chrisgregory.com

Here’s something I wrote for magazine publication a few months ago which, for various reasons, didn’t happen. But with the posties striking over the next couple of days, I guess this might help explain why they’re doing it:

My dog, Luffy, barks at posties. He hears the motor of the little Honda motorbike approaching, or the sporadic squeal of the Honda’s disc brakes, and runs out to the front fence and barks crazily, in little triplets. Luffy is a chihuahua poodle cross, so he couldn’t scare anyone. But the postie stops and then rides on, and Luffy seems convinced that he scared the postie away.

If I see a postie in neutral territory, I’ll approach them and say hello, and maybe hold Luffy up to be patted. I hope I’ll convince the dog that posties don’t represent a threat. I’m telling you all this, just so that you know I have no special interest in postie welfare, but that I tend to notice them about. I’ve never been a postie but I can recognise that the job involves a fair amount of repetitive physical labour. Posties always seem to have tanned and muscled calves, at least on the leg that I see when they ride past. The gear they wear looks heavy and uncomfortable, and the bikes never get to go fast enough to generate much of a cooling breeze, so in summer they must feel like they’re doing step aerobics in a sauna. They start at six in the morning and often work until past four. And dogs bark at them. A lazy person is not going to become a postie. A lazy person is going to aim for a desk job.

There is a noted phenomena by which a person will see a fault in others as being the result of laziness or incompetence, whereas when they display the same fault themselves it is seen as the result of external forces or unfortunate circumstances. News that Australia Post was planning to make posties who weigh more than a hundred kilograms lose weight or be reassigned really brought out the bigots, with headlines like ‘Post Aporkalypse‘ and the Herald Sun claiming that their excess weight was slowing mail delivery. Rather than get bigger bikes (which would seem the sensible solution), Australia Post plans to force bigger posties to diet to fit the bike’s weight limit.

The basic facts and figures: Australia is the only country that uses motorised postie bikes. It’s a large continent with a relatively sparse population. Even our major cities are huge sprawls, so the bikes were introduced to make the mail delivery more efficient and to make the job more pleasant. The 110cc Honda bikes that posties currently ride were originally rated to carry 130 kilograms. That broke down to 40 kilograms of mail and, at best, a 90 kilogram rider. But they found it too hard to attract and retain posties who also fit the weight requirements, so in early 2008 they asked Honda to reassess the bike’s upper weight limit. Honda obliged, and raised the legal carrying limit to 145 kilograms, meaning they could hire 105 kilogram posties.

But with the economic downturn and one thing and another, the demand for postal services is down right now, and Australia Post is looking to shed some staff, ideally without having to offer redundancy packages. Weight is not a protected characteristic, like age or sex or race, according to the discrimination lawyer quoted in the press in relation to the issue.

So arrivederci, fat posties. And I thought discrimination lawyers tried to stop discrimination rather than, you know, kind of encourage it. I must be so naive.

The question, then, is why is it legal to discriminate against fat people? How is weight different to race or sex or age or, for that matter, sexual orientation? This is where things become contentious. There’s a popular notion that being fat is a lifestyle choice. People who are fat choose to be fat, some argue (always people who aren’t fat). Fat people are lazy and eat too much junk food, watch too much television and put an inordinate drain on the healthcare system. They need to be harassed and constantly shamed into fixing themselves, or be heavily taxed and have their fat offspring taken away, and are generally to blame for all the world’s ills, up to and including global warming. If there were no fat people there would probably be no heart disease, cancer or diabetes, and we’d all live forever, happily.

I’m hardly exaggerating. Susie O’Brien argued in the Herald Sun that clothing stores shouldn’t offer clothes in large sizes because it encourages fat women to feel comfortable in public. She wrote: ‘Alarmingly, a new Australian study of more than 30,000 people shows obese and morbidly obese men are less depressed and less suicidal than those of a normal weight.’ Well, I won’t be sending Susie a Christmas card this year. Michael Smith, in an opinion piece for the Age, wrote: ‘Obesity and related diseases are costing the ALP millions of votes because of premature deaths.’ I’m really not sure how many people he thinks lives in Australia, for obesity to have killed millions of potential ALP voters, but he seems firmly convinced of the need to abandon the most fundamental principles of democracy in order to solve the ‘obesity crisis’. Democracy has met its match. Brought down, not by terrorism, nor by drugs, not even socialism, but by fat people.

There are other people, myself included, who question many of the basic assumptions behind the ‘obesity epidemic’. We’re talking about a flat increase of roughly three to five kilograms in the weight of the average adult born in the last couple of generations, an increase that plateaued back in the eighties, and was probably the result of improvements in food availability and nutritional knowledge, and is at least partially explained by a corresponding increase in average height. People are living longer now than they have ever lived before. Australians have the second-longest life expectancy (behind Japan) of anyone in history. How you turn that into a health crisis is a mystery. Now, while life expectancy is not the same thing as quality of life, it’s the best indicator that we have. Sick and unhealthy people generally die younger.

Your weight is largely determined by genetic factors, so the only truly effective way to maintain a slim figure is to pick slim parents. While there may be correlations between obesity and certain diseases, and while weight gain (or weight loss) can be a symptom of health problems, obesity is not an illness. While the BMI, or Body Mass indicator, has been used by insurance companies for many years to assess health risk, there is no evidence of a correlation between obesity and poor health. The life expectancies of overweight through to morbidly obese people are actually higher than for people with ‘normal’ BMIs, particularly beyond the age of twenty-five or so, when most people put on a bit of weight. Being underweight has the lowest life expectancy of all, even compared to that of the morbidly obese. Weight loss has never been about health, but about conventions of beauty and issues of social class and social status, control and obsessive-compulsive ritual behaviour.

Dieting neither seems to work terribly well, nor be terribly good for you. Two-thirds of dieters who have lost a large amount of weight (think Magda Szubanski) put it back on within twelve months. While you can starve your body of calories for a period of time, unless you plan to spend the rest of your life feeling hungry, the weight is almost certainly going to return. How anybody gets anything done in a constant state of hunger is beyond me, but hell, people have different priorities, right? Ninety-eight percent of people who lose more than fifteen kilograms put the weight back on within three years. Weight loss is a forty-six billion dollar-a-year business in the US, and it doesn’t bloody work.

And while I’m at it, heart disease, cancer and diabetes are all largely genetic. The seeming increase in all three is almost entirely due to an ageing population and the result of improved medical care (and in the case of diabetes, much better detection). You’ve still got to die of something. Since most of the old killers have been eradicated with antibiotics and surgical procedures, and we’ve come up with all sorts of other neat things to protect you from external threats, you’re probably going to end up dying because of something genetic, some built-in design flaw. That doesn’t mean that these diseases are getting more common, just that a lot of the other horses are out of the race.

But with an ageing population, and the very profitable nature of ‘preventive’ medicine practices, politicians are swayed by anyone promising to shift the cost of healthcare on to the individual. Somehow, people living long and possibly full lives became a problem, rather than something to be happy about or thankful for. But the average human body doesn’t need constant medical care and attention. Doctors are for sick people, and while constant medical regulation and governmental intervention might make some medical practitioners’ jobs easier, it really is missing the point. Your body’s not like a rented tuxedo; you don’t get your deposit back if you return it in pristine condition. Your body is not owned by the government, or your employer, or even Australia Post. There is a real threat here, but it’s not from fat posties.