Page 1163 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 3 May 2006
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MR SMYTH: Blame the weather, blame the environment. Blame the environment, Mr Barr—that is it. It is a drought; it is just too hard.
Ms Gallagher spoke about Healthpact and about funding and Ms MacDonald spoke about the issue of smoking. And what happened in last year’s Healthpact funding round? The government cut $30,000 of money that was being used by the ACT’s premier female sporting team to promote a healthy body, healthy image program to young ACT women, and in particular to stop them smoking. Thirty thousand dollars were taken from the Capitals—$30,000! It was dirt cheap. They are such good examples for young women in the ACT.
Look at the statistics. Who is taking up smoking in this country? Young women. What is the ACT government’s answer to that? Do not fund the Capitals; do not have our premier sporting female team out there sending out the message; do not help stop young women taking up smoking—cut the funding. That is the problem: the inconsistency in all of this from the government and the nature of these sorts of motions.
The motion probably should have stopped at paragraph 5. Let us give credit to the Heart Foundation. Let us give credit to Eileen Jerga and her staff. They do a fabulous job on a very tight budget, and without them most of this would not be delivered and most of this awareness would not be out there. Let us put the credit where the credit is due, and it is due to people like Eileen Jerga and the Heart Foundation, and well done to them.
Ms MacDonald talked about Health Promoting Schools and said that the ACT government had opened a web site recently. Well, who set up Health Promoting Schools? The former Liberal government did. Mr Stefaniak, Mr Moore and I used to go out every year and hold a barbecue, where we cooked and served up fat-free sausages to the young kids, with a fruit box and a bit of fruit to follow up, to promote healthy eating. We got money out of the urban services budget, out of the education budget and out of the health budget to say that Health Promoting Schools was essential to back up the good work that should be done at home, and in the majority of cases is done at home. We had a role to play there, and we expanded that program and indeed included preschools and put up substantial money for the first prize for the various categories, to make sure that schools had the opportunity to do what they were doing.
I notice the minister spoke about the walking trails, and I am very pleased that she did that because I initiated the walking trails. We set up a number of parks in Campbell—Victoria Cross Park, George Cross Park and Legacy Park—to honour the commitment of Australian service men and women and their families and those that survived them. We linked them with a park. We said, “Let us make an attraction, let us get a health benefit of out of this, let us educate people about their heritage, but at the same time educate and urge them to get out and do something about their health, to keep fit, and make it attractive for people, give them an incentive, to go out.”
I am pleased that that program is all over Canberra now; it is in Tuggeranong and in all sorts of places. It is really important that we help people get fit. The purpose of the community walking tracks was to show whether, say, a three-kilometre walk was tough and therefore some people would know not to do it, or easy so that they could go ahead and do it if they were not that well or fit. People could overcome some of the fear that
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