The outdoor advertising industry is stepping up its fight against the Queensland government's plans to ban junk food advertising on its billboards, concerned that the policy could be adopted by Labor Party-controlled governments in Victoria, Western Australia, the ACT and Northern Territory.
"It's a Labor Government in Queensland - if it goes through potentially the other Labor states will as well," said Steve O'Connor, chief executive of JCDecaux Australia and chairman of peak industry body, the Outdoor Media Association (OMA).
The ACT government banned junk food ads on government buses in 2015. The Cancer Council NSW has urged the state government to remove junk food ads from state-owned property, citing figures showing that 21 per cent or 247,000 children in NSW are overweight or obese.
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Steve O'Connor, JCDecaux Australia
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"It's really very frustrating,” O’Connor told Nine’s Sydney Morning Herald. “We're low hanging fruit, we're targeted first ... It's just a quick win. I'm all for healthy eating, don't get me wrong, especially for kids. We're all for having sensible restrictions on advertising.
“It depends on how restrictive they make it. The problem is that it's a very hard category to regulate because what's unhealthy - trans fats, high sugar - depends on what ingredients you put in it and that's going to be quite tricky.”
O’Connor suggested a ban on junk food advertising within a 150 metre sight line of a school - similar to existing restrictions on alcohol ads - could be a solution.
"We've been doing that for years,” he said. “It works really well, we don't get any complaints about it. We will take a hit on the revenue but we think it's a sensible, sustainable and fair way for us to be treated.”
OMA CEO Charmaine Moldrich said the restrictions on junk food ads would cut about $34 million of annual Queensland Government revenue from Out of Home (OOH) advertising and threaten the job security of those employed in OOH and the food and grocery industries.
“Simply removing one type of ad won’t improve the health of Queenslanders,” Moldrich said. “At 6% of the total advertising market, a ban targeting Out of Home advertising only is likely to see advertising dollars shift to other channels rather than disappear altogether.”
O'Connor was concerned the restrictions would see advertising money moving away from local billboard businesses and towards US-based digital giants like Facebook, who do not face the same restrictions. "They don't pay tax, we do,” he said.
Queensland Health Minister Steven Miles has announced that “unhealthy marketing” will be phased out of more than 2000 government-owned or leased outdoor advertising spaces, including billboards, bus stops, train stations and road corridors. “Junk food advertisers target kids, we know that, and obesity in childhood is a leading indicator of obesity in adulthood,” Miles said.
Two-thirds of all Australian adults and about a quarter of children are overweight or obese, according to latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
