Page 738 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 29 March 2006
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We often hear Ms Porter talk about the role of volunteers in community work. I would love to see a study done on the value of those who volunteer in organised sporting activities. My own family and the families of most members here have benefited enormously from the fact that there are people willing to organise rosters, referee games and turn up on Saturdays when, in this day and age, more and more parents seem to be wanting to handball that assignment to somebody else.
Sport and recreation are vital to the Canberra community, not only as a source of entertainment but also as a way to encourage physical activity and a healthy lifestyle. Accordingly to the 2003 ABS data, which is the latest we have, 218,600 Canberra residents participated in sport or physical activities. Whilst it is recognised that this is comparatively high when compared to the rest of Australia, I believe the government should never ease up on the task of seeking to improve on those figures. Certainly one way to do this is to encourage participation in either existing or new sport and recreation activities of an organised nature.
The benefits of a comparatively small investment in sport and recreation programs are clear. By encouraging physical activity, particularly among our children, the rate of overweight or obese people will decrease, as will the rate of health problems like cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and arthritis. I know there are those, especially the Greens, who say that one of the solutions to all our obesity problems is to ban the advertising of fast food on TV.
I am not one who believes that arbitrary things such as that are going to make an iota of difference. It is a bit like a lot of the ills that afflicted the people of the former Soviet Union, notably in matters such as alcoholism, but there was no advertising of alcohol whatsoever. Those who advocated bans on alcohol could never quite work out the next answer. The fact of the matter is that people who advocate those sorts of policies do not recognise the fact that these advertisements are not likely to get people to suddenly abandon their ways and take up healthy pursuits; they will impact significantly on people’s choice of product—that is not denied.
We have to try and get positive messages to our young people. There are programs in schools, some of which are not based on good science, and that worries me at times. We have to look at impacts on lifestyle. As I mentioned in estimates last year, an issue of concern is that the DMFT rate—decayed, missing and filled teeth—is escalating among our children. It is not a problem I blame on governments but rather a fact of changing parental behaviour. We have to watch areas where we can have setbacks in health if we are not careful. I suggest that, if we start tightening the belt unduly in the area of sport and organised sporting activity for our young people, we will quite rapidly start to see deterioration in health issues relating to our kids and then, as the territory advances in years to come, we will see those people being admitted to hospital through illnesses that may be related very much to their inactive lifestyles.
MR STANHOPE (Ginninderra—Chief Minister, Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment and Minister for Arts, Heritage and Indigenous Affairs, and Acting Treasurer, Minister for Economic Development and Business, Minister for Tourism, Minister for Sport and Recreation, and Minister for Racing and Gaming) (11.18): I understand the sentiments Mr Stefaniak seeks to express through this motion. At any
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