As someone who has spent a lot of time contributing to all manner of Australian sports articles across all codes, I recognise several of the contributors there

As someone who has spent a lot of time contributing to all manner of Australian sports articles across all codes, I recognise several of the contributors there and can assure you that they don't have some kind of secret nefarious agenda. They just - like I - are very skeptical of data claiming things like "42.6% of Australians have participated in walking". Regardless of whether or not that's actually true under their defined methodology (presumably it is), it's probably a pretty good indicator that their methodology is of extremely questionable use, and that other data may have equally (but less obviously) misleading data. I will note that the existing participation section of that article states that soccer has a higher participation rate than any other team sport amongst males (netball being higher for females), so it's extremely clearly that editors aren't objecting to the tables' inclusions on that claim alone, given that it's made in the article either way.