Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This year the Women's World Cup will be co-hosted in Australia and New Zealand, a wonderful chance for everyone to get behind women's sport and the Matildas, who are, in fact, our most successful national football team. Last week both Football Australia and New Zealand Football were blindsided by a FIFA announcement that Visit Saudi, the Saudi Arabia tourism body, would be a major sponsor of the event. This outrageous decision has been widely condemned by human rights groups and activists, including Amnesty International and former Socceroo Craig Foster.

Until June 2018, Saudi Arabia enforced a ban on women driving and imprisoned many activists who tried to challenge and change this ridiculous law. Saudi Arabia's guardianship law is still in place, a system that means every woman must have a male guardian, rendering them legal minors throughout their life. While Saudi women over the age of 21 can now apply for a passport and travel abroad without permission from their male guardian, considerable male centred legal control still applies when it comes to marriage, divorce, children's issues and custody. Men retain significant rights over women that allow them to file cases for 'disobedience', forcing women to choose between a return to guardianship or imprisonment.

These laws entrench a system of gender based discrimination for women in Saudi Arabia, and neither women playing in this year's World Cup or those who will pack stadiums in Australia and New Zealand to see them play should be forced to accept this obvious attempt to rebrand its image through the guise of sports sponsorship. While the country tries to modernise its image for tourists through sponsorship of women's sporting events, Saudi Arabia continues to impose draconian prison sentences on women like Salma al-Shehab. Salma is a PhD student and mother of two young children who was sentenced to 34 years in prison in August of last year, and her crimes include having a Twitter account and retweeting women's rights activists. Same sex relationships are prohibited in Saudi Arabia, and atheism is illegal and punishable by death. I can't imagine why the Matildas might not want 'Visit Saudi' printed on their jerseys! In October of last year Noongar woman and netballer Donnell Wallam raised her concerns about Hancock Prospecting being a uniform sponsor. The Diamonds' only Indigenous player, Wallam opposed wearing the uniform bearing the Hancock logo as its CEO, Gina Rinehart, has never publicly denounced racist comments made by her father. Hancock, as we know, subsequently withdrew the funding. A public statement from Hancock Prospecting says that it considers:

… it is unnecessary for sports organisations to be used as a vehicle for social or political causes.

As though that wasn't exactly what they were attempting to do by sponsoring the Diamonds in the first place!

Forcing women into a situation where they become walking billboards for organisations—and in this case, the women's world cup, for countries—that often threaten their rights is not fair and it's not part of the job. FIFA's human rights policy prohibits any form of discrimination, including on the grounds of gender. How they can then accept this sponsorship, encouraging tourism to a country that operates every day under system of entrenched gender based discrimination baffles me.

I support the calls of Football Australia, New Zealand Football and human rights advocates in demanding FIFA reject Visit Saudi's sponsorship of the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup. I note that the organisation Women's Agenda is running a petition where people can sign on to call for that sponsorship to be dropped. It's up to 9,000 signatures right now. Please go and add your voice if you think that women shouldn't be walking billboards, and that they certainly shouldn't be for a country that doesn't even accept them as equal citizens.