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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2018-11-07 Daily Xml
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South Australian National Football League

The Hon. L.W.K. BIGNELL (Mawson) (15:27): I rise today pretty disturbed about the South Australian National Football League and the way they are trying to stop freedom of speech in our state. A few weeks ago, parliament heard that the CEO of the SANFL sent out an email to all of their members, telling them not to turn up here on the steps of Parliament House to protest a rally against the government's slashing of the former Labor government's Female Facilities Program. There were a lot of people who are involved in the SANFL who are extremely upset at those cuts, and they are even more upset that they were directed by the SANFL not to turn up and stand side by side with other people, men and women, who were protesting the cruel cuts to women's sport in South Australia.

What we know about the SANFL is that it has always looked after the blokes and the boys. Whenever it comes to funding for the women's part of the game, they do not fund it out their own money: they come and hit up governments to do the funding of those things. If they do get money, they put it straight back into the men's and the boys' side of football. When the women's Crows team entered the AFL Women's league, we had the Crows in to see us and they got $500,000 to help facilitate the extra demand on women's football.

It is great to see so many women and girls playing the national winter sport that has so long been the domain of men. To help cope with that demand, the government gave them $500,000. By the time the season rolled around, the Crows had not bought enough jumpers for fans and young girls and women who were playing the game to get out with Crows jumpers. I think they bought 300 jumpers.

Then we had the SANFL come to see us and they wanted money as well for women's football. They have a lot of money. We built a $535 million Adelaide Oval and the big recipients out of that are cricket and football. So the money is there, while other sports like soccer, hockey, softball, baseball and tennis have been missing out on this high level of funding. The SANFL and the AFL want more and more money from the taxpayers of South Australia.

It is not good enough to keep coming back to seek government funding for women's and girls' football. The SANFL has to take responsibility and ensure they put the right amount of money into the female version of the great game. When we came up with the Female Facilities Program, we settled on $24 million because we knew that it had to be quarantined and delivered to female facilities, not put into other areas. The Liberal government has taken that money, and while they say they will put some into women's sport they will not.

It is not in the DNA of the people at the SANFL to look after women. The organisation is rooted in the past. They have clubs with abysmal financial records and they keep coming to the government for bailouts. That is not good enough, and I urge the new government to correct their ways and take back that money.

Another thing that worries me about the SANFL relates to the 2018 preliminary final, whereby North Adelaide won the game over the Eagles after having 19 men on the ground in the first three minutes of the final quarter. It never should have happened. Has anyone at the SANFL lost their job? Is John Olsen still Chairman of the SANFL? Yes, he is. The only person to be punished is an Eagles ruckman who went on social media to complain about the result. He has been suspended for three matches next year for 'bringing the game into disrepute' by saying that North Adelaide had an extra man on the field, that they kicked eight points in those three minutes and then went on to win by five points. How has he brought the game into disrepute?

The people running the SANFL have brought the game into disrepute. They could have sorted it out after the match, but instead they handed it over to an eminent judge, who then had to make a decision because they were too scared to do so. In the preceding years, they had over a decade to follow the way the AFL changed their rules to make sure that if 19 people were on the ground you did not have to go through an archaic system of getting the team captain to call for a headcount; you could just penalise that team. North Adelaide went on to win the premiership, and that win will always be clouded by what they did in the preliminary final. The SANFL should be ashamed; they are the ones who have brought the game into disrepute, not Eagles ruckman Seb Guilhaus.

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