The NRL-run League Bilong Laif (League for Life) program in Papua New Guinea is positively changing the lives of participants, according to an evaluation by the Centre for Sport and Social Impact at La Trobe University.
Experts from La Trobe recently returned from a visit to PNG to assess the impact of League Bilong Laif, a sport-for-development program that runs in schools and promotes messages about respect and the importance of education for all Papua New Guineans. The program is funded by the Australian government and delivered by a team of Papua New Guinean NRL staff in four regions.
“We are starting to see that League Bilong Laif is more than just a schools program and can impact change for females, males and people with disabilities of all ages and in all regions”
“We are starting to see that League Bilong Laif is more than just a schools program and can impact change for females, males and people with disabilities of all ages and in all regions” says NRL Pacific Program Manager John Wilson, who travelled with the La Trobe review team to Port Moresby, Eastern Highlands Province, East New Britain Province, and the Autonomous Region of Bougainville.
“The NRL PNG team under the management of Mark Mom are doing a great job. We are building awareness that rugby league is not just a sport through delivering our positive education and respect messages in each community that will ultimately define the future of the program. The team is also delivering the program in sign language to make it more accessible” said Mr Wilson.
In addition, research found that participating in the League Bilong Laif program provides children with an opportunity to engage with education in a meaningful way, and that the program reinforces the message of gender equality through female NRL PNG staff, who are seen as role models and strong women.
Reflecting on his visit, Mr Wilson said PNG was full of great people that were looking for ways to contribute to their communities for a better tomorrow. “League Bilong Laif is a great platform for our staff to give back. In each region that we visited, the staff presented new opportunities for me to explore the cultural and logistical differences that affect the programs we deliver every day,” he said.
The research has found that the impact of the program extends beyond participating children, with preliminary findings suggesting positive change for program staff and broader communities, through partnerships with PNG and international charities, and community outreach programs.
Education specialists have been involved from the initial stages to establish and review the LBL program to ensure quality delivery of the program with desired outcomes. Review team member and sports management specialist Dr. Emma Sherry said they monitor education and gender equality outcomes through surveys and interviews with teachers and NRL PNG staff, stories of change with children, and via in-depth in-country interviews with program funders and key stakeholders. By utilising these tools, the review team has sought to identify changes in attitude, behaviour and the impact of these on the participants, their school and community.
Dr. Sherry stated that the LBL program had grown exponentially since its inception three years ago, and the success of employing full-time staff, reaching out to dozens of schools, hundreds of teachers and many thousands of children is a testament to the dedication and expertise of the staff in both PNG and Australia.
“During the pilot phase, the program had been refined and is now being replicated across the Pacific [Fiji, Samoa and Tonga] as an example of how to actively engage children and their communities in education” she said.
League Bilong Laif is managed through a three-way partnership between the Australian Government, the PNG Government (represented by the National Department of Education) and the NRL. The program is supported by the Autonomous Bougainville Government Department of Education, the PNG Rugby Football League (PNGRFL), the University of PNG and the PNG National Sports Institute.
This article awas originally published on NRL.com
Peter Sivey: “This isn’t the way to fix private health insurance”
Photo: abc.net.au
The private health insurance sector is ripe for reform, but the Federal Government should look further than populist policies that seem to offer more choice but at a cost to overall equity and efficiency, writes Peter Sivey.
The Federal Government has confirmed that it is considering reforms to private health insurance regulation that would allow new policyholders with healthier lifestyles (including non-smokers and people with low BMI) to pay lower premiums.
This policy change would represent a relaxation of Australia’s long-held “community rating” system which enforces a rule that everyone pays the same price for the same policy.
The proposed reform sounds like classic small “l” liberal reform: reducing regulation and improving choice for consumers. But it’s bad for fairness and it’s bad economics.
Smokers nowadays are a relatively small but highly disadvantaged group in Australian society. Latest estimates suggest only 18 per cent of Australians are smokers. But disadvantaged groups such as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, remote and rural Australians, those currently unable to work, and single parents have much higher smoking rates, up to twice as high.
We know that smoking is highly addictive and it is hard to argue that the differences in smoking prevalence across socio-economic status represent the rational choices of individuals. On this basis, price discrimination against smokers is unfair and inequitable.
Allowing such price discrimination would surely lead to some smokers dropping their private coverage as their premiums rise to reflect their higher health costs. These smokers would now seek their expensive treatments from the public hospital sector. So the net effect of the policy would be to move more of smokers’ health costs (as well as the costs of others with unhealthy lifestyles) onto taxpayers. Previously their costs would have been subsidised by their own health insurance premiums, and the premiums paid by other policyholders in the same fund.
The Government is also considering allowing private health insurance to cover out-of-pocket fees for GP services (for example, when GPs don’t bulk bill and charge a fee higher than the Medicare rebate).
Again, this reform seems appealing on the face of it. Why shouldn’t we be able to use our costly private health insurance to cover bills from the GP surgery?
A primary reason is that the existing policy of forbidding insurance coverage of GP fees has put the responsibility on GPs themselves and the Government of the day to keep fees low and bulk billing rates high. For example, the Howard government introduced a series of increased payments to doctors which successfully reversed the decline of the bulk-billing rate in the early 2000s. Under private health insurance coverage, GPs would have an incentive to increase fees and the government would have the temptation to deflect any problem with accessibility onto private health insurance. There goes the principle of universal access to primary care.
The private health insurance sector is certainly ripe for reform, but the Government should look further than populist policies that seem to offer more choice to consumers but at a cost to overall equity and efficiency. The ability of health funds to design restrictive policies which exclude certain treatments mainly needed by older people (hip replacements are a common example) would be a good starting point for better regulation.
You only have to look at health insurance TV adverts to see where the system is going wrong. Excessive marketing to young people, and focus on ‘extras’ cover (dental, optical, etc), shows where the fat profit margins lie. Restricting extras cover and enforcing more adequate minimum levels of hospital cover could improve price competition and improve coverage for essential medical procedures.
Peter Sivey is a senior lecturer in the Department of Economics and Finance at La Trobe Business School.
This post was originally published on the ABC website for The Drum.