A week ago, just before the blog went off air, I was part of the expert panel at a community consensus conference on the topic “Should there be a tax on fatty foods”. This was organised by students at the UQ School of Journalism and was largely about exploring the process, though there was also plenty of interest in the substantive question. It was very professionally organised with its own website, video and news coverage.
The setup for these exercises is that members of the public with an interest in the question get together with a panel of experts to explore the issues, and try to reach a resolution that will hopefully be both well informed and more likely to gain public acceptance than simple reliance on expert judgement. I am sympathetic to the idea, but somewhat sceptical, in the light of experiences like the Constitutional Convention on the Republic (also mentioned by Kate Carnell, former ACT Chief Minister and now CEO of the Australian Food and Grocery Council who was on the panel). It seems to me that the experts ability to persuade the public participants in a process like this does not necessarily translate into an ability to gain broad public acceptance.
As it turned out, the majority of the public “jury” were sympathetic to the idea of a tax on fatty foods at the outset. Opinion among the experts, on the other hand, ranged from dubious to firmly opposed. Not surprisingly, this swayed the majority of the public participants. There was some interesting discussion of alternatives, but the concise nature of the process tried here (one half-day, as opposed to the multiple weekends adopted in other implementations) didn’t really allow for a full-scale alternative policy.
John Quiggin 