Page 703 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 28 March 2006
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overweight and obesity in children. This significant public health survey will give us much better data on the incidence of overweight and obesity in children and is designed to monitor those children throughout their school years, in particular their primary school years. This program will be an important and significant step forward in understanding trends in the health of school-aged children in the ACT and will allow us to properly target our funding to address overweight and obesity in the most effective way.
In addition to this, the ACT Department of Education and Training has allocated additional funding over four years to improve nutrition and promote healthy lifestyles in schools. This involves a range of initiatives to improve nutrition and physical activity in schools, including programs to strengthen health promotion, improve nutrition and increase physical activity, expand access for schools to expertise in food and nutrition education, physical education, including dance, and a diverse range of physical activity, provision of professional learning programs on nutrition and physical activity to teachers and members of the school community, and support for the implementation of the accreditation of healthy canteens.
Only today I was out at Narrabundah primary school for the launch of this year’s activities at the Kootara Well program, which is the health education program at Narrabundah primary, and I was able to see what they are doing in terms of healthy canteens and physical activity for students. I am pleased to see that at Narrabundah the school community and the parent body have agreed they will switch their canteen to a healthy canteen; they are providing healthy alternatives and stopping selling some of the types of foods that we know are high in fat, high in energy and certainly a contributing factor to obesity. That sort of thing is happening across the board now in schools in the ACT.
Earlier this month ACT Health provided a three-day obesity prevention course. This course was designed to educate government and community health workers to develop better strategies and programs to target overweight and obesity. The course was presented by Professor Boyd Swinburn and Dr Colin Bell, both eminent researchers in the field of overweight and obesity.
From all these programs and initiatives I have outlined, you can see very clearly that the government have identified overweight and obesity as a significant public health issue. We will continue to commit funds to implement programs to encourage healthy and active children in the ACT as a way of preventing the consequences of overweight and obesity in later life. I thank Ms MacDonald for bringing this matter to the Assembly’s attention.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (4.27): I too thank Ms MacDonald for the topic that she has introduced in today’s MPI. But I really have to comment on the fact that the title of her MPI—the importance of implementing programs to encourage healthy and active children in the ACT—has led members to focus on obesity as the issue.
I acknowledge that the incidence of overweight and obesity among Australian children has increased rapidly in recent years and, if we follow the trend of the United States, will not be abating any time soon. We do know that children are very keen on some of the modern fast foods, and it is a very strong parent who can deny them their visit to McDonald’s, though I have got to say that my own daughter has not developed an
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