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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2024-03-06 Daily Xml
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Davenport Electorate Sporting Facilities

Ms THOMPSON (Davenport) (15:18): Since becoming the member for Davenport, I have enjoyed a good relationship with the City of Onkaparinga. We have partnered on some great projects. We have delivered new change rooms for the Happy Valley Sports Park; we have delivered some incredible upgrades at the Serpentine Reserve, including a half-court basketball court, new practice goalposts, lights, shade over the playground; and we are currently working together on building the Minkarra Link trail, which is a beautiful path which ultimately opens up sections of our community that the community has never had access to before—but today I have a bone to pick with council.

We have some fantastic tennis and netball clubs in my electorate: the O'Halloran Hill Tennis Club, Happy Valley Tennis Club, Valley Vikings Netball Club, Flagstaff Hill Falcons Netball Club and Flagstaff Hill Tennis Club. They pay a lease to council, like most sporting clubs do, for the use of their facilities—their clubhouse and their courts. Tennis and netball also pay annual maintenance fees, and they go towards court maintenance and court resurfacing every three to five years, if they are lucky. These maintenance fees are intended to be a fifty-fifty responsibility arrangement with the asset owner, who is council.

Most of the clubs would pay a $724 per court per annum fee on top of their normal lease fees. For the O'Halloran Hill Tennis Club, who have six courts, that works out to be $4,344 that they pay each year on top of their lease fees for the upkeep of their courts. That is hard to stomach for them at the moment while three of their six courts have been left pretty much unusable and unmaintained.

So when they received a notice from the council, like many other tennis and netball clubs in the City of Onkaparinga did recently, that their court maintenance fees would be going up by an eye-watering 79 per cent, you can only imagine how they felt. They were pretty dumbfounded. It seemed completely unreasonable and, in my opinion, downright outrageous. How can our clubs, who run on volunteers and ultimately on the smell of an oily rag, take on these fees without passing them on to their members?

Have the council considered the impact on families in our community? Have they considered the impact on our young tennis and netball players? I support council going out and seeking alternative income streams to bail themselves out of what ESCOSA recently referred to as financially unsustainable. I support them 100 per cent in seeking new income streams, but bleeding our local sporting clubs is absolutely not the answer.

I have written to council seeking an explanation and also seeking a meeting with those sporting clubs and with a council representative so that we can talk through how this might be ultimately unwound, how council can find other ways of delivering new income streams, how council can get behind supporting their local sporting clubs and their local sporting heroes and how we can get behind supporting tennis and netball for our communities into the future.

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