Female Facilities Program

Ms HILDYARD (Reynell) (15:35): I rise to speak about yesterday's launch of our female facilities campaign—the beginning of our fight for those opposite to reverse their cruel axing of the dedicated $24 million Female Facilities Program. Thank you to the many incredible athletes, administrators, coaches, volunteers and supporters from clubs across our state who attended. Thank you for your voice, for being willing to fight for equality in sport, for those who currently play the sport they love and for the generations of girls and women to come who wish to follow their sporting dreams.

South Australian girls and women are taking to traditionally male-dominated sport in droves. They are taking their rightful place on ovals, courts, pools, pitches, diamonds, coaches boxes and umpires rooms. They are at the centre of teams, leagues and clubs. Those clubs that have positively welcomed them to equally and actively participate are growing, changing their culture and thriving. Despite this incredible progress, there are some things that for too long have not changed.

The gender pay gap in sport means that girls and women are paid at least 50 per cent less than men across all codes, coverage of women's sport still sits at around 9 per cent, female board membership is far too low and their facilities are far inferior to those of male athletes. These are unacceptable statistics, completely at odds with unprecedented participation, and that is why we need positive, dedicated programs that accelerate change that support women's role in every sport.

That is why our former Labor government made a dedicated investment of $24 million into female facilities so that clubs everywhere could build or upgrade change rooms so that when girls and women were at their clubs they knew that they were equally welcome to be there and that they were valued. That is why we set up our South Australian Women in Sport Taskforce, which I had the privilege of chairing and driving, and our female participation grants scheme. We needed to positively focus on making change.

We as a government, alongside many clubs, rightly and emphatically refused to accept that it was okay for women to get changed in a change room with a urinal, one toilet without a sanitary disposal unit or have no access to appropriate facilities, forcing girls and women to change in a car, bar or anywhere in between. We set up our $24 million dedicated Female Facilities Program because in 2018 having such inequality is utterly unacceptable.

We relentlessly focused, through our task force packed with leading South Australians, on attacking gender inequality in sport. Yesterday, the Minister for Recreation, Sport and Racing bizarrely spoke about my not filling in his survey about our task force. Why on earth would I complete a survey about something that I set up, chaired and was deeply passionate about when that survey was clearly the precursor to his cruelly cutting the task force—a task force that was spoken about in their cruel cutting budget as having met all its objectives? The phrase' clutching at straws' comes to mind in relation to this minister, given his clear disregard for the inclusion of women and girls at every level of every sport.

We focused our energy on investing in positive programs to address inequality because that is absolutely what it takes to make change if you truly care about achieving equality. Our $24 million dedicated program was hugely popular, oversubscribed in every round, and it transformed clubs across our state in a way that said to girls and women, 'You are equally valued and you are welcome here.' But that program, together with our task force and our female participation grants, has been cruelly cut.

The $10 million final round of our $24 million program has simply disappeared, leaving volunteers devastated who worked so hard to put in their applications. This government's budget has now cut the $24 million program altogether. They have committed to a $5 million per year program not specifically for women's facilities, contingent on council and club funding and only available to those clubs that can match money and convince council, and it is only available to football, cricket and netball.

When asked about this cut in question time yesterday, minister Wingard said that his government's grants focus on women, families and all South Australians. He clearly does not entirely grasp the meaning of the word 'focus' or what it takes to achieve equality to address inequity. For equality to be achieved in any area, additional support is required to help the disadvantaged group up to the level of others—a concept the minister does not understand. We will fight this cut because our South Australian girls and women deserve better because they matter, because our local clubs matter and because equality matters.