Kate Lundy (ACT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on a topic that is very close to my heart. As we approach the final weeks of 2013, it is fitting to reflect on what Australia has achieved in the area of sport. When I talk about achievements I of course include some of the fantastic feats by our Australian athletes and teams. Adam Scott's success in Augusta I think is very much at the forefront of many people's minds as we head into another Australian summer.

I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge Kim Crow, who became the first Australian to win a Rowing World Championship gold medal in the single scull. Another local Canberran, Caroline Buchanan, won the BMX World Championship and backed it up to take out a world mountain bike crown. The Australian netball team showed their dominance in reclaiming the Constellation Cup in a tightly fought series with their fierce rivals—a rivalry that goes back many years now—the Silver Ferns of New Zealand.

I would like also to reflect upon, in part because this sport has achieved many great things over the last couple of years and proved itself to be an exemplar of organising its elite performance, the five Australians who were on the winning crew of the Americas Cup this year, not least Tom Slingsby, our Olympic gold medallist, who was the chief tactician. So a nod to all of Australia's sailors as well.

These successes are not only possible because of incredibly talented and dedicated individuals; there is the complete sporting landscape in Australia, from the coaches and support staff to the national sporting organisations that engineer themselves right through to the volunteers who sustain participation in sport at a community level. Today I would like to focus on the success of the Australian sport system and the achievements of our sport governing bodies and organisations, including the bureaucrats that build an enormous amount of work in the office of sport, the Australian Sports Commission and the Australian Institute of Sport. All of these people are dedicated and devoted to continuing to develop and adapt a robust environment to achieve sporting success and expanding the opportunities at all levels of sport, no matter your age, where you come from or your gender.

I was privileged, as I am sure my colleagues are aware, to hold the position of Minister for Sport in the Labor government. During that period of government some of the most significant challenges were thrown at sport. The way the sport system in Australia responded to these challenges has resulted in an improved and strengthened landscape for sport in this country, and I am optimistic about its future.

The sport portfolio and sport in general are complex. The stakeholders will tell you that what sport provides our modern civil society is far more than the sum of its parts. Community sporting clubs and organisations contribute volumes to the health, wellbeing and social cohesion of our communities. I was very proud as minister to establish the Multicultural Youth Sport Partnerships. In fact it was Senator Arbib who established that, but it certainly came from a policy that he worked on collaboratively with me as Minister for Multicultural Affairs. It was an important partnership that I was able to further develop as Minister for Sport. This initiative enabled young people from new and emerging communities and culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds to engage in sport and physical activity within their own space, their local communities, and build linkages with their local clubs.

Sport, I believe, is the most effective platform for social cohesion in our communities, and I was very pleased to encourage our settlement services to work with their local community sports. I was also pleased to meet with them at a national level to work out what opportunities there were for collaboration to build that platform of social cohesion across the settlement sector. Settlement, of course, supports newly arrived people coming to Australia—refugees, asylum seekers, humanitarian entrants and migrants all seeking to build that sense of belonging in their new community.

I would also like to mention the Be the Influence campaign, because sport is also a great platform for promoting and disseminating very positive messages into the community. Be the Influence saw alcohol sponsorship replaced by the Be the Influence campaign, which was a campaign promoting safety for young people and a very strong anti-binge-drinking message. The Be the Influence campaign was adopted by a number of sports. I think ultimately 13 or 14 sports ended up replacing some of their alcohol sponsorship with the very positive Be the Influence message. I would like to also mention the Good Sports program, an excellent initiative designed to allow sports community clubs to develop alternative revenue sources to alcohol. This is a free support offered to community clubs—not in fact through the Sport portfolio but through the community services portfolio—and acknowledges their progress as they rebuild their links with families and make community clubs more family orientated.

One of the great challenges for sport is to continually adapt itself. It is, of course, a sector that is built on the backs of volunteers. I know so many sports clubs where the same people have been the president or the secretary or on the board for decades. I love seeing those people acknowledged, but I also think it is a huge challenge for them as society changes and moves around those clubs and they are forced to adapt in a number of ways. There are plenty of challenges that come down the channel towards them, and one of them, of course, is how they recruit and retain volunteers and how they recruit, retain and promote membership and participants within their sport. We were very pleased to be able to commission the CSIRO and the Australian Sports Commission research that came up with the document The future of Australian sport: megatrends shaping the sports sector over coming decades. I would encourage all wise members of sports boards to familiarise themselves with this document, as it has lots of tips on how to help support the changes necessary to adapt to modern challenges. Innovation in sport has never been more prominent in this way, and the Australian Sports Technologies Network is an industry-led national network coordinating access to sports technologies research capability, national sporting organisations, sports retailers, commercialisation expertise and investors. The ASTN were identified under the Labor government to establish a sports technology precinct to help grow, develop and take advantage of national and international opportunities.

Perhaps one of the strongest themes, however, was governance. In 2012 the Australian Sports Commission released the revised governance principles for national sporting organisations to encourage a greater focus on management, planning and reporting practices. This was particularly essential in a year when we saw the integrity of sport challenged from a number of directions, from the Wood review into cycling after the scandal broke out about Lance Armstrong and the issues that beset cycling internationally through to the release of the Australian Crime Commission's report into Project Aperio, which is continuing. To this end, we as a government established the National Integrity of Sport Unit to provide national oversight, monitoring and coordination of efforts to protect the integrity of sport in Australia from threats of doping, match fixing and other forms of corruption. The investigations by ASADA continue into the issues that were raised at the time by Project Aperio. Sport is too important to allow this kind of insidious corruption, immoral drug cheating and all the rest of it to take a hold in Australia. Whilst it was a very tough period of time within the sports world, I was incredibly proud of the sports CEOs who were prepared to stand up beside the ACC, me and Minister Clare and declare their willingness to be involved in the clean-up of Australian sport and the stamping out of those practices.

The challenges that faced us this year also included battling racism. It is the 20th year since Nicky Winmar lifted up his jumper and said, 'I'm black and I'm proud of it,' and I would like to acknowledge Wayne Ludbey, the photographer who captured that moment. Twenty years is a long time, only to see Adam Goodes, a Brownlow medallist, face the same kind of vilification. So I am very proud of the fact that we initiated our 'Racism. It Stops with Me' campaign through the Australian Human Rights Commission.

Finally, in the week of the very sad passing of Nelson Mandela, I would like to conclude my remarks tonight with some of his words, because I think they sum up many of the messages that I have tried to convey through my words in this presentation. Nelson Mandela said:

Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire, it has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope, where once there was only despair. It is more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers.

With that, I commend Nelson Mandela's words to this chamber.

Senate adjourned at 18:58 until Tuesday, 11 February 2014 at 12:30