Gold for Australia: a lesson in successful public policy?

Hogan and Norton dismantled the trickle-down effect theory. They found that while Australian elite performance has improved massively over the past twenty years, the level the general population’s participation in sport and activity has continued to steadily decline. It is somewhat ironic that while Australia has become one of the great sporting nations of the world, the average Australian citizen has got slacker and fatter.

In the eyes of the world (and perhaps in our own eyes) Australia is a nation of fit and healthy people with a love of the great outdoors and playing sport. In actual fact Australia is facing a major health crisis because of inactivity. Heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancers, osteoporosis and osteoarthritis are all major killers, and treating these diseases is costing us a huge amount of money. Just to give you an indication of how much these diseases are costing us take the example of osteoporosis. By 2010, osteoporosis will be costing about $1 billion per annum in hospital admissions. Add up the rest and you have a cost to the community probably not matched by anything else.

Those big killers are in large part diseases of inactivity and poor nutrition. In other words they are preventable. If only we could get active.

We need to translate the public policy approach used in elite sport to general activity. We know there are real benefits in getting Australians fit. In fact the Hogan/Norton research points to evidence that doubling Australia’s current participation rate in physical activity would translate to a $17.5 billion gain to the community. That is a real return to the Commonwealth and would have a real impact on the wellbeing of the Australian population.

It seems governments are afraid of making the sort of proactive commitment that has been made to elite sport on a bigger scale – even though the returns may be greater. Governments don’t like spending massive amounts of money if a Minister can’t stand next to a medal winner, or a big factory, or some other tangible proof of money well spent. But, let’s not forget it took more than 20 years to be on target for 60 Olympic medals.

Surely the big ticket issues that make a nation are worth a bit of forward vision, planning and long term commitment. Health, education and environment are probably the three areas of public policy that could most benefit from the same approach to public policy we have taken with elite sport, albeit on a much grander scale.

Leadership and targeted investment have made us the greatest sporting nation in the world. Now we need that same leadership applied to one or two other pressing matters of public importance.