Nita Green (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority Amendment (Sport Integrity Australia) Bill seeks to establish a new Australian government agency, to be known as Sport Integrity Australia, in response to a key recommendation of the 2018 Review of Australia's Sports Integrity Arrangements. This new agency would bring together a range of sports integrity functions that are currently the responsibility of the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority, the national sports integrity unit and Sport Australia.

The establishment of such an agency was a key recommendation of the 2018 Review of Australia's Sports Integrity Arrangements, known as the Wood review. This bill seeks to implement an important part of the first stage of Australia's response to the 52 recommendations of the Wood review. To paraphrase the review, a centrally coordinated response to sports integrity issues will help overcome the silo effect that currently exists with multiple bodies, including NSOs, law enforcement and regulatory agencies, engaged in protecting sport from the many threats it faces.

Australians expect fair, clean and safe sport. Labor are committed to appropriate responses to the real threats facing Australia's sport integrity. Threats to the integrity of sport in Australia evolve and so must government responses to them. The establishment of Sport Integrity Australia through this bill is another step towards further strengthening Australia's defences to any and all threats to Australia's sport integrity. Labor support this bill because we know it is important to invest in protecting the integrity of sport. Sport is an integral part of our Australian way of life—from supporting national teams from the stands or our living rooms to participating in local clubs on the weekends.

Sport has been a constant in my life, and that's why last week I was thrilled to have a tour of the new world-class stadium in Townsville—a 25,000-seat venue that will open this weekend, where the people in Townsville will be able to use the stadium to watch their beloved Cowboys' home games as well as big musical acts like Sir Elton John this weekend. Cowboys fans extend all the way up to Cairns, where the Cowboys' second home is Barlow Park. Last Saturday I went along with a packed crowd to watch the Cowboys play the Broncos. They won by two points, by the way. It was really fantastic to be at the park's footy event where Queenslanders from communities all across remote and regional Far North Queensland came to watch. It was very clear that the tropical rain was not dampening anybody's spirits. They were there to watch and cheer their team because they love being a part of sport. Most Australians have a connection to sport in some way and get a lot of value from it. Sport is exercise, it brings people together and it offers economic value to our community. That is why it is important that government support the development of sport everywhere for everyone.

It is therefore disappointing that, at the same time that this government is calling for more integrity in sport, it has not led by example. Instead, this government rigged the Community Sport Infrastructure grants to win votes. It was set up to be a merit based funding program, and Sport Australia was tasked with independently assessing project applications from sporting clubs. Sport Australia provided their recommendations to the sports minister based on the grant criteria. Unfortunately, we know now that those recommendations were thrown in the bin. Instead, this government, or the minister's office, instituted a colour-coded spreadsheet of each application, coded by political party and, very importantly, by electorate and whether that electorate was marginal or a target electorate. That spreadsheet, we know now, was sent back and forth between the minister's office and the Prime Minister's office. We were coming up to an election and the government saw an opportunity to exploit the very thing that Australians consider should be fair.

In the first round of funding, 41 per cent of the grants the minister handed out were not endorsed by Sport Australia. In the second and third rounds, as the election got closer, this increased to 70 per cent and 73 per cent respectively. Approximately 43 per cent of the clubs awarded funding were ineligible at the time the agreement was signed. Sport Australia warned the minister that her interference was compromising its independence, but she persisted anyway. When the truth finally came out, the new sports minister, Minister Colbeck, was more concerned with where the leak of the spreadsheet had come from than the conduct of his own colleagues.

This government still refuses to acknowledge what we already know—that the grants were handed out in a biased way to marginal and target seats just before the election to shore up votes that would win the government election but that would not give sports grants to clubs that desperately needed them. These are not professional clubs. They're mums and dads and volunteers, and they spent hours writing applications for local sports teams. They thought their grant applications would be considered on merit against everybody else's. They expected a level playing field. They were told: if they had a go, they'd get a go. But we know that that isn't true.

In addition to the $100 million in grants that were misused under this government's scandalous sports rorts scheme, we also now know that an additional $150 million was spent in marginal seats on swimming pools. Regional and remote communities were flagged in the program's brief as 'key stakeholders'—the regional and remote communities that desperately need this funding, the regional and remote communities that members of this government say they represent—but less than $10 million was actually allocated to rural electorates, whilst Liberal-held, non-rural seats got nearly $110 million of that funding. We now know that this government blatantly abused at least a quarter of a billion dollars in public funds in its desperate attempt to boost its votes in marginal electorates in the lead-up to the election, and who missed out? Mums and dads in sporting clubs in rural and regional areas.

The funding was supposed to be used to develop female change room facilities at sporting grounds and community swimming facilities around Australia, but, when it came to sports rorts 2, no guidelines were even released and no applications were ever called for. Instead, the government pumped more than $100 million into pools for marginal coalition-held electorates. Less than 15 per cent of that funding was actually spent on female change rooms. How many times have we seen the Prime Minister and members of this government stand up in this house, in media conferences, and say that they rorted the system because of female change rooms—because they didn't want women getting changed in sheds? But, when we look at those figures, we know, and the women who are still getting changed in sheds know, that that had nothing to do with these funding decisions.

Quite frankly, female sport deserves better. The government have disgracefully tried to pretend that they had a program aimed at spending money on women's change rooms. I know that women in Innisfail, at the Rugby League club there, in rural and regional Australia, still don't have their change rooms. These are the women that the Prime Minister said he was doing this program for. That's what he said: 'That is why we did it.' Yet a club in Innisfail, which scored 75 from Sport Australia and was recommended for funding, missed out. This government is faking its interest in women's sport, but the women of Australia can spot a dive when they see one. Australians expect integrity in sport and in their government. They expect it both on and off the field and they expect that if they have a go they will get a go.

Labor does support this bill, but it is galling of this government to bring in a bill about sports integrity when they haven't even tabled documents and reports about their own sports rorts scandal. They have an opportunity this week in the Senate to come in here and rectify that problem—to fess up, to give those mums and dads the answers they have been asking for and to fess up to the women of Australia who are still getting changed in sheds and tents out the back. Whether they do that or not is a question of this government's integrity. We know that this government have no integrity. We know that they refuse to answer questions when they're asked. We know that they refuse to do the right thing. This bill must be passed. It introduces good regimes in sport. But it is galling that the government are in here talking about sports integrity when they have none of it.