Page 3262 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 10 November 2021
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cool our residential streets. Others will be planted in public parks and green spaces to further strengthen canopy coverage and biodiversity. As this program gets underway, we will be looking for opportunities to undertake more planting around Canberra’s play spaces because we recognise the huge contribution they make both to sun safety and for general amenity and play.
While we are taking tangible action to improve shade at play spaces around our city, Dr Paterson’s motion raises the issue of the importance of using a range of platforms to remind parents, caregivers and guardians, as well as children, about sun-safety messages and the health benefits of protecting yourself from the sun. ACT Health provides annual up-to-date messaging on the public health benefits of sun safety, but we should always be looking for different ways that we can get those messages out to the community. I thank Dr Paterson for her suggestions for new methods to spread sun-safety messaging to more Canberrans—in particular, ways that we may be able to do this in our playgrounds, where thousands of Canberra children will be playing over the summer.
MS CHEYNE (Ginninderra—Assistant Minister for Economic Development, Minister for the Arts, Minister for Business and Better Regulation, Minister for Human Rights and Minister for Multicultural Affairs) (3.30): I rise briefly to speak in my capacity as Minister for the Arts, but first of all as a local member, to commend Dr Paterson for bringing forward this motion. Sun safety and sun smarts are a critical issue for all families and individuals, and exploring the ways in which we can ensure the health of everyone in our society is incredibly important. Dr Paterson has put forward some very pertinent suggestions, which Minister Stephen-Smith and Mr Steel have underlined, for creative ways in which we can explore messaging, get the community engaged and work with each other to achieve a better outcome for us all.
As Minister for the Arts, I want to acknowledge that Dr Paterson’s suggestions very much coincide with the first strategy of the recently released statement of ambition. That is about creating amazing art and culture everywhere, at any time, for anyone. This is about how the arts help us to engage with and understand experiences. We interact with art all of the time, and we should be interacting with art all of the time. It should be simply everywhere you go. Dr Paterson’s motion really speaks to this, and I commend her for it.
DR PATERSON (Murrumbidgee) (3.32), in reply: I thank my colleagues Minister Stephen-Smith, Minister Steel and Minister Cheyne for their support of this motion, and I thank the Canberra Liberals and the ACT Greens for supporting the motion. The speeches were a good reminder to thank all the doctors and nurses in the ACT health system for the care they give to those with skin cancer in our community. I thank Dr Kanellis for his commitment to the dermatological health of our community and for conducting this research and bringing it forward to the Assembly.
I had an interesting engagement with a constituent on Monday, a very dedicated, politically engaged community member who said that when they had heard about the motion, they had written to numerous New South Wales politicians—fair, bald, middle-aged men who had been standing outside in press conferences in the blazing sun not wearing hats. She said that she had had some interesting responses. While we
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