Page 2375 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 29 August 2007
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I think it is very important that these two vital areas actually work together. Obviously, if you get more people exercising in whatever way, health costs come down. For every additional 10 per cent of the population engaged in healthy recreational level sporting activities, health costs in Australia would come down by about $700 million a year. That figure is about six years old. I heartily endorse Dr Foskey’s plea to the minister.
Mr Speaker, I will not speak for terribly long. I refer members to my comments earlier this morning. Anyone reading the Hansard will see that I raised a number of points of concern to me regarding health which came up during the estimates hearings. In particular, I refer people to my comments about the nurses and the need to broaden the base so that more people can enter the profession at various levels. I think that is crucially important.
I made some other specific comments in relation to areas of the hospital that I visited recently, like the fracture clinic, and I think additional attention needs to be given to the clinic. So, rather than repeat all that, I simply refer people to my earlier comments, which are pertinent to the health debate.
Might I also refer people to my comments in the previous debate about backing up the hospital staff. I think there was some misinterpretation, especially from the government, in relation to comments made by Mrs Burke. I think the Chief Minister was spraying off in relation to a certain part of the opposition’s estimates report and taking something very much out of context there. We on this side have the utmost respect for health professionals. We want to see them supported. No-one is ever perfect, and some people obviously work better than others. That applies in any area of human endeavour, be it health education, private or public, whatever.
We do have some very dedicated people in this system. They do need backup and the system is stretched. Without labouring the point, I refer to the comments I made earlier in relation to some possible ways of actually improving the system. It does need to be done and can be done, I think, without too much difficulty, specifically without a huge amount of additional money being spent.
One of the big problems that any health system faces is an ageing population. We as a nation spend about 10 per cent of GDP on health and I have seen figures which show that, by 2043, that might rise to about 18 per cent simply because of the ageing population. The more we can do to plan for that and to keep the costs down, while ensuring that we cater for the specific health problems of an ageing nation, the better it will be.
Again, I hearken back to earlier debate about Healthpact. We need to support a lot of healthy activities, and you cannot go past good recreational and sporting activities. Dr Foskey said that if the government was to reinstate grants for sports and recreation, which everyone in the estimates committee wanted to see happen, back to 2005 levels, that is about $500,000 a year. Down the track you would be saving $10 million, $20 million, $50 million or $100 million in health costs and making a real effort in terms of problems like childhood obesity. So I commend those earlier comments in this debate.
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