Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Primary Healthcare) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last Monday Swimming Australia announced the new South Australian Aquatic and Leisure Centre at Marion would host the 2012 Olympic trials. This is the culmination of a dream for so many people in my community. To go back, Adelaide has not had a FINA-standard pool since the early 1990s and last hosted a national-standard event with the Pan Pacific Trials in 1997. The 1997 Pan Pac Trials in South Australia was when Ian Thorpe sprang to notice, first qualifying for the Pan Pac's team as a 14-year-old. Ironically, it will again be South Australia that hosts his trials comeback. This is the first time that the Australian Olympic trials have been held outside Sydney since 1992. Ian Thorpe, Libby Trickett, Geoff Huegill and Michael Klim will all be making their comebacks for the Olympic team for London in 2012.

While the lack of a FINA-standard pool has held back the development of swimming in South Australia, we have seen some South Australian swimmers shine at the highest level. Matthew Cowdrey OAM from my home state of South Australia has competed at the 2004 Paralympic Games, the 2006 Commonwealth Games and the 2008 Paralympic Games. He collected 14 medals between the Athens and Beijing Olympics, including eight golds. Hayden Stoeckel, originally from Renmark, swam at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and claimed a silver and a bronze medal.

The pool's first event was the Australian Age Championships, which were held between 18 and 23 April 2011. They were an outstanding success and had more than 1,500 competitors. I was able to go to the South Australian Short Course Championships on Friday night, which were opened by the Governor. Future confirmed events include the Australian Short Course Championships from 1 to 3 July 2011. This will be the first televised event from the new swimming centre. The Australian Swimming Championships next year will be doubling as the London Olympic and Paralympic trials. In 2013 the site will also host the Australian Swimming Championships, doubling as the FINA World Championship selections and the Australian Age Championships.

I would like to pay tribute to several people without whom this facility would not have been built. The Mayor of Marion, Felicity-ann Lewis, her chief executive, Mark Searle, and the team at the City of Marion kept working on this vision for more than a decade and put together the submission to federal government in 2006. Nick Minchin as finance minister and Rod Kemp as federal minister for sport ensured that $15 million was delivered to the City of Marion in 2006 for this facility. It sat in the City of Marion's bank account for five years and by the time it paid for the project it was almost $20 million. I want to pay tribute to Michael Wright, who was the then South Australian sports minister. He made a commitment that if the federal government put in $15 million he would match it, and he did that. I would like to pay tribute to Alex Candetti, the Executive Chairman of Candetti Constructions, who demonstrated that a local builder could deliver a major project like this. All the people who were involved in the South West Indoor Aquatic Centre, a community group which sprang up more than a decade ago and started campaigning for an indoor pool in the south-western suburbs, by getting the local government, state government and federal government all involved, now have one of the best facilities in the Southern Hemisphere and an aquatic centre that compares with the Water Cube in Beijing. This is the culmination of a dream for a lot of people. It is an outstanding facility that will really do a lot for the sport of swimming at the grassroots level and at the elite level in South Australia. We look forward to hosting the Australian Olympic and Paralympic trials in 2012.