ASC CEO Kieren Perkins says sports funding needs a wider focus. Photo: Ian Bushnell.
Australian Sports Commission CEO Kieren Perkins put the cat among the stadium pigeons at a Property Council event on Thursday (26 June), questioning whether public money should go to a facility serving commercial football codes while community sport languishes.
A new Canberra stadium is slated for the Bruce precinct, but sits behind other big infrastructure projects in the government pipeline, such as the Convention and Entertainment Centre in the city.
A site is still to be determined for the potentially billion-dollar project, but a government spokesperson said a feasibility report should be ready in a couple of months for a location to be selected.
Olympic swimming great Perkins told the From Sidelines to Stadiums: The Future of Sporting Infrastructure forum that only about one per cent of the sporting population was involved at the elite level, while millions faced a huge number of barriers to participating in their sport of choice.
Along with cost, one of the biggest challenges was access to infrastructure, Mr Perkins said.
“I understand why everybody wants to see a much better stadium in Canberra,” he said.
“That will have great impacts when it eventually does come for everybody, much the same as the conversation in Brisbane about the facilities that need to be built there, but I really want to test us as a community who is passionate and interested in sport.
“Are we really servicing our country best when we focus all of the time, or predominantly, on delivering an outcome for the one per cent of the population who have the access, the opportunity and the capability to be involved in elite commercial sport?”
Mr Perkins, who is overseeing a redevelopment of the Australian Institute of Sport precinct, said there were more than 11 million people across the country who wanted to play sport and be involved in physical activity.
“We have more people wanting to play sport than facilities to enable them to be involved in sport,” he said.
Mr Perkins asked whether Australia was giving itself the best chance to be an active nation, to have a community that’s fully engaged and involved in sport at all levels, which then can produce elite athletes.
“So that those odd few lunatics like me who are willing to actually sacrifice everything and everyone in their lives to go on and ultimately be an elite athlete, have wonderful systems of high performance support facilities and engagement to enable us to do that and then shine on the world stage.”
What the new Christchurch stadium will look like. Image: Besix Watpac.
Financing a new stadium will need Commonwealth support and even with that, the numbers involved are challenging.
The forum raised the possibility of a Public-Private Partnership that could help manage the cost.
Mark Baker, CEO of Besix Watpac, which has delivered a number of major Australian stadiums and is building the new 30,000-seat Christchurch stadium, said PPPs were not usually used in sporting infrastructure but a version of the idea was worth exploring.
“PPPs are definitely a form of procurement and a form or a way of using private finance to fund public assets,” he said.
“It’s just that governments need to think: Are you open to exploring different ideas with the private sector as to how that might come together?”
Mr Baker said most recent PPPs in NSW and Victoria were called incentivised models with much more collaborative arrangements that could reduce public costs.
He said that early collaboration in such a project, as had been the case between his company and the Christchurch City Council, could bring construction costs and timeframes down.
“It wasn’t just about optimising the design, it was actually optimising the sequencing, the methodology of the supply chain, what the capability of the local market was,” Mr Baker said.
The government will pursue a PPP for the Convention Centre but the stadium is a different proposition, mainly because these facilities rarely make money.
The Property Council has consistently backed the stadium and Convention Centre projects, supported by public transport and linked to accommodation and the night-time economy.
Property Council ACT & Capital Region executive director Ashlee Berry said these were catalytic assets that would shape the city’s identity and performance for decades.
But with the parlous state of the ACT Budget and a new stadium unlikely to be completed until 2033, as per the government’s infrastructure pipeline, Ms Berry urged the ACT Government to prioritise upgrades to existing infrastructure.
“If a new stadium isn’t on the immediate horizon, the government must allocate sufficient funding to upgrade what we have and ensure our facilities are fit for purpose,” Ms Berry said.
