The Royal Australasian College of Physicians was in the news this week with the release of its pre-election statement outlining what it thought should be on the policy agenda for the incoming government. There were some quite excellent suggestions in the document about preventative health and financial levers for improving chronic disease management and the obesity crisis, as well as a few long shots that have no chance of getting up.

Ideas like a tax on sugary drinks and volumetric taxation for alcohol are extremely unpalatable to the two major parties and would incite enormous rounds of pearl clutching from the anti-nanny state types, the very people who were responsible for encouraging the abolition of the Australian National Preventative Health Agency in 2014, which the RACP now wants re-established.