Page 427 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 21 February 1990
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community. With the emphasis of the media on elite sporting features, most Australians would rather be looking like those very fit high performers than the Norms who were spoken about earlier. Who would like to look like Norm?
The ACT has the highest rate of participation in sport nationally, and that is around 40 per cent. The huge range of sports available to people in the ACT has been mentioned - all 30 of them - along with the numbers of people who participate in those sports ranging, as has been said, from 10,800 to about 880 in the top 30. We benefit from this participation, not just as individuals with improved health but also as a community, because, as I have already said, the health and fitness of the community is reflected in lower health costs which have to be borne by the taxpayers as a whole.
Labor's budget included the funding of a health promotion fund, as members opposite will vividly recall. We proposed that taxes raised from the sale of cigarettes be used to fund health promotion, and part of that was to be used to replace tobacco sponsorship of sport in the Territory. It would also be used to encourage healthy lifestyles, especially amongst the young. We cannot forget that the only significant group in which tobacco smoking is being taken up is young women. That has been raised in this house before, but I do not think anybody would object to it being raised again and again, until there are some achievements in reducing the impact of tobacco products on our youngsters.
In 1989 the ACT Department of Community Services and Health released the Canberra health survey which demonstrated ACT individuals' understanding of the need for a healthy lifestyle. The survey results showed that in the last five years 5 per cent had given up smoking and that 23 per cent of men and 14 per cent of women were ex-smokers. It is important to capitalise on this trend and reinforce the message that smoking is dangerous to health.
The tax that has already been collected - very little of which has been spent, I might add - is being held by Treasury and has not flowed on to sport, so sport has seen virtually nothing of the money collected. We know that a significant amount of this money would be in the Treasury. It is of concern to the community that the Government will be overcome by the temptation to use that money to fund some of the areas in which it has failed to manage properly the economy of this Territory.
Of an expected revenue of $660,000 this financial year, as I have said, virtually nothing has been allocated by this Government. I think that is a disgraceful performance. It is disgraceful in the sense that there was a community expectation that the money would be allocated to do what we set out to do with the program in the first place, but it is also disgraceful that there has been seemingly a turnaround from the high priority that was put by the
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