David Coleman (Banks, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to have the opportunity to speak on this important bill, the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority Amendment Bill 2014, about administration of sport in our nation. It may be a cliche to say that sport is very tightly bound up in the Australian identity but it is absolutely true. I think the vast majority of us are great fans of our sports teams. Some of us aspire to play on the team and many more of us just aspire to cheer. It is very important that there is integrity in the administration of sport and it is very important that the rules around antidoping do everything they can to ensure that integrity.

One of the great things about sport is that the best player should win. The person who wins should be the person with the most talent, the person who trained the hardest in the team that worked most closely together, and that is all that any of us want. We want to make sure that sporting events are won and lost on their merits because we all care about sport.

My first memory of being a viewer of sport was the 1981 Ashes tour of England. It is a bit of an unhappy memory for an Australia cricket fan, but I think we all have our memories of Australia's involvement in sport. For kids in particular, sports people are their heroes. Sporting leaders are much more exciting for our children than their parents and certainly more than politicians. It is really important that the system is administered in a sensible and fair way.

Not everything is fair in the world, but everything should be fair on the sporting field. That is a very important point. It is also important that the administration of sport is conducted in a sensible and calm fashion and that also applies to antidoping provisions. We do not need Hollywood-style press conferences with flags arrayed and designed for effect. We need a sensible and calm approach to these matters. I was disappointed last year to see the press conference by the member for Blaxland and Senator Lundy in relation to these issues. Without getting into the specifics of any cases, I did not think that that press conference was consistent with the idea of a sensible, dispassionate and unemotional administration of sport and specifically antidoping provisions.

This is not an area that should be politicised. This is an area where all Australians should be on the same page, one where we demand fairness in our sporting events and we demand that our individual players do the right thing. Importantly, we need to do this as part of a global effort because, if Australia has different rules from other countries in relation to antidoping then, of course, that is not a level playing field. Just as we would expect that a Belgian athlete, a French or a British athlete or whoever complies with the fair rules of play, so should we. Our rules cannot be different; to do so would be inconsistent. If we want to hold ourselves to the highest standards, we must opt-in to a global system of administration, as we do in so many other aspects of administration. We should not get to pick our own set of antidoping rules. We should be a part of a global coalition, effectively fighting against this evil scourge against our sporting endeavours.

This bill ensures that the Australian provisions in relation to these matters are consistent with those adopted by WADA across the globe—of course, ably led in previous years by a former member of this House, former Premier of New South Wales, John Fahey. WADA does the important work of ensuring that our sports are clean. We do not need to dwell on those unfortunate examples of past events at the Sydney Olympics, obviously events in the sport of cycling and others as well. We know that this is a real issue and we know that we have got to act upon it, and act upon it we shall.

There are a number of changes which will bring us into line with WADA rules. One is prohibiting athletes from associating with convicted drug cheats, similar to criminal association type laws we see in the criminal laws in many state codes. It is an important issue here because we do not want our athletes, frankly, hanging around with people we know are drug pushers. It is important that that is stamped out. Complicity in this area, covering up on behalf of another athlete, is absolutely unacceptable. It is not only the case that you should not cheat yourself; you certainly should not facilitate anyone else's cheating, and we will be making sure that that is the case under this set of rules. Penalties will increase from two years to four years for deliberate doping infractions for the more serious drugs such as anabolic steroids, and that is absolutely appropriate because this is a very serious matter.

There are a range of other initiatives as well: a more sophisticated testing regime as required under the WADA code and establishing a violations list that formalises the requirement to publish a list of people that have received an antidoping sanction. Let's be transparent—if someone is found to have been involved in doping, frankly, let's tell the world. Let's make sure that people know about that, because these are not the sorts of people we want in sport and we do not want this to be something that is swept under the carpet. It also creates a new review panel, the Australian Sports Drug Medical Advisory Committee, separate to ASADA, to provide a mechanism for athletes who apply unsuccessfully for a therapeutic use exemption where they have a legitimate use for a drug which would otherwise be out of bounds. That is an important change.

There are a number of other technical matters, importantly, allowing ASADA to say something publicly when athletes or their representatives make incorrect statements. It has happened, unfortunately. I think we have all seen examples where athletes and their representatives have come out and criticised ASADA or other bodies for the method in which drug sampling is undertaken and have made inaccurate statements. It is appropriate that ASADA can effectively defend itself from those sorts of accusations.

This is a really important piece of legislation. This is fundamentally about fairness. That is all any of us can ask. We love our sports teams, we love what they represent—they represent the very best of Australia, they work hard, they play by the rules and they are great heroes for many of us and, very importantly, for kids. I would dare to suggest that for most kids the first figure in their life that they really look up to and really aspire to be one day is a sporting hero. We have got to make sure that Australian kids when they have that hero do not get let down and do not have a situation where they find out that actually that person was not playing by the rules, because that is sending exactly the wrong message. This is an important set of provisions and I am very pleased to speak in support of this legislation today.

See this speech in context