TRANSCRIPT
Former Melbourne A-F-L star Shaun Smith has experienced collisions in Australian sport firsthand.
He won a 1.4 million dollar payout for damage caused by head knocks during his 11-year-career, and says concussions can have a lasting toll.
"I've seen the impact personally in my own life. I'm doing my best to make myself better, but there's so many guys I see who are literally - they're broken, broken human beings."
Dr Adrian Cohen is a concussion researcher.
He says the link between contact sports and potential long term brain damage is widely accepted.
"Every blow is doing you damage, and the more you have the more likely you are to get short, medium, and long term problems. This is not a trivial illness."
A Senate report has now been released following an inquiry into the extent of head injuries in Australia's sporting codes, and what is being done about them.
Greens Senator Janet Rice was part of that inquiry.
"The committee felt that it was a really important issue to do some research into, and I think we have produced a really landmark report that really shows that the community as a whole, but particularly the government and sporting organisations, really need to step up and to be doing much more to be dealing with concussion in Australia."
Senator Rice says they've handed down a range of recommendations to deal with head injuries in community and elite sport.
"Critically we feel there needs to be a national strategy to really pull together what needs to happen to prevent concussion and then to deal with the impacts of it, and to have some national protocols about return to play for people who have been impacted by concussion, and then how to care for people who are suffering from concussion from their sporting injuries."
The AFL has welcomed the findings of the report, and says it will consider what more can be done.
Former manager and now concussion campaigner Peter Jess says improvements are long overdue.
"The report in our regard wasn't strong enough for us. That's only because we are seeing it at the back end and a lot of these Senate inquiries tend not to rock the boat. But if we're going to have serious change, then we've got to be serious about the issues that we want - and they've got to be funded. What we see at the moment is that the AFL create this damage and then they make it a societal issue rather than the issue of the sport itself."
Dr Cohen says in the meantime we all need to rethink our attitudes to head injuries in sport.
"People often think of concussion as a big boofy footballer missing a week of sport and maybe some money and that's not such a big deal. Let me tell you it is a big deal. It's a big deal if you're a kid, if you're 14 or 15 and your brain is still developing. It's a big deal if we don't recognise the concussion and send you back out to a game or to training where you sustain another blow to your head."
For Shaun Smith, the goal is not to stop people playing in the A-F-L.
He says it's about getting on the field safely so players don't have to abandon the sport before they're ready.
"I mean, there's current day players who are in their 20s who have to give the game (AFL) away... These are all very, very young men who have had to stop the game because their brains have been mistreated."
