Julie Collins (Franklin, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Community Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to talk in the House today about the Active After-school Communities program. The federal government announced just over a week ago that we will continue with the Active After-school Communities program for 2011 with $43.5 million in funding. I know that in my home state of Tasmania the Active After-school Communities program is very well supported by local schools, by parents, by teachers and by local communities.

The program is intended to engage young children in sport, either through structured physical activity or to have a fun and positive experience and develop a love of sport and physical activity. Nationally there are over 3,000 primary schools that participate in the program from 3 pm to 5 pm each school day, and there are around 150,000 children that are benefiting from this physical activity. In my home state of Tasmania, there are more than 90 primary schools and more than 5,000 school students that participate in this important program. There are more than 14 schools involved in my own electorate of Franklin, and I am really pleased to welcome the news that this program will indeed continue.

Just last week I went to Snug Primary School in the south of my electorate, where one of the coordinators, Brony, received an award for having been a coordinator at Snug Primary School for some time. The children had done a very special little notebook for her with some messages and some drawings about how much they much appreciated her coordinating their Active After-School programs. I also played hide and seek with some of the children. The children at South Arm Primary School showed me some dance and taught me how to DJ, which was great fun. I have played football with the students at Bellerive Primary School and I have been to St John’s primary school with some local basketball champions, where we played some basketball. At Risdon Vale Primary School we did some bike riding with the former sports minister, Kate Ellis; they also do swimming there. So there is a huge range of activities that happen at the Active After-school program in Tasmania. There is AFL, soccer, surfing, dance and hockey, and I learnt the other day that they are going to introduce archery in one of the schools. There is a very wide range of activities and programs that some of these children would not otherwise be able to participate in that are happening in the Active After-school programs.

In Tasmania we also have excellent staff at Active After-School. The state manager, Blair Brownless, works tirelessly and is very well known and very well liked by the school communities. There is Aaron Markham, who is currently on leave. I think he is on his honeymoon, which I am sure is getting him well refreshed to come back into the program. The Active After-school coordinators and the state managers obviously work with local sporting clubs, volunteers, private providers, teachers, retirees and parents—(Time expired)