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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (21 November) . . Page.. 4103 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

a futsal stadium. It was curious. There was no futsal stadium. All sorts of other things with emerging needs were talked about. Badminton and table tennis were talked about as having emerging needs that might be needing some support in the future. I read all the fine print, all the big print and all the print in between, and nowhere did I find futsal.

That was all right. We thought, "Aha! The Estimates Committee hearings are coming up. We will ask the Minister what is the secret". Lots of sporting groups come to me all the time wanting money. I thought, "This is the time to ask the Minister what is the secret. How do you get from nowhere on a 10-year plan to No. 1 on the top of the list?". What did we find? The Minister did not give us an answer at all. In fact, the Minister said that he did not think that anybody was in the least concerned about their funding, that they were all perfectly happy. But what the Minister did not know was that our intrepid Mr Moore was not going to be outdone by this. He had the other bits of paper - the grants that had already been given. And what did the grants show? They listed a whole series of groups that had asked for lots of money and, beside it, what little bit of money each of them was given.

From this Mr Moore quite cleverly drew the inference that perhaps there were lots of groups that would have liked more money. Did the Minister produce the secret for getting from nowhere on a 10-year plan to No. 1? No. We tried. Instead of being too aggressive, we thought, "Maybe there is a factor in all of this that we do not understand". Of course, what we did not add to the debate was that we had been approached at various phases and asked not to spoil this attempt for SOCOG in case we got blamed for upsetting this great international conspiracy that was going to bring futsal to the ACT. So, we thought, "We will not get too aggressive about this. We will just note the fact that the Minister has no idea how, from nowhere, on a 10-year plan, we suddenly get a futsal field". Perhaps it was as much of a surprise to him as to anybody else in this city. As Mr Pryor quite nicely put it in the cartoon, mushrooms do spring up, except that this one cost $250,000.

We thought, "Maybe we will just be gentle. We will ask the Bureau of Sport, Recreation and Racing to do some further policy work, read between the lines, and tell us when you are going to build futsal fields". We got the extra policy work. I cannot help myself; I have to read this into Hansard. If Mr Moore was a little worried about the previous comment, this one is truly one of the most puzzling of the answers:

The Bureau of Sport, Recreation and Racing has consulted widely in developing a 10 year Facilities Plan. It will continue to do so through ACTSPORT and the Sport and Recreation Council.

That is good. It went on:

The 10 year plan will be reviewed in 1997 to ensure that emerging needs are identified.

One hopes that no more surprises will appear, but one is not sure. So, this plan is going to be reviewed.

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