Daryl Melham (Banks, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Bankstown District Cricket Club has proven to be the most successful club in the Sydney Cricket Association over the past 20 years. Over recent years the club has involved itself in numerous causes, including continually raising money for cancer research, supporting the St George Cancer Clinic and the McGrath Foundation and, this year, directing its efforts to prostate cancer research. It also donated the $20,000 proceeds from a match between its first grade team and the Sri Lankan national team, played as a warm-up to the one-day international series, to the Hope Cancer Hospital, which gives free treatment to underprivileged people in Colombo under the Foundation of Goodness, an organisation set up to assist and educate the orphans of tsunami victims. The club donated Kanga cricket kits to the orphanage in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, set up by Father Chris Riley and assisted by Bankstown MP Tony Stewart for tsunami victims; and it has collected and shipped cricket gear to Uganda.

The club resolved to conduct a campaign to collect, repair, clean, pack and ship as much cricket gear as possible to Uganda. All the gear was sorted, repaired, cleaned and packed by mostly junior club members. In early 2005 a container, containing in excess of 300 bats, 380 pairs of pads, 360 pairs of batting gloves, 80 pairs of wicketkeeping gloves, 100 helmets, as well as protectors, thigh pads, stumps and balls, was shipped to Uganda. The consignment got such a reception and caused so much excitement in Uganda that the club decided to conduct a further campaign in conjunction with the 2007 Sydney Ashes test. Again, the campaign proved successful, collecting similar quantities of gear as before, but this time cricket clothing was also included.

The club shipped a third container a few weeks ago, again with a similar amount of cricket gear together with a huge amount of clothing, including almost 2,000 new cricket shirts from Cricket New South Wales, as well as football equipment and uniforms from various schools, surgical equipment for a Kampala hospital and books and uniforms for the Kikandwa School, which has been set up by a parishioner from the Bankstown Baptist Church. The container is expected to arrive in Kampala at the end of November. The task of shipping containers to Uganda is complex and expensive. It costs about $8,000 each. The club remains grateful to the Bankstown Sports Club, which covered the cost of all three shipments. Since the last container was shipped, donations have continued to come in and the Bankstown District Cricket Club is now aware that its Ugandan project will be ongoing for many years to come.

The wider cricket community has continued to donate the cricket gear, and other organisations and companies have offered merchandise such as surgical equipment, footballs, football boots and uniforms, school uniforms and almost 2,000 mostly educational books, most of which are brand new. The cricket club is to be commended for its activities. We are all proud of them and I wish them success in the current competition as well.