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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 11 Hansard (22 October) . . Page.. 3893 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

Work on this subject has been done by an Assembly committee and research has been carried out. Experts in the field do not agree with Mr Pratt that it is necessarily useful to have compulsory fitness testing because this can actually create a worse situation psychologically for many young people. The occurrence of eating disorders and body image problems is high enough for these factors to be considered serious health problems for young people, particularly girls, but increasingly for boys as well. So it is not so much a question of whether we should have compulsory fitness testing but whether we provide opportunities for young people to exercise their bodies in ways that they feel good about.

Mr Pratt also again raised the question of competition, and he suggested that people are saying it is an evil thing. Well, I do not know who he thinks is saying that. As I understand it, what people are saying is that there needs to be options for physical activity. Competition is appropriate for some people and not for others. Recommendations have been made in reports, such as the reports of committees that I have chaired in this place, that we should look at alternatives to competitive sport, which is the main avenue of sport available to schools at the moment. Some young people are saying quite clearly and consistently that they do not want competitive sport-that it is fine it is available, that it is fine it is there for people who like it, but those who do not like it and who are not by nature competitive need other options.

Obviously, many other options can be pursued. There can be lone sports such as cycling, surfing, snowboarding or whatever. However, you have to have the money to engage in some of those sports, and I stress that because a certain income level is needed to participate in a lot of these sports. There are also opportunities with dance, circus activities and so on, which have a very different and collaborative approach. Of course, dance can be competitive as can circus and physical activity-Ms Dundas is nodding her head-and competition can be brought into that, too. But it is about having opportunities for both competitive and non-competitive experiences of physical activity.

It is very interesting to look at the links-this is evident from research-between a sense of self-esteem for young people, the arts, for example, and physical activity. Breakfast radio on Tuesday last week featured an interview with the executive director of Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education, Arnold Aprill. Mr Aprill toured Australia towards the end of last year and is out here again. He has a very strong international reputation for his work centring on the incredible benefits the arts can deliver to some young people at risk of dropping out of education. It can keep them engaged in the education system; it can offer them a physical discipline and pleasure; it can, and does, give them a much stronger sense of their own possibilities and worth, which, as I have already said, is quite often central to people's capacity to deal with being overweight.

This is work that is well researched and evaluated and the results are unarguable. The key point that he makes is that it is about a partnership between individual schools and strong, reputable, high quality arts organisations, and the outcomes for some kids can be life changing.

A discussion on ABC radio last week included Anne Bamford, an arts education researcher at the University of Technology in Sydney, who spoke exactly about that

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