Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Roads and Transport) Share this | Hansard source

Yes. I have only a couple of seconds to go. I need to compose myself. It has been said that a lot of these boys do not actually proceed to a high level in football. I can tell you that many of the boys that have been in this program have been drafted at the AFL level. This template that Gerard Neesham uses could be transferred to other sports, and I am sure it has been to rugby. It is a very good template which could also be transferred to the sports that girls are involved in. As a result, it needs a huge amount of funding.

In the time left I would like to give you a bit of history about this. Gerard Neesham went to Graylands Teachers College with me many years ago. He reached a high level in football. He played for the Sydney Swans and, as we know, he was the inaugural coach of the Fremantle Dockers. Once he had finished coaching the Dockers, he had been looking for another direction in life and he went to teach Indigenous kids at Clontarf. At that stage they did not have a football program so he decided that it would be an opportune time to introduce role models in a program, because obviously he himself was a very good role model having been an achiever at such a high level in sport. As he says to me, ‘Don, when you go all throughout the deserts of outback Australia you see that one thing that combines the Indigenous people is their love of Australian Rules football. They can all tell you who played in the grand final for Carlton several years or who won the Brownlow Medal and in what year. They wear their colours and their football beanies.’ He saw that as a unifying opportunity in education to get the kids to school. When I return to this speech, hopefully some time later, I will be able to tell members about the retention rates, how the program is spread out, how it is funded, why it is such a necessary program into the future and why all forms of government, both federal and state, and businesses need to continue their support.

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