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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2016-02-23 Daily Xml
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Women's Australian Open

Ms WORTLEY (Torrens) (15:06): My question is to the Minister for Tourism, Recreation and Sport. Will the minister update the house on the recent Women's Australian Open golf tournament held in Adelaide?

The Hon. L.W.K. BIGNELL (Mawson—Minister for Agriculture, Food and Fisheries, Minister for Forests, Minister for Tourism, Minister for Recreation and Sport, Minister for Racing) (15:07): I thank the member for Torrens for the question. In this year's state budget we put an extra $35 million into the tourism sector. A lot of that money was aimed at getting new events for South Australia, and for the first time since 1994 South Australia played host to the Women's Australian Open down at the Grange Golf Course and it was an outstanding success.

We only won the right to host the event late last year, so we had a fairly short lead time. Golf Australia was predicting that about 15,000 people would turn up, going on the numbers that it had in Melbourne and Canberra in previous years. I am really pleased to tell the house that 31,000 people turned out over the four days to see the best golfers in the world.

The Hon. A. Koutsantonis: How did you go when you did your demonstration?

The Hon. L.W.K. BIGNELL: Yes. And so we had many of the world's best golfers here, including the world No. 1, Lydia Ko. She is a New Zealander and just 18 years of age, the youngest ever person, male or female, to be the No. 1 in the world of golf, and just an outstanding sportsperson and human being.

She was beaten into second place by the Japanese golfer Haru Nomura who shot a seven under for an overall total of 16 under to finish four shots ahead of Lydia Ko. What we learnt from this is that golf is popular not only with South Australians but also with people from around Australia and, indeed, overseas, and it was great to be out on the course running into visitors from Korea, Victoria and other parts of the country, and what we want to do is to build on that.

Of course, this is an exciting time to be in South Australia, with the Fringe going on. We want to bring the arts more into the golf tournament and the golf tournament more into the arts precinct, and we have got some good ideas on how we can do that next year. I happened to be playing with Mick Molloy, one of the great comedians, in the pro-am—

The Hon. T.R. Kenyon interjecting:

The Hon. L.W.K. BIGNELL: —he is a very straight driver and a straight talker—and with Lydia Ko on the Wednesday in the pro-am. He suggested that there are a lot of good golfers among the comedians and that, maybe, we can do some sort of special event that crosses over both things.

I think in the area of sports diplomacy, which this government is getting better and better at, that we should probably invite the ambassadors from Korea, Japan, China and some of the other countries that are involved in the game. We have players from 26 nations taking part in the Australian women's golf open and it is an enormous opportunity to show off Adelaide. It was televised throughout many parts of the world to an audience of 200 million people.

I must congratulate and thank the ABC for telecasting the event around Australia, with an audience of a million people tuning in to see beautiful South Australia. To the Grange Golf Club, well done on presenting your course in an immaculate condition and providing people from around the world with a wonderful experience.

Next year the tournament will move to Royal Adelaide and the following year it will be played in Kooyonga. We are looking to build on this event and working with the major sponsor, ISPS Handa, and I thank Dr Haruhisa Handa and his executive assistant, Midori Miyazaki, for their contribution. This event was worth AU$1.85 million, which makes it the richest purse for any golf event, men's or women's, anywhere in Australia this summer.

I think it is terrific to see women's sport at this level, where the prize money is better than the men's, because we need to lift the standards, and that is something that we are doing as a government. We've done it with the women's Tour Down Under, bringing that up to world standard, and we want to bring even more top-class elite women's sport to South Australia.

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