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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 7 Hansard (4 June) . . Page.. 1866 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

One of the great indicators is the extent to which women who play sport receive coverage through our media. I do not know the latest statistics on that, but I can hazard a guess. I know that, six or seven years ago, in comparisons of the coverage of women and women playing sport in the daily metropolitan newspapers of Australia, the average column space devoted to women playing sport was something like 10 per cent of all sports coverage.

I understand, and have always acknowledged, that the one paper that did stand out from the other national metropolitan daily papers was the Canberra Times. The Canberra Times has always led the nation in its preparedness to provide additional media, additional column space and additional photographs of women participating in sport. Even so, the Canberra Times only gets the level of coverage of women's sport up to around 20 per cent of the coverage of all sport.

There is a definitional issue there. We need to be careful about the extent to which one, for instance, regards horse racing or car racing as men's or women's sport, and the extent to which we seek to designate that as men's or women's sport. I think it is fair to do that. On the indicators, or the indicia, used in assessing the extent of coverage in the printed media, women and women's sport receive only between 10 and 20 per cent of all coverage. The electronic media is far worse than that.

It is a classic chicken and egg problem. The owners of the news outlets insist that they will not cover women's sport because women's sport is not valued, or viewed, to the same extent by the community. They say the community are not interested in watching women or women playing sport on television to the extent that they are interested in watching men and men's sport. Perhaps the crowd numbers indicate that, but it is one of the classic "what comes first" questions.

Women are not supported in their pursuit of sport. It is not embraced; it is not encouraged and it is not valued-in fact it is devalued. We have created a culture where sport played by women does not have the same value or should not be supported or resourced in the same way. An almost self-fulfilling conclusion is arrived at in relation to that. The statistics stand for themselves.

It is these sorts of issues that this bill seeks to address. This bill seeks to pursue a cultural change in relation to women and the value of sport for women-indeed, the value of sport for all of us and the need, or demand, for equality. We need equality in recognition, equality in support, equality in resourcing and equality simply in the value of sport to all of us. We must acknowledge that women are, have always been and continue to be, discriminated against in a most serious way when it comes to their capacity to play sport and participate in sport-everywhere, at all levels. That cannot be denied. We all have personal experience of that. Even with funding, governments here in the ACT have always battled, and continue to battle, to ensure that the same level of resourcing goes to women's teams and to support sporting opportunities for women.

At the big picture, or macro, level you can reduce that to the level of support we provide to infrastructure, not just to individual teams-the construction of sports grounds and sports facilities, and the fact that this community has, in the last couple of years, spent $60 million or $70 million on a football stadium. This community, in toto, has not spent $60 to $70 million in the last 20 years on infrastructure for women to play sport, yet we

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