Speech on Australia Sports Obsession

Good morning year 9, many in this room will be followers of a certain sport and I can guarantee all of you know at least 1 avid sports fan. Yet how many of you play sports outside of school? We Australians may be labelled sports obsessed due to the mass number of fans that support sports teams, the fans are in their millions, yet the numbers of Australians who participate in sports are dwindling with each year. Some ill-informed people argue that Australia is too obsessive about sports and enough funding is not going into the arts, these people are overtly those who are ignorant to the hard truth. According to the 2010 Australian Bureau of Statistics survey, 63% of children aged 6 to 16 participate in organised sports outside of school. This may seem a high amount but the survey of 2005 showed this number to be 68% which is a drastic decline in a short 5 years. Furthermore, Australian adults have little encouragement to incorporate themselves in any form of physical activity; according to the Australian Sports Commission report, less than half of Australian adults are participating in daily physical activity and less than a mere 20% of the population are receiving the recommended daily amount of exercise. To add to these horrific numbers, a gargantuan 54% of Australians are either overweight or obese as depicted in the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ survey. Does this sound like a country obsessed with sports, when we are ranked second in the world for the largest quantities of obesity? Due to these numbers the Australian government must give more incentive for people to participate in sports and exercise through work and school extracurricular and mandatory physical activities, tax decreases for healthier families and more funding for Australian sports programmes. How can we give more funding to art programmes when they further discourage healthy, active habits? I will ask you once again; do you really think Australia is a country which is sports obsessed, with...