FEDERAL MEMBER FOR MELBOURNE SARAH WITTY: Hi, I’m Sarah Witty. I’m a Federal Member for Melbourne, and I’m here with the Minister for Sport, Anika Wells, alongside Duré from Collingwood Basketball Association, and Nick from Basketball Victoria. And we’re here to talk about a fantastic announcement, and I’ll pass over to the Minister now.

MINISTER FOR COMMUNICATIONS AND SPORT ANIKA WELLS: Good morning, everybody. We’re just over three years on from when the Matildas had their barnstorming run through the Women's World Cup here in Australia, and really created a lightning bolt moment for women's sport. And out of that, the Albanese Government created the Play Our Way program which was the largest ever investment in women and girls' sport in this country, a $200 million fund. Since we created Play Our Way, we have been awarding grants to really worthy organisations like Basketball Victoria and the Collingwood Basketball Association, who join us here today, and we're here to celebrate the fact that Basketball Victoria has now had 10,000 girls through their courts in the free clinics that they've put on across Victoria, which is a really remarkable number and one we love to celebrate for Play Our Way.

Collingwood Basketball Association also has received money through Play Our Way, just over $480,000, and that's particularly to address that drop-off that we find with girls once they hit 13, trying to get girls 13 and over to try out basketball and to stay in basketball, because we know the massive mental and physical health outcomes that we can achieve for Australians if we can get them playing sport, both as a child and then through their teens.

So that's what we're here today to celebrate, the good work of the Collingwood Basketball Association, led by Bella who has escaped the press conference, but I wanted to give her a shout out because she's doing an amazing job as Head of Girls here, and Duré who is president of the Collingwood Basketball Association, and Nick Honey from Basketball Victoria, getting tremendous numbers out here, one of the biggest participation sports in the country.

So I will give you over to Duré and Nick, and then I'll come back for questions.

COLLINGWOOD BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION ACTING PRESIDENT DURÉ DE WINTER: Thanks Minister, thanks for all coming today and welcome to Collingwood Basketball. I'd just like to warmly welcome and acknowledge the Minister and the leaders of Basketball Victoria for coming and helping us celebrate the impact of the GWP, our Girls and Women's Pathways program here at Collingwood. We've been really lucky enough to have the Australian Government funding through Play Our Way to engage and support local girls, women and gender diverse people to participate in our program, so they get to enjoy the sport that we all love and cherish. As the Minister said, a huge asset in our funding is our Head of Girls, another shout out to Bella Doherty who's doing some incredible work. She, and all the female coaches she works with, has created a safe, supportive and inclusive space where newbies and returnees to basketball feel welcome and celebrated no matter their skills, fitness and comfortability on the court.

We've had over 300 participants so far, many nights and lunchtime sessions of fun, joy and laughter, uniforms and registrations covered, employment pathways for young female coaches and referees. All of this because of the funding through the Federal Government.

We wanted to share one of the stories from one of the participants in our program. She said, “Sport, being competitive, health and wellbeing were values that my brother instilled in me. After his passing, I found it hard to do these things which are a massive part of me. I heard about the GWP program via the Collingwood All Stars newsletter. After the first session, I was hooked. I've never played basketball before. It's challenging and competitive in the most positive way. A really great group of diverse women coming together, celebrating one another and having fun. After each session, walking back to my car, I say to myself, ‘I can't wait till next week.’"

This says so much more than any program summary. It shows how when women, girls and gender diverse people are given the chance, confidence can be restored, identity can be reclaimed and community can be built.

I was going to conclude with some thank yous: to all the schools that we've partnered with, we know that without their support and collaboration, we couldn't do this without them. They do so much for young people in the community and with such little. So I would really like to thank Collingwood College, MITS and Fitzroy High. To the W Club and Darebin Street for all their support and partnership. To all the generous women and gender diverse volunteers around the club, particularly to all the mums who go about all their hard work with little recognition, I see you and thank you from the bottom of my heart. To Sharin Milner and everyone who supported the GWP program. And, finally, thank you to all of our participants who remind us why programs like this exist and why they matter. We're incredibly proud of what's been achieved so far and look forward to what we can achieve for the rest of the funding period. 

BASKETBALL VICTORIA CEO NICK HONEY: Thanks. I’d like to reiterate what the Minister said. The funding provided by the Play Our Way grants has been an incredible enabler, and what I'd suggest is a fantastic investment in women and girls' participation in sport. We like to think basketball as a sport in Victoria has provided a fantastic return on that investment.

As the Minister said, over 10,000 girls have participated in this program since the introduction of it in May. Many of them have been retained to the sport, which was a key goal – to keep girls participating in sport. But a lot of girls are new to sport, and this is what this funding round has enabled, the resourcing and the capacity to bring girls to try new sports and hopefully become lifelong participants. Thank you.

JOURNALIST: Minister, just on women and young girls in sport, how have we seen the uptick of women, young girls in sport over the past, say, five years when we do see on a national stage now broadcast more broadly on TV, people like the Matildas and the women's cricket team. How does that correlate to young girls taking up the sport?

WELLS: Well, that's what we want to see, that girls can see on TV free-to-air, on broadcast, these national beloved women's teams, and believe that there's a place for them in those sports and that they can either play, they can coach, they can become a STEM specialist – we were talking about different sports that need STEM specialists – that there's a place for them in Australian sport.

What Play Our Way has done, a $200 million program, it was specifically designed to try and break down the barriers that women and girls experience when they consider enrolling in sport, trying to overcome – there’s equity issues, traditional access issues. And of the $200 million, about $135 million went to infrastructure, female changing rooms where they didn't exist, that kind of thing. And then about $55 million went to participation programs. So, trying to address particularly, there's a different program here in Melbourne that specifically tries to work with migrant women and girls who haven't ever had to swim, who've come to Australia and are now in a position where they need to learn how to swim but the lessons aren't available.

So trying to address those kinds of barriers and access issues so that when you have great private organisations like the Collingwood Basketball Association, they have supports to help people who are just getting on [indistinct].

JOURNALIST: How can the Australian government say that Australia isn't involved in the war when two Australian soldiers were on board a US sub that sunk an Iranian warship?

WELLS: I think the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Penny Wong, has already spoken to that and you’ll continue to hear from the Australian government as we get more updates from what's happening over in the Middle East. I want Australians out there to know that we are really focused on the 115,000 Australians who remain in the region, trying to support them in what’s obviously a really distressing time for them, and trying to work with them to make sure that there are commercially available flights.

JOURNALIST: So does the government still stand by the fact that Australia isn't involved in this war?

WELLS: Yes.

JOURNALIST: They do, even though- can you confirm that those two Australian soldiers were on that US sub

WELLS: I'm Minister for Communications and Sports, so I'm going to leave this to the Minister for Foreign Affairs.

JOURNALIST: So how many Australians are overseas at the moment? 

WELLS: About 115,000 remain in the region and we are working through DFAT trying to give those Australians as much information as we have as it comes to hand. As you appreciate, this is a fast moving conflict. We're trying to access good information that Australians can rely on and use that to try and get Australians out.

JOURNALIST: Where to from here? Obviously this could potentially go on for five months. People in limbo, what are they meant to do from here, do you think? 

WELLS: We would encourage everybody who has either family in the region or they themselves trying to leave the region to stay in touch with DFAT. We are trying to provide good and accurate information as regularly as possible through the usual DFAT channels. 

JOURNALIST: So I can you confirm you don’t think Australia is still involved?

WELLS: I’ve answered the question.

JOURNALIST: Can you walk us through these changes we're going to see from next week in regards to accessing websites and age verification from the eSafety Commissioner?

WELLS: We have some industry codes that take place from Monday. They have been worked through the eSafety Commissioner and the industry themselves, the industry-led codes. They're designed to provide further protections for kids online, and particularly to address the harms that we all know are happening online. Children getting access or witnessing pornography, children finding content that helps them get into eating disorders, more information about suicide, that kind of thing. So, the industry codes that start from Monday are designed to have big tech, and the people who control these platforms, do more to make sure that Australian kids are safe online.

JOURNALIST: And what would this mean for families as well as, given this affects everyone? Do you think this will, I guess, put a message out to websites that need to make sure they're doing the right thing and protect our most vulnerable?

WELLS: These are industry-led codes where the onus is on industry to do more to protect Australian kids online. We're grateful that industry and eSafety have worked together on those codes and that they're starting 9 March. The Australian Government, obviously is working on our digital duty of care and we're trying to progress that as quickly as we can so that the onus is placed back on big tech to provide a duty of care to Australians as they navigate online, rather than the current system where it's really whack-a-mole trying to police these things and trying to address harm after it's occurred.

JOURNALIST: Any update on the social media ban and the accounts? Any increases?

WELLS: The big tech platforms have to provide monthly updates to eSafety, who is our independent regulator in this space. That happens in tranches, and then eSafety continues to keep us abreast of that as they work through that data. So I think we're expecting a new tranche soon and we'll provide that to you if we can.

JOURNALIST: Should we be concerned for the safety of Australian sailors that are on these ships, US subs overseas?

WELLS: I'm really going to defer those matters to the Minister for Defence who looks after Australian sailors overseas.

JOURNALIST: Looking forward to the F1 this weekend? 

WELLS: So we have a massive weekend of sport. We have a massive weekend of Australian sport this weekend. Today, we've got Alyssa Healy leading out in her final test match for the Australians against India in Perth. We've got NRL season kicking off. That, for me, is the Broncos against the Panthers tonight. First thing tomorrow morning we’ve got the opening ceremony of the Paralympics, and we've just seen Georgia Gunew and Ben Tudhope be selected as our flag bearers to lead Australia out tomorrow morning in the opening ceremony. And then tomorrow night, we've got Taryn Dickens on the biathlon. We've got Amanda Reid, Australia's first Indigenous Paralympian, she's on Snowboard Cross tomorrow night. We've got Josh Hanlon in the Alpine Downhill. And then Saturday night, I've got Lions versus Bulldogs because the AFL season's kicked off as well. Sunday, we've got second round, second day of the Paralympics where we've got Ben Tudhope, one of our flag bearers, contesting the medals in the Snowboard Cross. We've got Lauren Parker, who's a summer Paralympian, multiple gold medallist, coming across to attempt the biathlon for the first time. So we'll all be up watching that.

Obviously, the Australian Grand Prix is a huge international event – so, absolutely, I will be meeting with stakeholders who are converging upon Melbourne this weekend there. I'm going to try and get to the Supercars. I always try and check in with Girls on Track, which is a federally-funded program, which tries to get more women and girls into a male dominated sport, like Motorsport Australia. So they'll be at, I think, Supercars garages this weekend, so I'm going to try and check in on them. But I won't be at the race proper, I'll be at the Tillys. The Matildas are playing South Korea, Sunday night. I think we're second on gold differential at the moment, so we need to win that game in order to try and top the group. Best run through the final series, so charge your phones everybody, big weekend for Australian sport.

JOURNALIST: Was there any communication with you with officials for the F1 when some of the race officials and mechanics and things were struggling to get over to Melbourne for the F1 this weekend? 

WELLS: As you'd expect, the Australian Government worked with the Australian Grand Prix Corporation to try and assist where we could, but as I understand it, between the Australian Grand Prix Corporation, Victorian State Government and F1 and the FIA, the peak body, they manage their logistics, and full credits to Travis Auld and his team for the ceaseless amount of hours they’ve put into that.

WELLS: Thank you.