Page 4197 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 24 October 2018
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they can do something they go on to perhaps more challenging events or remain happy with what they are doing.
We still have some work to do in this space. I acknowledge the various initiatives undertaken by the ACT government, including by the current minister, Minister Berry. I certainly support the calls in Ms Cody’s motion that we continue to ensure equity and access to sporting facilities, think about how to deliver and encourage participation in women’s sport, and look at ways of ensuring that there is more funding, including through the community clubs contribution scheme.
I do not think that is the only pathway, but it is one pathway where in government policy we can take the lead in making sure we are setting parameters that encourage more funding into women’s sport. The Greens are pleased to support this motion today.
MS CODY (Murrumbidgee) (4.14), in reply: Again, I should not be surprised by some of the comments today, but I am. I thank Mr Rattenbury for some of his comments. Although Mr Rattenbury spoke about the data he looked up in the Victorian report, I agree that a lot of that stuff is intuitive. I know as a mother with young children that it was hard to find the time to participate in sport. I agree with Mr Rattenbury in that triathlon in particular, my current chosen sport, is very good at segregating the time frames to allow all members of a family and children to participate.
I am involved in triathlons that often happen over a two or three-day period to ensure that everyone can participate and that there are several distances for men, women, and children; for anyone who would like to undertake sport. It is those sorts of initiatives that can help; initiatives that can ensure that women who have caring responsibilities do not continue to feel guilty when they try to participate. We must ensure that we have conversations and initiatives where women do not feel ashamed that they might miss out on a school pick-up or they might miss out on taking their child to a sport.
It is really important that we continue to have these conversations in places like this, here in the Legislative Assembly, where we make laws and set policy around how we can fund women’s sport in particular but sport in general and how we can think of better initiatives to encourage more women to participate.
As I said, I should not be surprised anymore in this place but, yet again, we heard Mr Parton’s misogynistic comments about women’s sport. Yes, I did call for opportunities we could look at through the community clubs contributions scheme and ways we can contribute more of that money to women’s sport in particular. In 2016-17, 61 per cent of all community contributions made by the sector were to sport and recreation. But of that only about $300,000 went to women’s sport. That is a lot of money some may say, but it would be interesting to see how much of it went to men-only sport.
Ms Lawder referred to a number of teams that the Vikings, in particular, support. I know for a fact that a lot of those teams are men-only or mixed teams; they are not
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