David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is great to see the parliament starting to talk about the concerns that many Australians have about the huge shift from a play based to a phone based childhood for Australian children and what to do about this and how best to tackle the proven harms of social media. While setting a higher minimum age for Australian children to use social media platforms is important, this needs to be part of a much broader strategy. You can't take something away and then leave a gaping hole. If the Prime Minister wants to say—and I'll quote him here—'I want to see kids off their devices and onto the footy fields, the swimming pools and the tennis courts' then where's the investment in things like community sports, after-school programs and the arts? I hear from people constantly about how much harder it is to get access to these kinds of activities.

Right here, in the nation's capital, we have a chronic lack of facilities, as well as soaring costs for young people who want to get involved. There are currently 500 kids on the waiting list for basketball because there aren't enough courts in the ACT. Scouts is becoming inaccessible because its insurance premiums have gone through the roof. Badminton, pickleball and volleyball all have to compete with each other because there aren't enough indoor courts in Canberra. Inadequate lights and maintenance prevent elite-level soccer and cricket after dark. Even basic things like a lack of change-room facilities for girls and women at Lyneham sports field and at many of our local sporting grounds is inhibiting participation.

More than anything, what I hear from sports in the ACT is the need for a long-term community sports infrastructure plan that lays out how we're going to address these issues. They know it can't all be fixed at once, but they'd be happy if there were a plan and they knew when funding would come. Grassroots sports, the arts and other activities are the backbone of our communities. They bring people together, strengthen community ties and give people a sense of purpose. How can we not be valuing these things as a society? Why aren't we investing in them? If we want to get our kids off devices, we have to actually provide alternatives for them, and that is the opportunity in front of us.

We're lucky in Canberra to have a rich multicultural community that holds regular cultural and religious celebrations. In the ACT, there are over 20,000 people of Indian and Chinese background. We also have big Italian, Greek, Vietnamese, Nepalese and Filipino communities. We have many new and emerging communities, too—Sudanese and Afghan communities, just to name a couple. For these communities, their cultural celebrations are so important—to gather and support each other, and to build new lives in Australia.

At the last ACT election, the Labor-Greens government promised to spend $21 million on a purpose-built indoor venue to be used as a multicultural centre. When this didn't materialise, representatives of our culturally diverse communities asked me to help them stand up to the ACT government and ask: 'What's going on? You promised this. Where is it?' When I raised this with the Chief Minister, he confirmed exactly what the community was concerned about—that they were actually just planning to refurbish a pavilion at EPIC, which seats only about 1,000 people—far less than what's needed—which would not be accessible during big events like Summernats, and which would not be for the exclusive use of the multicultural community. That means it won't be a multicultural centre at all; it will just be another venue.

Canberra's multicultural communities feel extremely let down. Their trust has been broken. The current venues are too small, too expensive, don't have enough seating and don't have commercial kitchens. Food is the centre of many of these events, so a commercial kitchen for self-catering is a must. I had a brilliant work experience student in my office last week who said her mum had been preparing thousands of Indian sweets in their kitchen at home for upcoming Hindu celebrations because there is no multicultural centre she can access to do this preparation. If the ACT government is going to make promises at election time, they've actually got to start keeping them.