Page 4195 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 24 October 2018
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spending on women’s sport—these facilities are used by both men and women. I need to repeat this extremely important point when it comes to the final “calls on” in this motion.
Clubs give as much as they can to the community. They are not-for-profit organisations. If you impose this additional tax, it means that the clubs are not able to give the same amount to the organisations that they have up until this point. There will be sporting organisations, whether they be men’s or women’s, which miss out.
Ms Cody notes the enormous support that comes from clubs to local and community sports. We all agree on that. But the other reality I wish to point out to Ms Cody is that if we continue to shift the goalposts for our clubs—if we continue to squeeze the clubs through regulations, machine reductions, increased reporting, every other thing that we can come up with—it is absolutely inevitable that clubs will close. I have said it here in this chamber before and I will say it again: once a club has closed the doors, it ain’t going to be giving any support to anyone.
MR RATTENBURY (Kurrajong) (4.07): This is an opportunity to reflect on women’s sport in the ACT. I intend to keep my remarks brief given there has been a long discussion already, but there are a number of elements to this motion. Firstly, it celebrates the ongoing success of some of Canberra’s women’s teams, and a number of members have made reference to that already. I was pleased to hear Ms Lawder reference the 3-0 start to the season for Canberra Caps. It is great to see them back on a roll after a tough season last year. Given their proud history, it is great to see them back in the winners’ circle.
Various other teams have been mentioned today: Canberra United in the W League; the AFL Giants netball teams did extremely well for the ACT this year; and Canberra women’s Rugby League has made significant efforts recently to give women in Canberra an opportunity to play the sport. Across the board we are seeing a surge in participation but particularly the profile of women’s sport. I think this is very encouraging.
In preparing for this motion we did a bit of research on what sort of data was around. There is a very interesting report from VicHealth in 2015. They did a report on female participation in sport and physical activity, and it was a snapshot of the evidence. It made a number of interesting findings that are very important for us to reflect on as we think about how we promote female participation in sport. This is less about the elite teams and more about just general participation.
They found that, overall, females of all ages generally have lower physical activity participation rates than males. That is probably not surprising, but it is always good to put data behind these things. Four times as many females, so 44 per cent, are choosing to participate in non-organised or more flexible physical activity offerings compared to organised physical activity at just nine per cent.
Female participation through sporting or recreational clubs is lower compared to males. Compared to men, women place more importance on the social aspects of physical activity and are less motivated by performance outcomes such as building
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