Q: What does Kevin Rudd have in common with Lord Farquaad?

A: Just like the angry and diminutive cartoon character, Mr Rudd would like to see Shrek banished from the magic kingdom.

According to media reports today, a Rudd Labor government would ban the use of licensed characters like Shrek to market food and drinks to children as part of a plan to tackle childhood obesity.

Rudd and Labor Health spokesperson Nicola Roxon are apparently responding to a survey that showed parents are “concerned about food advertising that offered children free toys or gifts… (and) food advertising that used popular personalities or characters to sell products”.

In other words, they are exploiting the fears of the electorate rather than responding to any actual evidence of a connection between such licensing and childhood obesity.

Like anyone else who grew up in Australia in the 1960s or 1970s and is now a parent, Rudd and Roxon were themselves exposed to thousands of giveaways and promotional tie-ins associated with food products.

Through the 1960s, Kellogg’s gave away millions of injection-moulded plastic characters in wonderful series like the Tooly Birds, Camel Trains and Crater Critters now celebrated by collectors and pop culture historians (see Barry Divola’s book Searching for Kingly Critter). And then there were Kellogg’s own brand characters like Tony the Tiger (Honey Smacks), Sam Toucan (Froot Loops), Coco the Monkey (Coco Pops) and Snap, Crackle & Pop (Rice Bubbles), some of which have survived on the fronts of packaging to this day.

Rock bands and pop singers – powerful forces for social identity in the sixties – hadn’t truly “made it” until they recorded a jingle for Coca-Cola, telling us all how to make “things go better” or “it’s the real thing”.

In the late sixties, Coke’s local competitor Tarax produced a fantastic cricket game that you could only get by collecting a large number of bottle tops. I don’t recall any parental or political protests then (and if anyone still has one of the games, I’ll happily take it off your hands).

And speaking of sports, just how and where would Rudd and Roxon draw the line?

Is it OK for Olympians and “iron men” to promote “healthy” cereals and things like canned fruit? What about Ian Thorpe’s “Thorpedo” sports water, which some might well argue is outrageously overpriced? Weet-Bix – a healthy, wholegrain, no added sugar, Aussie icon brand (“Aussie kids are Weet-Bix kids”) beloved of parents – actually renamed itself “Brett-Bix” as part of a promotional tie-in with cricketer Brett Lee.

Would Lord Farq-Rudd and Fairy Godmother Roxon ban these too? If not, who would they empower to decide which promotions are OK and which are not?

OK, so the Shrek The Third licensing in supermarkets has been truly “over the top” (and hence likely to be subject to very rapid wear-out), but movie and TV tie-ins have been around since the 1950s, from The Monkees to Star Wars. So why will today’s generation of kids be unable to resist the lure of the licensed character, when their parents were?

Pardon my cynicism, but this has all the appearance of yet another attempt to find an easy scapegoat for childhood obesity, when it is clearly a complex societal problem with a multitude of causes.