The Packaged War - Part 2: Someone Think of the Children

With its plans to undermine the tobacco companies' leverage of branded packaging well underway, the government has been greatly encouraged to pursue new avenues; where the superior intellectual and moral mettle of parliament can serve to remove further temptations from the landscape of excess, pervasive in a free society. Where many have expected the next target to be alcohol or fast food, the government has instead chosen DVDs, video games and other products of home entertainment to be the next commercial product to which it will legislate mandatory plain packaging.


DVDs have exploded in popularity over the last decade and begun to normalise the behaviour of watching films in the home. Removing film-watching from the context of a social activity has degenerated the wholesomeness of cinema-going and condensed its audiences into reclusive enclaves whom are more likely to remain sedentary at home rather than engage with the outside world for their entertainment. From this, the government has deemed it necessary to educate the public of the implied social, cultural and health effects of excessive consumption of home video. 

The key to ensuring the success of such regulation, is to comprehensively convince the population of a product's ill-effects on the vulnerable; children are the quintessential proxies for projecting all worst-case scenarios. By incorporating such negatives into the conventional wisdom of the populace, a government can convince people that in limiting the choices of adults, they are protecting the wellbeing of children. From there its a mere extension of reasoning that products that are bad for children are also bad for adults, and should thusly be extracted from the palette of acceptable choices. With ingenius foresight, governments the world over have spent decades acclimatising us to assess the suitability of films by arbitrary ages with rather flimsy justifications. It is from this entrenched system that the government will finally be able to pull the reins on the insidious marketing arms of the home entertainment industry.

The Packaged War - Part 1 On to the Next Step...

With largely bipartisan support from both sides of the parliament and surveys concluding an overwhelming public support, the government's plain packaging policy is well on its way to pioneering a new front in the war against tobacco, and beyond. 

Too long have we allowed people to be willing victims of insidious branding and Orwellian marketing which take the malleable minds of the weak-willed and dilute them into mindless consumption machines, ordained to make the wrong lifestyle choices. 

To our fortune however, the White Knight of the people, the government, has taken up the mantle against the amoral corporations that pull the strings, so that - without irony - they can reclaim our free will for us. We have the luxury to be nonchalant as we, the marionettes, dangle and convulse sporadically beneath them in their tussle, losing nothing more than a few trifling shards of our freedoms. We can rest assured that the government is, after all, acting in our best interests.

What critics might call an untested and conjectural policy, is attributed by a far greater number as a pioneering world-first strategy that strikes at the heart of the ills of our social and physical health. The broad community has demonstrated in its support for this measure that the principal of personal choice cannot trump the greater social good, which is burdened by the selfish choices of individuals; choices motivated evidentially by packaging. Spurred on, the government now looks to the next agressor towards the serfs in its charge; a shadowy looming menace that has, for years, circled the fringes of our culture; a purveyor of the most insidious branding and garish packaging that must be reigned in, to protect the credulous amongst us. The government is now to move against the film industry...


In part 2, I will exclusively reveal the top-secret details of the government's bold plan to protect the Australian people from the proven health and societal dangers of the products of the film industry.

Design by Bureaucracy

As a person with a strong Libertarian inclination, I found myself recently considering the impact of Government interference in my own industry of work. Perhaps despite my better judgement, I'm going to have a crack at a socio-political discussion about Design - could anything be more cringe-worthy?

What set me on this particular train of thought was a talk-back discussion regarding a cigarette company that was seeking compensation from the Australian Government for the claim that the mandatory on-pack health warnings had affected their branding and subsequent sales. There are understandable intentions on both sides of this story, but like many similar stories that have circulated over recent years, I am convinced that the Government is in the wrong.

As introduced, I have a strong Libertarian inclination, that is, my opinion is that the role of Governments in society should be strictly limited from infringing on individual freedom. They of course have a role to play in law, justice, defence, diplomacy, health, infrastructure and education and resultantly their influences do bleed into people's lives through such provisions. However, it seems that Governments can easily over-step their bounds when they begin to interfere in people's choices.

Now, before this becomes an unwieldily broad topic, I am going to bring this back to the cigarette packaging. The intention of the Government with mandatory health warnings is to advise consumers of the known health risks of smoking and as noble as it may be, it's my opinion that the Government has not only infringed on the cigarette branding but also the work of Designers. And now busy-body bureaucrats are moving forward with laws dictating that cigarettes should only be sold in plain packaging, akin to less than a 'No Frills' branding. In effect, this would decimate any local Design studio that serviced the tobacco industry. That this was even proposed raises serious concerns about the arbitrary way the Government can affect the work of Designers. 

I know nothing about Design for tobacco so any further comment would clearly be speculation, but I would like to take these concerns and transplant them to an area of Design more familiar to me. In my own niche of the Entertainment Industry, there has been considerable Government interference which has directly affected the practice of Graphic Design. The greatest area of Government influence has been in their policies on the ratings classification of films. In around 2005 the OFLC revamped the classification system, not in any substantial way, but in a rather garish 'rebranding' - it is the same letter-based rating system, with the same points of consumer advice. Unlike the old ratings however, the new ratings device makes no concessions to integrate into the artwork it accompanies. Sitting there, in it's intrusive bureaucratic fashion, the large white device ensures that the Government's rating is the primary feature of the artwork. 

My Libertarian sympathies are greatly offended by the fact that my profession - to make the most effective artwork for DVD packaging - is impinged by the Government deciding that consumers in a free market need to be overtly educated on what content is appropriate based on whatever arbitrary age/maturity group they want to divide us into.

My Design sensibilities are also offended, mainly by the visual ugliness of this Government intrusion. Perhaps it's a lack of budget to alter the artwork, or perhaps truly no one gives a shit, but the horrible ratings device is usually slapped on in it's mandated position - like the intrusive bureaucratic fingerprint it is - with no thought to the composition of the keyart or what might be covered.

What's worse is the notion put forward that R18 rated films should be only displayed in plain packaging, not unlike with the cigarettes that got me started on this topic. No! No! No! No!!!

DVDs from the US are classified in their own system, however it is displayed on the back of the sleeve, given equal weighting to the rest of the important information about the content of the disc (running time, audio formats, aspect ratio). This is how Australia should label it's film classification, the Government does not need to step in for the Entertainment Industry to ensure films are skewed to the correct audiences, there are people employed by the film companies to do that very thing - it's called marketing. 

As a Designer my function is essentially as a branch of marketing; to visually convey a film in a way that corresponds with the desired direction chosen by the marketers. There are subtle ways in which tone, colour and composition can inform a consumer if a film is right for them, ways which are much more effective than a colour-coded categorization. The Government should not be in the business of marketing because, unimpinged, we professionals will do it better every time.