Education And Sponsorship

Debate resumed from an earlier hour.

The Hon. R. S. L. JONES [5.2]: The former President of the Federation of Parents and Citizens Associations, Mr Graeme Aplin, said that one school in the western suburbs - which I will not name - had so many advertisements plastered about that visitors could not read the name of the school or find their way to the school office. Mr Aplin commented that because of the positioning of some signs people were confused about whether schools were schools or fast food outlets. Honourable members will recall the scandal that erupted over the McDonald's logo appearing in a basic skills test. An article that appeared in the Daily Telegraph Mirror of 21 August 1993 stated:

Parent and teacher groups are outraged a golden McDonald's logo was drawn on to a map in a test sat by almost 60,000 NSW primary school students.

I wonder who on earth organised for McDonald's golden arches to be placed in the skills test. It is subliminal advertising to our young students. Children of such tender years are very vulnerable, they are easily influenced. They have young, open minds and tend to believe what is told to them. If they are told that McDonald's products are good to eat, they will eat them - regrettably - and we chase them along the path of early death, heart disease, and bowel, prostate, breast and other cancers which are caused by eating -

[Interruption]

I wish honourable members would read the literature on this issue; there is so much clear evidence on this matter now. Unfortunately, the New South Wales Cancer Council does not seem to be aware of this - if it is, it is certainly not promoting it. In the United States of America the Pizza Hut company sells pizzas in about 4,000 schools - in some of the larger school canteens it has actually installed pizza cooking equipment. Are we to go down that road too? I am proud of the University of New South Wales, which banned McDonald's from trading on its campus. I am also pleased to know that at the university canteen they sold 6,000 "vegie" burgers in the first few days of their being available. It is the way to go, there is no question.

The Hon. Virginia Chadwick: What is wrong with a "vegie" burger?

The Hon. R. S. L. JONES: Nothing is wrong with "vegie" burgers. A "vegie" burger organisation would at least sell a healthy and ethical product. The big problem is that we are getting tangled up with unethical products and unethical companies. Products such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola are not foods and should not be consumed by schoolchildren.

The Hon. J. F. Ryan: Marijuana is not a food either.

The Hon. R. S. L. JONES: No marijuana marketing company sponsors its product in schools. The products which young people are being asked to buy as a result of sponsorship deals - pizzas, McDonald's, Mars bars, Coca-Cola and Pepsi - are dangerous products to a certain extent. They contain drugs and products that can cause death several years earlier than one would expect otherwise. Honourable members have been informed of an instance when the
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Coca-Cola Company pressured a school in the Marsden district to install a Coca-Cola machine. The parents almost went along with the suggestion but wanted to put health drinks into the machine as well. Coca-Cola said no: it wanted only Coca-Cola in its machine. The parents objected to the installation of the machine because their children would be able to drink only Coca-Cola; that is all they were being offered by the machine. We have to teach our children better values. To encourage children to eat McDonald's, pizzas and Mars bars, and to drink Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola is not to teach them good values. That is going down the American fast food track.

[Interruption]

I am not anti-America, I have a lot of friends in America. I have been to America dozens of times. But I very much oppose large American corporations moving into Australia, Indonesia, Russia and Third World countries. Many years before the war in the region I travelled to Lebanon and visited the Temple of Bacchus, the wine god. In the centre of that magnificent, fallen temple, surrounded by huge pillars, stood an American 7-Up stand. I have seen in remote villages in some Third World countries Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola and 7-Up signs. Such communities do not need these products, they need traditional healthy drinks. Unhealthy drinks are being pushed on to Third World people, who are impressionable and are not used to such forms of marketing.

Similarly, in Australia we are pushing unhealthy products on to our children who are seven, eight, nine, and 10 years old. No one could oppose ethical sponsorship by an ethical corporation which produced ethical products. But that cannot be said for McDonald's, Coca-Cola, or even Pizza Hut. The products they sell are not good products for children.

The Hon. J. F. Ryan: What is your view on Ronald McDonald House? Would you return the money that McDonald's donates for that program?

The Hon. R. S. L. JONES: That is a nice little public relations exercise. The health costs to the community of people eating McDonald's products throughout their lives probably runs into hundreds of millions of dollars - not to mention the environmental cost. McDonald's claims that its beef does not come from recently cleared rainforest, but it does. It may not be rainforest in Australia, but it would be rainforests overseas. I have seen the Amazon being cleared, and as a result of people eating McDonald's, millions of animals are killed.

The Hon. Virginia Chadwick: Are you saying McDonald's trashed the Amazon rainforests?

The Hon. R. S. L. JONES: The Minister is claiming that McDonald's has trashed the Amazon rainforests. I do not know where she got that idea.

The Hon. Virginia Chadwick: You just said so.

The Hon. R. S. L. JONES: I did not say that. An article published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 6 August 1993, written by Peter West, the senior lecturer in education at the University of Western Sydney-Nepean, carried the headline "Hamburglar deal gives our kids a no quarter pounding". The article reads:

The New South Wales Government's tasteless deal with McDonald's for sponsorship, all on a sesame seed bun, of school activities is symptomatic of a wholesale corruption in values underpinning the State education system . . .

Peter West continued:

Children in State schools are thus being told to eat fresh fruit and vegetables, but they are going to be sold a message about eating more fried chips and white-bread patties. The whole deal is as ludicrous as a cigarette manufacturer being allowed to sponsor football.

Dr West said:

State schools should send Ronald McDonald packing: our children deserve better than this shonky deal of hamburgers-for-dollars.

The Government is selling out our children by allowing these companies to sponsor them with tasteless, unhealthy products. I refer honourable members to an article by Adele Horin in the Sydney Morning Herald of 4 August 1993 entitled, "The $3bn target: our kids". In that article she says:

. . . Childhood has become commercialised beyond recognition.

The article, when referring to a consumer kids conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, states:

It is a chance to learn how to "Grab Your Share Of The Multi-Billion Dollar Kids' Market . . .

These brands are living and breathing things to kids, an extension of their personalities. [Time expired.]

The Hon. JAN BURNSWOODS [5.10], in reply: I thank all honourable members who have contributed to the debate on this important topic of education and sponsorship. I express my disappointment with some of the contributions. I return to the matter with which I began: the important issues of principle involved in the debate on sponsorship in public education. Among others I mentioned school funding, the ethics of relationships between schools and business, the role of government education departments, the effect of advertising on young children and, in relation particularly to fast food sponsors, concern with children's health. I started off deliberately by mentioning those principles and issues because I wanted to make it clear that I did not intend to allow the debate to descend to the trivial depths to which, unfortunately, some Government members and Reverend the Hon. F. J. Nile allowed it to descend.

I emphasised that I very much believed that all honourable members would be concerned about the principles I mentioned. I tried to say also, I thought clearly, that I did not want to speak about the traditional methods of sponsorship by local small
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business. I did not criticise that form of sponsorship and went out of my way to speak of the guidelines issued by the Independent Commission Against Corruption and the kinds of rules it suggested in relation to tendering expressions of interest. In other words, I tried to say that this is not a debate - as the Minister for Education, Training and Youth Affairs tried to make it - about mums, lamingtons and local small business. It is a debate about massive commercialisation of our schools and the kind of impact that process might have on schools.

As Government members in particular tended not to deal with those broader issues but went back to a series of trivial issues, I express my disappointment with what they said. The only other point I make in that connection is in regard to the absolute obsession of those members and Reverend the Hon. F. J. Nile with McDonald's, which seems to suggest either an unhealthy craving for some of the additives and chemicals in that kind of fast food or a rather worrying concern to kowtow and toady to that kind of large company. Either way, I am disappointed about what those members offered. I should respond specifically to the remarks of the Minister for Education, Training and Youth Affairs. No wonder she would not let me anticipate what she would say. My little list was absolutely correct. I had written down lamingtons and some of the other things to which she referred. She said almost the same things she has said on other occasions. Unfortunately she was just as unconvincing today as she was on those occasions.

The Minister conspicuously steered clear of the issues of principle I had raised, and she failed to speak about principles such as equity. Instead of talking about equity she spoke about betterment - to use her word. The very point I tried hard to make was that our society has a problem if schools in fundamentally affluent areas with parents who can provide the kind of assistance that is relevant through things such as Coles computers, get more betterments than schools in other areas. I should have hoped that all honourable members would have been concerned about that problem.

I have no comment to make on the sensible contribution made by the Hon. Elisabeth Kirkby. The examples she gave were specific, such as advertisements on fences - a matter to which I had referred in passing. I do not share her views about the Labor Party's attitude to fees, but perhaps I should save that for another debate. I was especially struck by the remarks of the Hon. R. T. M. Bull in relation to the Mars bar uproar earlier this year. He commented that it was a national program that had nothing to do with the Department of School Education or the Government. As if the Minister were fearful that the honourable member had not made the point strongly enough, she went to the length of taking a point of order on you, Madam Acting-President, during your contribution, to make the point again.

What troubled me most about the efforts of the Minister and the Hon. R. T. M. Bull to make that point was that the Chief Executive of the Western Australian Education Department, Mr Greg Black, had taken the opposite point of view on the Mars bar uproar. I should read to the House some of the remarks he made. He said that he would be writing to schools advising them to be cautious about taking on sponsorship arrangements, as had been done in the eastern States where a fast food company was sponsoring school sport. He said he was uneasy about the Mars scheme and, although he did not think it should be banned, he would be advising schools against getting involved. Mr Black basically took the attitude, which I call on the Minister for Education, Training and Youth Affairs to emulate, that these types of schemes rather than being encouraged in our schools should be discouraged.

If the Minister and the Hon. R. T. M. Bull truly think that the Mars bars issue has nothing to do with the department or the Government, I urge them to examine the statements made in Western Australia and think for a moment about their duties and responsibilities as a Minister and Parliamentary Secretary respectively. I shall ignore the other remarks made by the Hon. R. T. M. Bull as to whether I had visited schools. I have probably been in a few hundred more schools than he will ever visit. He should check his facts before he reduces a debate such as this to personalities.

Finally, I refer briefly to the comments made about McDonald's by the Hon. J. F. Ryan. I know he had problems because he did not have his glasses with him. Nevertheless, it was indicative that he spoke only about McDonald's. That reveals the obsession to which I referred earlier. By speaking only about companies and reading out a long list - as the honourable member did at the end of his speech - of companies engaged in sponsorship, he ignored completely the issues of principle I spoke about at the beginning of the debate. I will ignore the comments of Reverend the Hon. F. J. Nile. His obsession with what I think he called left-wing socialist ideology was irrelevant to the debate. If he honestly thinks that children in our schools should be subjected to the kind of influences about which other honourable members have been speaking, I fear for his understanding of what education is really about. I should like to make a couple of brief comments about the real issue in this debate and refer to an article quoted from by the Hon. R. S. L. Jones at the conclusion of his contribution. The article states that budgets and politics have begun dictating value systems in schools instead of vice versa. Honourable members should consider that important point whether or not they agree with it. It states further:

"Justice for all" has become "If you want it, find the money for it". Attempts to spread opportunities, however idealistic or unrealistic, have become "look after yourself".

Dr West in the article raised the following question:

"Where will it all end?". Cigarette manufacturers sponsoring track and field? Steroid manufacturers sponsoring bodybuilding competitions?

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The other issue raised under the heading of "Where will it all end?" was beer manufacturers sponsoring the high school dance. I assume that a couple of months ago all honourable members received a booklet entitled "Home safely", which was published by the Distilled Spirits Industry Council of Australia Incorporated and other industry bodies. Reverend the Hon. F. J. Nile would be concerned about that. I should like to refer to a passage towards the end of the booklet under the heading "Education Kit", which states:

A multi media educational kit will be offered free of charge to secondary schools throughout Australia.

That is so generous of them. [Time expired.]

Discussion of matter of public interest concluded.