Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise tonight to speak on the serious issues raised in the Senate Community Affairs References Committee's Concussion and repeated head trauma in contact sports report. The recommendations and the actions put forward by the committee are indeed significantly important and do require consideration from the government. But I have to say that the issues put forward are more than a matter for government. If the government were to implement these recommendations in full, they wouldn't be enough. That is essentially because this is a cultural issue around how Australians play their sport and respond to it. There is a simple matter at hand. We do need significant cultural change in how codes, communities and players—children and adults—respond to concussion and its seriousness both on and off the field.

But it's not just in our contact sports. We have a lot of debate here about football and rugby, but some of you might be surprised to know that the largest number of concussions occurs in sports like cycling. That's of little surprise when you take into account roadside accidents. There are also falls from horses. Of course, that is not to underplay the focus on contact sports and the issues people experience as a legacy of concussions during their sporting careers. Some people have lived with the legacy of those impacts for a long time. That is in part what was highlighted to the parliament through our inquiry. But the impact of repeated concussion and traumatic brain injury belongs to a wide range of sports, and all sporting codes—and, indeed, the community more broadly—need to respond to this.

So what happens when a child gets a concussion on a Saturday, during their weekend game? Well, that child and their family could say, 'Come on, be tough and play on,' when in fact the child should be stood aside not just from that sport but also from bright lights or the risk of any other injury for at least a couple of weeks. The sporting code might say, 'You can't come back for a couple of weeks, Johnny; not until you've served the period set down.' But who lets the school sports teachers know or the basketball team know? This is much more than just an individual sporting code's responsibility. We really need to empower parent volunteers and get them to be serious about their obligations.

My next-door neighbour goes to her son's footy, and she was telling me about a recent concussion. Indeed, she is the first aider for her son's football team and was responsible for making sure that that child got appropriate medical attention. Has she been trained in that? No. Has she been briefed on her obligations in that regard? No. This is despite the fact that there is clear evidence that many sporting codes are trying to lift the standard, train their volunteers to respond at a community level.

The point I'm putting forward is that governments can have the best data in the world but none of that will help the very needy victims of concussion further down the track. The best cure is prevention. We need to have strong preventive approaches in our sporting codes. In our report we have recommended that sporting codes consider the extent to which rules of play could be affected by the need to respond to concussion. That could include putting into the rules of the sport the need to step aside from play after a concussive event, or it could include, as is already the case in children's sport, the need to further change sports rules so that fewer concussions occur.

That notwithstanding, we still need to enable a much more robust response to concussions when they occur. We must help Australians prevent repeated concussions and we must make sure they get the right diagnosis. When in doubt, sit them out. If you don't know whether or not it's a concussive event, you need to apply the rule that says a player must sit it out, and they must be supported to take precautions in all of the different aspects of their life.

There were a great many really significant issues canvassed in the course of this inquiry. I really want to underscore what we heard from the witnesses we spoke to about the terrible, debilitating impact of concussion on people who've experienced it, from people who, in some cases, had had a single head injury playing sport—and we've seen occasions where that has resulted in death—to people who had multiple concussions during their professional careers and people who became professional but whose professional careers were short, largely because they had sustained a significant number of concussions while they were playing sport recreationally.

Many of these incidents can be prevented. I know people are reluctant to change the rules of their sports et cetera, but we really need a serious dialogue about the integrity of sport to promote injury prevention. I've noticed that players are now starting to look to insurance for concussive injuries. If they insist, for example, that their codes support them to get insurance, and if that insurance becomes too expensive, then the codes are going to have to look seriously at how they go about preventing those concussions. If you can insure someone's legs, I don't see why you shouldn't be able to also insure them against head injuries. So I really want to use this opportunity of the tabling of this report to underscore our recommendations—to government but also very much to the broader community, to sporting codes, to state governments and to players and their families—about all the preventive actions that we need to take.