Aaron Violi (Casey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On Saturday I had the absolute privilege of going to the local women's football grand finals with my daughter. Firstly I want to congratulate the senior women's team from the Mooroolbark Football Club. Three premierships in a row—what an achievement. Congratulations. I want to send my commiserations to the women's team from Montrose, who played in that grand final and showed great spirit. Congratulations to them on making the grand final. To the Coldstream women's team, who unfortunately lost on the day, turn up next year. I know Maddy will have them running hard in preseason and looking to go one better next season. Good luck. To the Belgrave South women's team and also the Belgrave South veterans women's team, congratulations on making the grand final. Hopefully you can go one step further next year. Two weekends ago I was at Yarra Junction for the junior football boys and girls grand finals. Healesville had a couple of wins. I know the Wesburn under-17 girls had a great win. My good friend Matt Tilney's daughter Kaylen took home the premiership. That was a big day for their family.

Across the community in Casey and across the country, we are seeing an explosion in young girls and women playing community sport. This is a great thing for our community. It's wonderful to see that they have the opportunity to learn defeat and to learn the joys of victory, hard work and coaching. I've spoken before about the opportunities I had growing up playing sport and how fundamental it is to who I am as a person. But I look back on my junior career and acknowledge that we didn't see young girls and young women playing. So it's so exciting that we see them today.

But we also need to acknowledge the fundamental reality of this explosion, whether it's football, netball or soccer. That reality is that the facilities have not kept up with the explosion in female participation, and we need to do more. I'll give the government credit. It was great to see the Play Her Way program for $200 million last term. It was not quite as good as the $250 million coalition policy, but I will give them credit. We need to keep doing more because we risk losing this opportunity. We have seen this growth in female sport. If the facilities do not match, if they don't have the facilities that they deserve, we risk losing this generation of sportspeople at 15, 16 or 17 years of age. It will be a loss to our great games and to our community sport.

So I urge the Minister for Sport, the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government and the government to continue to invest in women's sport. I'll back them up. The coalition will work with them. I will make sure that, on the coalition side, we put forward policies that make sure that our community infrastructure is at the level it needs to be at so that every young person has the opportunity to build friendships, learn life lessons and make sure that they are better people. When our young people are better, our communities are better and our nation is stronger.