Summary - Department of Health and Ageing

There is also growing interest in community-based programs targeting illicit drugs with
community groups in various Australian communities providing support services,
employment, recreation and monitoring of young people’s parties. The approach is
promising but, to date, there has been little evaluation of its effectiveness. The Community
Partnerships Initiative is a Commonwealth program that funds community groups to
undertake preventive projects targeting illicit drug use by young people. Early evaluation
results suggest a significant gap between practice and the evidence base in this area. There
has been limited investment in rigorously evaluated community interventions in Australia,
whether for legal or illegal drug problems, with most of the controlled studies being
conducted overseas.
The mass media have been a powerful vehicle for the promotion and marketing of alcohol
and tobacco; and increasingly, public health agents have marketed competing messages
about alcohol, tobacco and, more recently, illicit drugs.
Anti-smoking campaigns have had some success internationally and Australia’s ‘Quit’
campaign, which used TV advertising as its main element, achieved decreases in
smoking in cities where the campaign was run. The Commonwealth’s National
Tobacco Campaign has been the most intense and longest running anti-tobacco
campaign in Australia, with the most comprehensive evaluations of any national health
promotion campaign. Evaluation found it achieved reductions in the prevalence of
smoking and savings of up to $24m.
Mass media marketing of alcohol prevention has formed part of larger communitybased
programs. The strength of this approach may be to reinforce community
awareness of the problems created by alcohol use and prepare the ground for specific
interventions. These recent campaigns have also been successful in their own right.
A current campaign targeting illicit drugs is aimed both at users and at their parents.
Stage one, which targeted parents and encouraged them to talk to their children about
illicit drugs, met its objectives but the campaign has not yet been concluded.
Advocacy works to promote healthy behaviours and healthy public policy by influencing
decision makers, working through political lobbying, coalition building, and the mass
media (typically the news media) to highlight and advance particular health issues. The
most successful public health policy reformers have based their advocacy on sound
research data and have utilised all three approaches to achieve their objectives. Advocacy
has been successfully applied in the areas of smoking control and, to a limited degree, in
alcohol policy in Australia.
Mass media marketing and advocacy are most effective when they are both used as part of
a broader strategy that includes activities such as community development and community
mobilisation, school and community education, health promotion, policy development
and institutionalisation, and coalition building and political lobbying.
Australia is one of a handful of countries whose health authorities promote and regularly
update national guidelines for low-risk alcohol consumption. These guidelines have been
central to policy, practice, prevention and research in Australia in recent years, and it is
difficult to evaluate their effectiveness in isolation from related strategies and policies.
Surveys have found that awareness of the concept of a standard drink (a concept integral to
the guidelines) rose during the 1990s and the people who can recall the information
provided on alcohol containers are those who drink the most. This is, therefore, a very
efficient means of providing information to risky and high-risk drinkers. Standard drink