Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Up there with Real Madrid, as the member for Grayndler said! There are also many other community and school teams. I was at the Rochedale Rovers match on Saturday for their season opener. I want to thank Paul Swindells and the whole executive for making me feel so welcome there, as they always do. I know Underwood Park intimately from growing up just around the corner. I have kicked a soccer ball around Underwood Park more times than I can remember in my 37 years. It is terrific to go back there as the member for their community. They make such a terrific contribution to it, not just to Rochedale.

Mr Van Manen interjecting—

I cannot hear what the member for Forde is saying. That is probably for the best. The motion mentions mental health which is very important. When you talk to some of the service providers in my community, particularly in Logan City, they do talk about the role that football can play in building social capital and giving people the opportunity to understand what services are available—particularly as it applies to new migrant and broader multicultural communities. For an electorate like mine, with 189 different cultural backgrounds, football is a terrific unifier. This weekend we have the Brisbane Roar Harmony Day Community Shield. We have got a club called Logan Metro which makes a special effort to include recently-arrived migrant young players. In late 2014 I hosted some of the former Socceroo greats—Craig Foster, Jason Culina and David Zdrilic—for the World Game Multicultural Festival in my community, which was a terrific success, working with SBS and Access in our community.

My electorate is becoming the epicentre of soccer in Queensland, because Football Queensland have moved their headquarters to Slacks Creek, which is a terrific development for Logan City more broadly but specifically for my neighbourhood. To have Football Queensland there at Meakin Park is something we appreciate greatly, and we thank our friends at Football Queensland for having the vision and foresight and the understanding of football in our community to move the headquarters right into the middle of my electorate.

Beyond football, we also need to think about the role that sport in general plays in our economy. Football is a huge participation sport and is a big contributor to the 137,000 jobs that exist in sport—which creates $5 billion in economic value added each year. More important than the economic impacts, of course, is the contribution it makes to the social fabric.

I congratulate everyone involved in football, whether it be in my local community or around the country, and David Gallop and his friends and colleagues at the FFA. We have had such a good story to tell about football in the last year or so, with the success of the Asian Cup—not just in hosting it effectively, but also in taking out the cup ourselves. It shows that football really is becoming ascendant in Australia. It shows the power and potential of football to enhance cultural ties with our neighbouring economies as well. I am very proud to stand up here and talk about the contribution of football. I thank the member for Forde, and I look forward to working with my football clubs in the years to come.

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