Page 4900 - Week 11 - Thursday, 21 October 2010
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attractive parts of the proposition. There is no doubt that having a clear pathway through will encourage young people to stay involved, to have a team that they associate with rather than necessarily having to leave town to follow their chosen sport. That would be of great benefit to the ACT, and we are not just talking about young men. AFL has a traditionally strong female support base, as well as very competitive women’s competitions right through to the open age. A traditional view of it might be that this is talking about young men, but it actually crosses over the genders and cuts right through the community.
Having another top level sporting team in the ACT with proper role models will encourage greater participation by young people in the ACT, and it will also promote better health. I think the aspect of promoting better health is quite an important one as well as the level of participation. If you have a look at the figures from the Greater Western Sydney website already, the simple participation numbers and, therefore, the health benefits amongst young people, are extraordinary. They had more than 8,000 participants in the AFL Auskick program in Greater Western Sydney alone.
Through community club football, they have access to 26 junior and senior clubs across Greater Western Sydney. Nearly half of the schools in the area are involved in AFL programs, and the Paul Kelly Cup has nearly 2,500 participants from Greater Western Sydney schools. So I think you can see the impact that AFL has in an area where they have not yet had a team. I know the ACT, of course, has a very rich history of AFL. I grew up in Batemans Bay where my Batemans Bay Seahawks played in a south coast competition. We did not make it into the ACT competition, but I know that across the ACT clubs, such as Ainslie and many others have a really proud and deep history. You just have to go to somewhere like the Eastlake Football Club and see the memorabilia on the wall and the list of past champions to know how deep and rich that history of AFL in Canberra is. Taking the opportunity for us to partner with the new GWS team I think will only enhance that rich history.
But, of course, there are benefits for the city as a whole beyond those for AFL tragics in the city. For Canberra there will be television and internet exposure, as these matches will be beamed all over the world and not just in Australia. I know that they are beamed all over the world, because I have a friend who has just been posted to the UK for work purposes and she signed up to some satellite TV company just so she could get AFL matches through the course of the season. We, of course, just saw the match played in China a week or so ago as the AFL attempts to expand coverage and participation around the world.
Obviously there is employment and income for local businesses on match days and, clearly, if we are able to structure the games in a way that increases the number of overnight visitors, all the better for the tourism sector in the ACT. We were just debating that sector yesterday and talking about the many forms in which tourism and events can contribute to the local economy.
I think another interesting factor which has not been touched on so much in the debate already is that GWS has already built strong corporate support in western Sydney. With matches regularly taking place in Canberra, those corporate supporters will inevitably come to this city to follow the matches. I think the possibilities arising from that simple exposure of the ACT and Canberra to those corporate players in western
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