Tuesday, 26 August 2025

Community sport

Georgie PURCELL (Northern Victoria) (00:43): (1870) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Community Sport, and it relates to sexism in local football clubs. Recently a man in Mildura, using a camera hidden in his wardrobe, filmed and shared a video of him having sex with a woman without her consent. The woman has since described the anguish of having the video shared like wildfire around Mildura and Robinvale, largely in football group chats. He was fined just $5000 for this behaviour. Police chose to withdraw the charge of distributing the sex tape as he argued it was his footy friends who accessed his phone and shared the video without his knowledge. This is not an isolated incident. In fact it comes just after a 19-year-old member of the Werrimull Women’s Football Club reported sexual harassment by a senior male player, only to be ignored. After her mother confronted the player, a committee member approached her and said:

Your daughter is nothing but a …

followed by an incredibly offensive gendered slur. The Werrimull women’s league then chose to boycott the Millewa centenary game in protest.

I have spoken many times in this place about the courage of the Kyneton Women’s Football Club in standing up to sexism at their club, but it should not be up to women to do something about this kind of treatment that they are receiving. If the government is committed to stamping out sexism in Victoria, they must take action to improve the culture in our local sporting clubs. Football clubs have major social influence, particularly in our regional communities, and it seems they are often the last remnants of the worst kinds of misogyny that exist.

Last week the media was also awash in commentary around the use of a homophobic slur by a player in the AFL. The sad truth is that this kind of bigotry is normalised throughout our sporting cultures, and it starts right at the community level. With the recent decision to scrap the Office for Women in Sport and Recreation and the prevention of violence through sports program grants, this government seems to have washed its hands of doing anything about the deeply embedded cultural problems that exist within our local and community sporting organisations. So the action that I seek is for the minister to update the house on what the government is doing to address the very clear cultural issues in community sport.