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.