Men’s Health
Reverend the Hon. Dr GORDON MOYES [4.04 p.m.]: I refer to this forthcoming Sunday, Father’s Day, and the fact that tomorrow in this House the Father of the Year will be announced. It is time to reflect on the fact that we should make men’s health a matter of a national priority. We do not seem to regard as of any significance the fact that men die younger and are more unhealthy than women. Men are more prone to work and road accidents. They have three times the rate of suicide, shorter lifespans and more cardiovascular disease than women. Health is just part of the crisis among men today. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare suggests that $17 million annually is spent on women’s health while only $11 million annually is spent on men’s health, yet men are less healthy than women. Males have higher death rates for almost all causes of death in every age bracket, including circulatory system abnormalities, road accidents, sudden infant death syndrome, accidental drowning, cancers, drug dependence, road deaths and suicide.
Being a man is a health hazard! In the gyms of the nation men are pumping iron and strapping themselves to modern torture machines. Once, all that hot energy would have built skyscrapers and bridges but now it evaporates into the air. Soft men are scorned as sensitive new-age guys—SNAGS—wimps or wusses. It is no wonder that some Australian men are beating their breasts about the warrior within. Has Australia become a land where women are women and men are nervous? Is there a sense of crisis among men who are outwardly worried about the brake linings of the family car but who know that being a good provider is just not enough? We live in an era when men, for the sake of their families, their marriages and their health, need to rediscover what it means to be masculine, what it means to follow good role models.
Some of my staff at Wesley Mission tell me that they know of whole areas, including one large road with scores of houses, where not one husband or father of children is living in the family. Today, with the authority of fathers challenged and divorce breaking many marriages, many boys are growing up without a father in the house. Many of these males express a longing for a father, for a good role model. A whole generation of young men have a father hunger in their hearts that does not go away. They are men not working who feel they have lost much of their masculinity. Some run to crazy aggression. Is it any wonder that in America Arnold Schwarzenegger is being recommended as the new Governor of California! Others fear being called “wimpy” or “wussy”. They have no room to move out of the stereotypical behaviour.
As a Christian I believe that Jesus Christ is a man among men. His life is a pattern for every man embodying the finest quality of manliness. We have to look again at role models in our community. I suggest to the House that on this Father’s Day and, in particular, as we are hosts tomorrow for the announcement of the new Father of the Year we need new role models presented to our community to help many of the young men of our community know what it means to be a man, and that modern fathers do not have to be wusses. 04 September 2003.
