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In the past decades, public health has increasingly addressed what has been called the children's obesity 'epidemic', most notably through large-scale initiatives promoting physical activity. Through a discourse analysis the current paper critically examines such efforts in Canadian and Australian public health. Public health websites in Canada and Australia were examined for information concerning children's health, physical activity and obesity and explored for how these issues were represented in the discourse. Bacchi's (2009) 'What's the problem represented to be?' approach to discourse analysis guided our interrogation of the taken-for-granted assumptions underlying Canadian and Australian public health discourse, the ideological and political influences involved in its construction, and the knowledge base upon which it rests. The article calls for critical reflection on how children's physical and leisure activities are being advanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The high incidence of sexual abuse of Indigenous children in remote Australia prompted the Australian Government to implement an emergency response of health and welfare measures (the Intervention) in 2007 to protect children and communities from harm. In this article we seek to assess the measures employed in the Intervention against the body of evidence of strategies likely to be effective in reducing Indigenous health disadvantage. Our view is that the emergency response may not have long-term benefit because of the dearth of basic primary health services in remote Aboriginal communities to continue the effort that the Intervention has begun. We conclude that Intervention measures are not sufficiently well aligned with evidence-based health improvement strategies to bring about long-term health gain in Indigenous communities. Governments must reassess the benefit of externally-imposed approaches to reducing health disparity and move to actively build capacity in Aboriginal communities to deliver culturally-relevant health and social services that meet community need. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]