Page 239 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 28 November 2012
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So let us put it beyond a doubt. Let us all agree to it. Because the Chief Minister thinks it is already coming, it will not be a burden for her to agree to these things. It will not be a burden at all for the government in its entirety to agree to this. It is important to have a strategy. We can talk about it, but we need deliverables.
If you go to Ms Porter’s motion, she does outline some of the problems which assail us as a community. Fifty-two per cent of adults are overweight or obese. Half the children aged five to 17 are not within a healthy range. Forty-three per cent of adults are not sufficiently physically active. Smoking rates have improved, but there is more to do, particularly among our Indigenous folk. Chronic conditions accounted for approximately 80 per cent of the burden of disease and injury.
If I remember rightly, approximately a third of the ambulance trips to the emergency department at our hospitals are those for people with chronic illness. This goes beyond the Health portfolio. It affects all aspects of government. Apparently, we all agree that we should be working on preventative health. Surely then it is not unreasonable to have a preventative health strategy. It would not be unreasonable to have a task force to work on that strategy and have a task force to help deliver that strategy.
The minister spoke of the Heart Foundation’s active living program. I have to say that if you have not read the document, it is a very, very comprehensive document. It covers a whole lot of things like city planning and access to important infrastructure, whether it be, for instance, things like light rail, bus services, cycle paths, footpaths, sporting grounds and things of that nature. The Heart Foundation is to be commended for the work that they have done because what it does is say that you can build a city that by its existence helps people to be active.
Of course, we know that there was a report early this week or late last week that said it was not what our kids were eating that particularly made them obese or fat. It was their lack of activity. I can remember the days, and it is not so long ago, when I was a child. We were very lucky. We lived in Colebatch Place in Curtin. It was part of a Radburn estate which looked onto a park. The backdoors of the homes fronted the street, the fronts of the houses fronted onto a park.
It was not uncommon on even a school afternoon for 20 or 30 kids to be out the front playing football or cricket. We actually managed two full cricket sides and a cheer squad. It was the same with the football. Kids used to get out. These are the things that such a task force would look at. These are the things that a task force would include in its strategy. These are the things for which we should have targets.
For instance, we know that throughout the drought the government shut ovals. They denied communities good playing surfaces. They are now spending a fortune to rehabilitate those surfaces. There are suburbs without ovals in this city. That is a shame because that discourages kids. That sends a really interesting message: “No, we are not going to keep your oval because we cannot afford to. We think it is unimportant.”
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