Seaford Soccer Club

Mr PICTON (Kaurna) (15:37): I rise to speak about an important issue in my local area, which is the Seaford Soccer Club. I have spoken previously about the growth in soccer in the southern suburbs. Particularly, this is a sport that many new migrants to Australia like to play, as well as lots of existing residents of the southern suburbs. It is increasing in popularity both for juniors and for women as well in particular. Today, I would like to add about the support I have given trying to assist the Seaford Soccer Club to upgrade their facilities, for their club rooms, change rooms and toilets as well as the grounds that they need upgrades for as well. This is something I have been working with them on since my election.

In 2014, 2015 and 2016, I have been trying to engage with the City of Onkaparinga to get them to focus on providing support for this upgrade to happen. As people will know, the state government does provide significant amounts of funding for sports facilities to be upgraded, but that support relies, of course, upon council as landowner providing landowner support for those bids. So, it is not something that the club can simply provide their own submission for unless they have the landholder approval for it. This has been something where we have been trying to get the council to agree with it since 2014.

On 20 June 2014, I held a meeting with the Mayor, Lorraine Rosenberg, and the CEO, Mark Dowd, from the City of Onkaparinga, along with representatives from the Office for Recreation and Sport as well as the Seaford Soccer Club and federal MP Amanda Rishworth's office, to look at how we could support them. At that time, the council said they were keen to support the club and realised that there was a need for additional soccer facilities in the south; however, they wanted to ensure that a master planning project happened. They were looking for that to commence in 2015-16 at that time.

I took that as an encouraging sign that such work would be happening in the future. Unfortunately, when we got to 2015-16 and, in particular, when the sporting club wanted to progress with a bid to the Office for Rec and Sport for funding, I had another meeting with Mayor Lorraine Rosenberg and the soccer club to look at that bid for the upgrade of the facilities, and to try and get council landowner support for that upgrade.

At that meeting, the mayor said that she would take that away to the council. Unfortunately, a couple of days later, the mayor forwarded an email to the club from the manager of assets, Mr Britt Gowing, where he said that, unfortunately:

At this point in time we would suggest a feasibility project needs to be completed before we could support a Rec and Sport application for grant funding to upgrade and expand Seaford soccer. Alternatively we could consider supporting an application by the club to undertake the feasibility study which is a different category within rec and sport grant process.

So essentially they said that they would not provide the landholder support for the upgrade at that stage, but they did hold out that some sort of future planning was in the works that would happen; and they said they would support it if the club wanted to go ahead with a planning application to the Office for Rec and Sport. Funnily enough, they did do that. On the advice of the council from that email, the club provided that support and, unfortunately, they were not successful.

We now learn, from a later letter I have, that the council is now saying that, when the Office for Rec and Sport phoned saying that a funding application had been submitted for the planning process, that was the first time they had been aware of the funding application, which I think is not entirely true, given the history of the matter and the previous email from the council.

The latest example is that I wrote to Mark Dowd, the CEO of the council on 25 January 2016 saying that they need upgrades for their facilities and, in particular now, they are looking to redevelop part of their area to get some more practice pitches for the new kids that they have playing there. Unfortunately now we have another letter back from the City of Onkaparinga saying that they cannot support this at this time but are looking at potentially doing more master planning in the future.

I have to say we are running out of time, we do need this funding and this support from the council to go ahead, and I absolutely implore them to support the club and to work with the club cooperatively to make sure that we can get a bid up for this state funding so these facilities can be upgraded in the future.

Time expired.