Michelle Rowland (Greenway, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise this morning to mention the Kings Langley Little Athletics Association and a very important issue that they have raised with me, something for which I have recently received a response as to certain representations that I have made. I was contacted by Mick Parker, who is one of the officers of the Kings Langley Little Athletics Association, in November last year. He was alerting me to an article in one of the papers about cuts to education funding in New South Wales, $1.7 billion of cuts which I have spoken about in this place, and in particular their impact on sport. This is one issue that I think is incredibly important for our young people, in representing the young community, as I do. It was reported in the Daily Telegraph on 26 November:

Representative state sport carnivals—which produced sporting legends like Ian Thorpe, Betty Cuthbert and Jana Pittman—are being threatened by the state government's $1.7 billion cut to the education budget …

Kings Langley Little Athletics wrote to me expressing their concern about the impact of these cuts and specifically the impact they will have on young people, the impact on their volunteers and the loss of valuable social skills that are gained though sports participation. Mick Parker, from Kings Langley Little Athletics, wrote to me saying:

School sport produces so many benefits for children, including confidence, the will to compete and try, and the making of friends and contacts some lasting many years.

He wanted to specifically mention to me the pride that students take in wearing the 'Blue and Yellow State Jacket' if they are lucky enough to make it from the school competition all the way to the state carnivals. Mick and others are very concerned about these cuts with sport participation falling in some areas and the abolition of representative carnivals and all the associated benefits that would be lost. In the words of Mick:

I hope you can do something about this … action that will affect so many children.

I have received a response from the New South Wales education minister, who had palmed it off earlier. Initially I wrote to the minister responsible for sport and that got passed off to the minister responsible for education and then finally I received a response from the director-general's department. I am concerned on a few fronts as firstly there is a typo, which you expect sometimes—no-one is perfect—but this is an education department. Also there is the fact that there is no attempt in this response to verify that school sport funding will be maintained. It actually says:

On Tuesday, 11 September 2012, the Minister announced that the NSW Government had made some tough decisions—

about the education budget. But this is despite the fact that on 31 October last year the Auditor-General revealed that the NSW government had in fact made a $1 billion mistake in its sums, and its budget would actually be in surplus. There was no remedying the situation even after discovering a billion dollars in revenue. The O'Farrell government has refused to put this money back into the education budget that they have recently decimated. That is my fear for sport in New South Wales. (Time expired)

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