New Year’s eve tonight, the accidental Senator David Leyonhjelm has recently called for the abolition of the ban on personal purchasing of fireworks throughout…
Decision-making about access is about ensuring a minimally acceptable environment for any child to be raised in.
Hernán Piñera/Flickr
Should people who need subsidised medical assistance to conceive have to show the state they will be good parents? These ethicists think they do.
Since fertility isn’t linked to one’s calibre as a parent, the state can only be justified in placing conditions on all prospective parents, regardless of fertility status.
PROBunches and Bits {Karina}/Flickr
Should people who need subsidised medical assistance to conceive have to show the state they will be good parents? This ethicist argues such checks are discriminatory.
David Leyonhjelm is chairing the Senate inquiry into ‘Personal Choice and Community Impacts’.
AAP/Sam Mooy
We don’t know what will come out of the Senate inquiry into the ‘nanny state’, but we do have some idea about what Australia would look like based on libertarian principles.
The “right to parent” according to one’s own values and proclivities isn’t actually unfettered.
photon_de/Flickr
A Family Court “order” for parents of a child to not smoke around him and to limit their alcohol consumption while caring for him have invited the same old accusations about the “nanny state”.
Libertarians, such as David Leyonhjelm, refuse to see anything but individual liberty as having decisive moral weight.
AAP/Lukas Coch
David Leyonhjelm is a conviction politician whose positions are governed by principle, not populism. But he is exposing the disturbing moral thinness of the libertarian principles he espouses.
Libertarians have a deeply atomising picture about communities, states, even about what it is to be human.
Ars Electronica/Flickr
David Leyonhjelm’s parliamentary inquiry into what he calls “the nanny state” reflects a view of human beings as essentially independent individuals. But that’s not kind of society most of us want.
A few months ago I attended a debate at the Barbican in London on the pros and cons of international aid and the debate veered into one of individual autonomy and the problems caused by state intervention…
Our changing food environment has undermined our capacity to be responsible in the first place.
Shutterstock
In 1980 just 10% of Australian adults were obese; by 2012 this figure had risen to 25%, among the highest in the world. The food industry lobby and their friends in government would have us believe this…
The prevalence of obesity in Australia hasn’t tripled in the last 30 years because we’ve all lost personal responsibility.
Flickr/confidence, comely.
Almost two thirds of Australians are now overweight or obese. In fact, obesity and unhealthy diets now contribute to more disease and illness in Australia than smoking. This makes finding solutions to…
Food labelling has been a central plank of the food regulatory system since it first emerged in the mid-1800s.
Marcos Pozo López/Flickr
Coalition MP Ewen Jones has spoken out against reinstating the health star rating website controversially closed down by the assistant health minister. Jones says the government shouldn’t interfere with…
If you treat smoking as a purely personal choice you’re not giving enough weight to the impact of dying young.
stolenscript/Flickr
A few years ago I saw a poster stuck to the wall of a train station in Copenhagen. The poster was a protest paid for by a prominent Danish musician against new regulations against smoking in public. At…
If saving lives is the goal, a ban on tobacco looms large to anyone who cares to look.
David Hegarty
The Federal government’s High Court win on cigarette plain packaging is another sign that the carcinogenic mist is dispersing to finally reveal the smoking elephant in our collective lounge room. The pachyderm…
The multi-country study concluded that in Australia, television advertising’s contribution to childhood obesity is between 10% and 28%.
Maggie Osterberg
A recent complaint to the Advertising Standards Board by the Obesity Policy Coalition about a Smarties online colouring-in competition aimed at three- to ten-year-olds, and a bill introduced by Greens…
Lack of discussion of alcohol’s harm to others contributes to how little it is regulated.
AAP
A coalition of representatives from leading national health bodies are briefing parliamentarians today, calling for alcohol pricing to be placed on the agenda of the upcoming Federal Tax Forum in October…
Academic Director/ Clinical Ethicist, Children’s Bioethics Centre at the Royal Children’s Hospital, and Associate Professor in Health Ethics at the Centre for Health and Society, The University of Melbourne