Subjects: Health and Fitness, Olympic Games, Parenting
E&OE................................
Thank you very much to Lisa and her husband Grant Kenny, ladies and gentlemen. I wanted to launch this book for two reasons. The first is that I greatly admire the contributions that Lisa has made to Australian sport and also the contributions through her writings that she's made to lifting the level of national fitness. And the second reason I wanted to launch the book is that I have been struck by the paradox that has really emerged in the wake of such an enormous preoccupation, understandably so and properly so, with the Olympic Games, and that paradox is that we are in every sense of the word a great sports loving nation. I don't think anybody would contest that. We do have a passion for sport and we do have an identification with sport and it is one of the great levelers and one of great bonding agents of the Australian community. Yet on the other hand despite all of that we are a society, if you look at the statistics, that has at the very least a tendency to become lazier rather than more energetic. And it couldn't be more timely in the wake of the Olympic Games and the encouraging signs that they have encouraged people to become more actively involved, to have come on the market a book which is written in an understandable fashion, written in a way that parents can readily
relate to, which is really espousing the cause of fitness and physical activity, sporting endeavor and good health and healthy living habits amongst Australian children. The message is very well directed towards Australian parents.
Lisa has an unrivaled capacity to communicate it well and her background as a champion swimmer, her dedication and devotion along with her husband Grant to their three children, and the way in which she has held herself into promoting the cause of healthier lifestyles, , not only amongst children, but she has some very helpful hints for health amongst people of more mature years and she has taken the opportunity of communicating a few of those suggestions to my wife for passing onto me. And I am regular walker, she suggested perhaps I can walk even longer of a morning and if I didn't have so many radio interviews to do early in the morning I might walk an hour rather than half an hour every morning.
But anything that contributes towards Australians becoming more physically active has got to be a very good thing. I said when the Games finished that we wanted to encourage two things, we wanted to encourage elite sport because that is the flagship of our sporting endeavour and it is a very important part of that national psyche and you have always got to encourage excellence in whatever you do. But we also wanted to encourage grassroots participation and what is so good about this book is it's a very simple guide for parents in very practical things, packing school lunches, all of those things that as parents over the years we've had involvement with. The routine involving physical activity, the diet that you have for your children, the balance of take away and prepared meals, all of those things are very important and parents know the value of that and it's increasingly important to use that old clich‚ in our ever increasingly busy lives - it is very important that we get the right balance and the right mix. And both as a sports woman, a champion one who did Australia proud not only at the Olympic Games but also and most particularly at Commonwealth Games, Lisa and of course her husband whose own participation in sport has been quite an achievement to - also quite legendary - she is in a quite special position to do it.
I read of course of that famous remark of Lisa's after Shane Gould had won so many medals at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich that she said that one day she would represent Australia at the Olympic Games and her teacher patted her on the head and said go on dreaming and she did and she not only dreamt but she also competed and trained. And one of the things that she took a very strong stand for was to have as much sports preparation be a joint endeavor of women and men and the idea that you should separate the training of women from the training of men was not a notion that she ever embraced, quite correctly taking the view that the more the training took place together the more competitive the athlete at the end of the process was.
I commend this book, I commend it to Australian parents. We need role models like Lisa to talk about these subjects because they talk about it from a perspective of achievement, they also talk about it from the perspective of being a dedicated parent and I can't think, in relation to children's health, I can't think of a better combination. Somebody whose in her own right a great athlete and a great sports star for Australians and also somebody who along with her husband puts the welfare of her children above everything else and that is a great role model for anything and for something like this, the fitness of children, it's the ideal role model.
So I have very great pleasure in launching "Fit Kids". It's very readable, it will be a very valuable contribution and it addresses this paradox, we are a sports loving nation but for a moment we shouldn't be complacent about the level of physical activity and the level of physical participation. And it starts with instilling good habits into children because if you don't do that it gets very hard to reverse bad habits later in life and Lisa's book will make a great contribution to that, I wish it well, I congratulate Harper Collins on deciding to publish it. I know it will be warmly received and widely read by Australian parents.
Thank you very much.
(ends)