Mr Speaker, this report is a summary of my attendance at an international conference on Healthy Cities and Urban Policy Research in Tokyo, a meeting with the head of the World Health Organisation in our region, and a meeting with officials in our sister city of Nara.

The conference was an ideal opportunity to promote Canberra as a healthy city and showcase our credentials to the many international representatives. Our team worked extremely hard to promote the ACT as a desirable destination for international health workers and town planners.

It was also a valuable opportunity to invite delegates to the Healthy Cities conference that we will hold in June this year. From June 26-28 we will be hosting the Australian Pacific Healthy Cities Conference - a forum for examining Healthy Cities projects in the Pacific Region. The Canberra conference will allow us to celebrate the past 12 years of the Healthy Cities program with our international colleagues.

Good health and wellbeing are vital to us all. As the Minister for Health and Community Care, I am committed to improving the health and wellbeing of all members of our society. This requires a shift in our thinking and in the delivery of health services, from a narrow focus on illness treatment, to a broad focus on health and wellbeing and on improving partnerships.

Mr Speaker, this is exactly what the Healthy Cities movement is about and indeed was the focus of the Tokyo conference.

I launched the current Healthy Cities program in Canberra in September 1998. Healthy City Canberra is a stakeholder in health promotion in the ACT. It aims to facilitate partnerships between the government, private and community sectors to improve health and quality of life in the ACT.

The Healthy Cities Program is a world-wide development started by the World Health Organisation (WHO). The Healthy Cities approach engages communities and government in partnership to improve the health and wellbeing and quality of life of people. It recognises that diverse factors such as education, housing, transport, community safety, employment, the environment and the economy in general all impact on people's health status.

The global Healthy Cities movement now incorporates more than 6,000 islands, villages, communities, towns, municipalities, cities and megacities around the world.