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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Tuesday, 29 June 2004) . . Page.. 2946 ..

bought out in the ACT. The sponsorship was worth about $75,000, I recall. A couple were exempted. A particular cricket match, a Rothmans cricket match, was exempted. A couple of small artistic events also were bought out.

In the early days, a fair amount of money was going to Healthpact and it was used quite effectively. I recall that for many years there was a ratio which was not dissimilar to the ratio round the rest of the country in that at least 35 per cent of the Healthpact grants—I am talking about $2 million a year in grants a few years ago—would go to physical activities, to sport and recreational activities, that promoted a healthy lifestyle and they were used to get the message across about health and to provide valuable funds to those organisations.

There were always fairly stringent guidelines and restrictions on how the money could be used, but the system worked very well. I have become increasingly concerned in recent times, over the last 12 months or so, about reports that the sport and recreation community and ACTSport have some very real concerns in relation to how the Healthpact funding is going. One of the major roles of Healthpact is to promote healthy activity and one of the best ways of doing that is by promoting group activities and getting as many people as possible actively involved.

I was very concerned to hear—I might have mentioned it to the officials—that organisations such as Tenfit, which involves hundreds of people from three to 83 years of age, had been led to believe that they would get some funding, but found at the end of the day that they did not. I was also very concerned to hear that the 35 per cent plus that used to be spent on Healthpact—something I was always very keen to keep tabs on to ensure that it kept up to at least that level, even though it was not necessarily within my portfolio when I was a minister—had dropped to an average of 26 per cent of the total Healthpact funding being spent on physical activity events.

I was told that the funding did rise to 31 per cent during the Masters Games because it was a major sponsorship, which was good, but it was readily admitted that it is now at about 26 per cent. Quite frankly, I think that that is wrong. Other states that adopted similar programs actually had 50 per cent as the figure for the level of sponsorship of healthy physical activity in those types of events. For us to be down to 26 per cent is not the best way of getting best value for the buck, of getting more people physically active and reducing the health bill through basic preventive health measures like that. I think that it is common knowledge that if 10 per cent more Australians—for that read 10 per cent more ACT people—got active the health bill would drop by about 10 per cent.

I saw some figures recently suggesting that if we did that in the ACT we would be able to save about $20 million on actual health costs. I point out to the government, which has responsibility for Healthpact, that in New Zealand doctors now prescribe programs of physical activity as part of preventive medicine. It is actually part of their diagnosis and their recommendations for people to get better. I think that there is a lot that we can learn from schemes like that.

So, in terms of preventive health, I was concerned to see that 26 per cent average figure for Healthpact. That is something I would expect this government to address if it is fair dinkum in terms of trying to reduce things such as childhood obesity and of ensuring

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