I rise to speak on the Sport Legislation Amendment (World Anti-Doping Code Implementation) Bill 2026. I know WADA intimately. The locker room is a sacrosanct place for professional athletes. It is where we unwind after the game. It's where we talk about the things that happened. It's where we have it out with each other because something went wrong. It's where we celebrate our wins. You walk in after the game, and there's somebody in there who doesn't belong. They've got a black polo on and their lanyard—it's WADA. They take you to the room and they hand you the cup, and they spend a bit of time with you until you fill said cup. If you cannot fill said cup, as happened to a few of my teammates over the years, you've picked up a friend for the evening; they will follow you until the absolute bitter end. Unsurprisingly, they're not always popular. If you get to a level beyond mine and become an Olympian, they can show up at your house. I had a mate who was taking the dog for a walk, and WADA showed up. They were like, 'This is what we're doing today.' They came with him for a walk with the dog and went to the pool with the kids until they got the cup.

It's inconvenient and it's kind of annoying, and we were not always as polite to them as we should have been, but they gave us the confidence that every game we played was fair. We didn't know when they were showing up. We weren't given any warning. The last time I got tested was in Ballarat, at a 'Taking it to the Streets' Cairns Taipans home game. There was no indication that they might be there; it was a nothing game in the middle of the season against Sydney that didn't matter. But there he was, ready to do his job. He put up with the attitude that he got from a whole bunch of spoilt brat athletes and the jokes that came along with it. He took his sample and he went away, and you wouldn't see or hear from him again unless you were in trouble.

WADA did more than testing; they gave us the parameters in which we had to exist. As an athlete, you have to be incredibly careful about what you put in your body.

You have to know where it came from and what it is. They drilled it home to us every single pre-season. They get the entire NBL together in a room, and they sit down and they go through it piece by piece by piece. 'Stay clear of pseudoephedrine,' 'Don't have too much caffeine,' 'If you are going to use supplements, make absolutely sure that they are clean,' Please don't smoke weed'—that went sideways for a few of my mates, but we knew. We knew the rules, we knew the parameters, and we knew the consequences. Most importantly, we knew the consequences.

Basketball is not a great sport for performance-enhancing drugs. It's a highly skilled sport. If I were 20 or 30 per cent stronger, it wouldn't have made a lick of difference to how good I was as a player. If I had been able to dribble better or shoot better, that might have helped. Maybe I'd have gone to the Olympics. But, for other sports, it can make a massive, massive difference. You can change the way your body moves or the amount of power that's available to you through a decent course of anabolic steroids. If you are playing a sport that requires you to slow your heart rate, be it shooting, golf or even lawn bowls, a decent set of beta blockers will fix that up for you. If you need to be quick off the blocks, pseudoephedrine is the way to go. All of these things give people an inherent advantage, and, when you're at that very top level, you're measuring things in millimetres and you're measuring things in fractions of a second, so any single advantage that you can get is worth something. The fact that these chemicals exist out there, for some, is a temptation that's too high, and you see not only people go down that path and what it does to their bodies and what it does to their reputations afterwards, but what it does to the athletes they're competing against.

Winning, getting a trophy, getting a ring or a medal or whatever is a fantastic thing, but it's the moment that matters. Crossing that finish line and having the crowd erupt matters. Making that shot matters. If you're competing against someone who is not competing clean, they can potentially take that moment from you, and that is the heartbreaking tragedy. They can give it back to you years down the track. They might disqualify things as doping testing catches up with the dopers, but you've lost the moment, and the moment is everything. I don't know where my championship rings are, but I remember the moments, and the moments are distilled into everything that you've worked for, and, for Olympians, you might only get one shot. Your peak athletic performance is measured in not a full decade—27 to maybe 32 at your absolute peak. If you're lucky, you can have two. If you're really lucky, like the member for Hunter—shooting debatable—you can have five.