Queensland’s victory over NSW in the 1 June game lin 2016 was reported as the highest rating State of Origin match ever and ‘the top TV event of 2016.’ Both teams carried alcohol advertising on their clothing into the match. The association of alcohol with sport is deep, complex and profitable. Sport provides a lucrative vehicle for advertising and in turn many codes have come to depend heavily on the support of alcohol sponsors. The relationship is one of co-dependency.
The physical and mental damage from alcohol has led public health campaigners to advocate for alternatives to alcohol sponsorship and advertising. In 2012, supported by $12m generated by the Alcopops tax, 12 sporting organisations including soccer, swimming and cycling ‘signed the pledge’ to reject alcohol sponsorship. Big football and cricket codes did not. The then president of the AMA, Dr Steve Hambleton, foresaw the day when alcohol sponsorship of sport would cease. That day is yet to dawn.
Why the fuss?
First, the purpose of commercial advertising is to increase the sale of the advertised product. By their own metrics advertisers judge that the exposure of their product at major sporting events is good business. If it were otherwise why would they do it? In the run-up to the State of Origin match Mr Tim Reardon of the Brewers Association of ANZ stated that the investment in sponsorship related to influencing brand preference and that it would have very little effect on consumption. Such advertising was in any case highly regulated.
But we have been down this path before when the tobacco companies argued that their advertising was designed only to influence brand preference. In fact, curtailment of tobacco advertising was a component of tobacco control measures that effectively reduced consumption.
Alcohol is the elephant under Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak when it comes to health in Australia. It is often left off the list of public health hazards about which we should take action. We have been systematic, belligerent and effective (well, relatively so) in combating tobacco, including ridding sport of tobacco advertising and sponsorship. But not alcohol. It remains safely out of sight.
Yet by any calculation the destructive health effects of alcohol are vast and pervasive. There are about 6,000 deaths and 125,000 hospital admissions each year due directly to alcohol. But in moderation it remains a revered and widely enjoyed commodity. Even if we incline to the view that a little is a good thing (and the epidemiological support for this notion grows weaker each day) it is difficult to sustain an argument for more advertising and hence yet more consumption and embedding of alcohol in the fabric of our society.
Second, professional opinion is behind bans on alcohol sponsorship of sport, as is the community. The Royal Australasian College of Physicians’ then president, Professor Nick Talley, reported in March this year a community survey on alcohol and sport. It showed that about 60% of the sampled NSW residents were worried about alcohol sponsorship of cricket and Rugby League where alcohol ‘features in sponsorship, naming rights, clothing branding, press conference backups and TV advertisements.’ NSW premier Mike Baird was reported as saying, ‘I find it quite incredible…[that] the captain of our cricket team sits there with a big VB on the middle.’
Third, and more broadly, alcohol raises questions about the kind of society we wish for ourselves. Alcohol, because it is integrated with so many aspects of our society, qualifies as a ‘social determinant of health’ alongside air and water quality, socioeconomic status, educational attainment, employment and food supply. All these variables, turned up or down in volume, affect our health and life expectancy. None is entirely under the control of the individual.
What do we wish to define as an acceptable level of alcohol consumption in our society? Given the dangers associated with it, to what extent do we wish to encourage its use?
A recent hard-hitting document from the St Vincent’s hospitals set the goal of reducing alcohol-related illness and injury by 25% by 2025. This could be achieved, the report suggests, by a combination of lockout laws, health warnings on alcohol, no more alcohol advertising on free-to-air TV coverage of sports and an end to alcohol sponsorship of sport and music.
A big problem with alcohol consumption is that it readily develops an addictive momentum that rides over individual intention and responsibility. It is the seduction of advertising to use the relief and joy that consumption of alcohol enables to blot out its cost and destruction. A caring society is one that applies reasonable restraint and education to protect its citizens from such hazards. This is scoffed at and derided as a manifestation of a nanny state: personally, I find that nannies do much good and little harm, so this sexist epithet backfires.
Permitting the alcohol industry to exploit the brilliance, excitement and delight of sport to advertise its products of destruction is inconsistent with social responsibility.
Stephen Leeder is Emeritus Professor of Public Health and Community Medicine, Menzies Centre for Health Policy and School of Public Health, University of Sydney.
Stephen Leeder is an Emeritus Professor of public health and community medicine at the University of Sydney. Steve has 45 years of experience in epidemiological research, medical education reform and in mentoring young investigators and is currently Co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Epidemiology. He held the position of Chair of the Western Sydney Local Health District Board from 2011 until 2016 and was Editor-in-Chief of the Medical Journal of Australia from January 2013 until April 2015.
Comments
2 responses to “STEPHEN LEEDER. Alcohol and sport. A REPOST”
Some years ago, I wrote a ‘not-for-publication’ letter to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. I pointed out the hypocrisy of their reporting (awash in crocodile tears) on the numbers of road deaths and injuries and other accidents and malicious injuries caused by alcohol-affected people, while the Herald carried full-page advertisements from the discount retailers of alcoholic beverages.
I did receive a reply. It pointed out the Herald’s financial dependence – with the migration of classified ads to the Internet – on those advertisements, and commented that the price of the paper would need to double or treble if they ceased carrying them.
Today (Tuesday 9 January) I phoned the Department of Communications in Canberra because I was appalled by the density of the advertising of alcohol and betting on the Channel 9 coverage of the cricket test matches. I wanted to discuss this — as a policy question — with a relevant officer of the Department.The receptionist was seriously mis-informed. She told me that this wasn’t a matter for the Department at all (despite my protest that the Department is, after the Parliament, the government’s senior policy agency in matters of communications and Not so, was her reply as she transferred me to ACMA, which is the “policing” authority, she assured me. The Department needs to educate its staff better when they have to respond to the public.
The person who answered at ACMA (after a menu which informed me that it is an “independent statutory” which acts for the protection of the public: There’s little chance of that lofty ideal being given much effect) was obdurate in the extreme. “We don’t deal with the public,” he said, as he refused to put my call through to a relevant officer with whom i could discuss or debate the issue. When I reminded that I, as a taxpayer, contribute to the funds which pay his and his confreres’ salaries and duly asked to speak to the PA of the CEO, he again repeated that guff adding that if I wanted to achieve anything substantive, I should contact my local member of Parliament but that, emphatically he’d do no more that the robotic repetition of the mantra that they don’t deal with the public. What I wonder can the justification of the existence of ACMA possibly be?
Eventually I learned from the office my my MHR that, indeed new legislation will take effect on 1 March and that will drastically limit the screening of betting and gaming advertisements. [That is all very well and the companies and the channel were doubtless engaging in an eleventh-hour advertising binge — with utterly no concern for the welfare it the viewers of the society.] The parliamentarian’s staff y could tell me nothing at all about alcohol advertising — which is abundant for hours at a time while children are watching the sport (a fact which is reinforced by the number of commercials which feature children, doubtless to make it all seem wholesome and family-friendly when the truth is the exact opposite.
Severe limits need to be imposed on the advertising of alcohol on television and nobody should be bluffed by the fatuous argument that it’s a legally-available product (the same pernicious lie used to be repeated about the advertising of tobacco products). The truth is that alcohol may NOT be legally sold to minors and they should not be exposed to its advertising. The social and health costs are far too high.
John CARMODY.