GEORGIE TRICKETT, CO-HOST Libby, imagine a cold, winter's morning here in Brisbane.

LIBBY TRICKETT, CO-HOST: No. No thank you, because it actually does get cold here.

G TRICKETT: It really does get cold here, and it’s still dark. But this one morning that you're out, it's actually pretty quiet because it's not a weekday, it's a Saturday morning.

L TRICKETT: And my question would be, my follow-up question would be, why is anyone out on a very cold and dark morning?

G TRICKETT: Because of sport?

L TRICKETT: Yes, that whole caper.

G TRICKETT: Specifically one community event that has absolutely revolutionised what Saturday mornings look like here in Australia. And a lawyer from Brisbane has dragged herself out of bed not to just join in, but to set one up. As she marks the course and rallies the volunteers, the sun starts to rise on another parkrun.

L TRICKETT: I have to say, bless all parkrun volunteers for giving us a reason to get out of bed and move on a weekend.

G TRICKETT: And how incredible to think that the person who is setting up the witches' hats and organising those volunteers went on to become the person who is organising and running sport in this country, Minister for Sport Anika Wells.

L TRICKETT: That is very cool.

L TRICKETT: This is Sportish, and I'm Libby Trickett, Olympic swimmer, mum of five kids and an avid fan of the sports documentary format.

G TRICKETT: It's honestly hard to find one she hasn't watched yet. I'm Georgie Trickett, a former average softballer and an elder millennial who's just got comfortable in the weights room at the gym. This season is powered by the Australian Sports Commission, highlighting Australia's sport participation strategy, Play Well.

L TRICKETT: It's all about creating fun and inclusive sporting experiences for all Australians, because everyone has a place in sport.

G TRICKETT: Anika Wells is the Federal Minister for Sport and Communications.

L TRICKETT: Minister Wells, we are delighted to have you here on Sportish.

MINISTER FOR COMMUNICATIONS AND SPORT ANIKA WELLS: it’s great to be with you in our hometown, and Anika's fine.

L TRICKETT: Anika.

G TRICKETT: Well, that was going to be my next question, because we've never actually had a minister on the podcast before.

WELLS: What an honour.

G TRICKETT: So if it's okay, we'll refer to you as Anika from now on.

WELLS: Everyone in Brisbane just calls me Anika.

L TRICKETT: And not Wellsy?

WELLS: I do get Wellsy. We’ll have to see where this podcast goes.

G TRICKETT: It’s too soon.

WELLS: If you want to lean in, that’s fine.

L TRICKETT: Yeah. Okay.

G TRICKETT: There are many portfolios in a federal government. Is it fair to say that being the sports minister is the one that everyone wants to get?

WELLS: It's definitely hotly contested, but it is polarising. I think I have colleagues who are mortally jealous of the things I get to do as the Australian Sport Minister. And there's also colleagues who regularly tell me, I'm so relieved I'm not the sport minister, I could never go and try to play hockey row on Lake Burley Griffin or keep tabs on all the stats coming in overnight from Jess Fox in Europe, or whatever it is. So it's definitely two firm camps. But I'm very pleased to say I’m in the I can't believe my luck camp.

L TRICKETT: I want to know what sport looked like for you growing up in Brisbane. How did it play out in your household growing up?

WELLS: My dad did a lot of triathlons. So I think he did marathon, then when his knee gave out, he went to triathlons. So I remember a lot of Sunday mornings getting up before dawn, being put in the car to go watch dad compete in triathlons. So that was the participation element, I guess. And then we were a Brisbane Bears family.

L TRICKETT: Yes.

WELLS: Dad's from Victoria, mum's a Kiwi. So Brisbane Bears was sort of the family team growing up before they became the Lions, obviously. And then at school, I did a bit of everything. I think I'm more like you, Georgie. I'm a participator.

[Laughter]

G TRICKETT: And that's fine.

WELLS: Anyway, once I made the regional cross country, it was very exciting. That's about as high as it went. So I did artistic gymnastics until I got too tall, and then I did rhythmic gymnastics in high school, netball – obviously as an Australian girl, I did a lot of netball, ended up umpiring netball - that was probably my first job, umpiring netball. Softball, I did t-ball and softball, and I tried volleyball in high school as well. So lots of different things, never one particular passion.

G TRICKETT: It's absolutely something that comes out in the research, the more we can be broad in the sport. So you followed all the right things, you did all the right things when it came to sport.

WELLS: And yet that call never came.

G TRICKETT: And that's okay.

L TRICKETT: Did you guys have the selectors come around and do the beep test?

WELLS: Oh, yes.

L TRICKETT: Don't you think that was so exciting?

WELLS: I think part of Brisbane 2032 coming means that all of our kids and a generation of Queenslanders get to have that selectors’ moment. I remember a girl in my school was an artistic gymnast and she ended up going and representing Australia in the Comm Games in weightlifting, because that explosive power that she had from gymnastics was able to be converted to weightlifting.

L TRICKETT: So last year, the Federal Government brought in a ban with social media for our under-16s. What do you feel like is the opportunity there for sport to kind of play a role to fill a void for so many of our teenagers across Australia?

WELLS: Yeah, that's why at the election the PM kept me in sport and moved communications and sport together, because our vision is we want kids off the devices, onto the fields, off the devices, onto the courts, pitch, whatever particular…

L TRICKETT: Pool.

WELLS: Pool, whatever particular sport takes your fancy. Putting those two together has given us a few intersectional opportunities that otherwise wouldn't have existed. We also have something called Sporting Schools, which a lot of people don't know about, but 10,000 Australian students every day participate in sport at their school because the Federal Government pays it to go into schools. So you don't have to have parents who can drive you somewhere for training. You don't have to have access to a local club. They’ll come to you. I know I went and saw a flag football program in Cairns that we were debuting because flag football is going to be at the LA 2028 games. They're trying very hard to be selected at Brisbane 2032 as well. Flag football is in its naissance in Australia, but there's a lot of parallels with other football codes that Australian kids might already be good at or passionate about. So just giving them the opportunity to try that without the risk of parents having to sign up for a season, you know, and then drag their child for the 10 weeks after they've stopped being enthusiastic about it.

G TRICKETT: Do you think our sports and codes recognise the opportunity that exists now with the social media ban, that there is this gap that needs filling and that they could play such a big role in it?

WELLS: I don't think anyone in the Australian sporting ecosystem is any doubt about the opportunities of sport. We're a sport mad country. There's an infinite number of funding ideas and initiatives that we could fund in a world with infinite money to do it. I think the tricky thing about Brisbane 2032, the opportunity is it's our North Star. Everything is building to 2032, but the sequencing has to be right. So in a world where everybody wants to upgrade their facilities because they might host the French tennis team for two weeks in the run-up to the games, I've been trying to think really thoughtfully about what must we fund 10 years out? What must we fund nine years out? What can wait until one to two years out? So for us, it's the participation programs now. So we have the biggest base as possible of children and young Australians who are given the opportunity, making sure our high performance streams are really great because we know people who make podiums have participated usually at least one games before. So that means we need our biggest team going to LA28 to give us our best chance of medal success in Brisbane 2032.

Those programs, you can't start in 2031. You've got to have them right now. So that's where the emphasis in our funding has been. And we doubled the Paralympic funding, which is one of my proudest things we've done in the Albanese Government. So that's up to $57 million now, and that's because there's a real opportunity for Para to shine at Brisbane 2032, but they've got to have the ability and the resourcing to pull that all together now.

L TRICKETT: You're starting to talk about how important participation is. And we know that the more people that we get involved, the bigger the talent pool, the better our results are going to be at the highest level. Can you tell us more about why the government is wanting to kind of invest in participation and how we as a community can do that better?

WELLS: Well, I think the PM really sees it as a preventative health measure. You know, the more people that we can have in sport, the better our overall primary health system is. And that's why we originally placed it in the Health portfolio before it moved with me to Communications and Infrastructure, which is where it is now. I think, again, no one disputes the value of sport in Australia. But the nature of how we interact with each other is changing as we move online. And you probably would see it, that P&C meetings aren't as well attended anymore, people don't go to a town hall to discuss politics. They do it online in their particular tribal group, wherever they associate online. Community sport is one of those last vestiges of places where people do still turn up every single weekend. And I noticed that when we started parkrun, which was in 2015, Chermside parkrun. In a way that church still operates for some people, you see someone every Saturday morning. You might not know where they live, you know that it's near you. But you also notice they turn up every week and you notice when they stop turning up. And someone will say, oh, I haven't seen Andrew in a while, and someone will check in on them, and it might be because something terrible has happened. It might be because they've just gotten a bit slack. But that community, we've had all our babies through Chermside parkrun. It’s so nice to see people go through their pregnancy and then have the baby and then have the baby in the pram, and then like 2015 now, 11 years on, we've got kids who were pregnancy park runners who are now running it on their own. I know in the regions in particular, community sport clubs have that same value. So for us at a time where I think lots of Australians are worried about our social cohesion, making sure that sport continues to be the lifeblood of communities, whether it's suburban communities or regional communities, has a lot of value beyond the actual health benefits and values that we learn at sport.

G TRICKETT: We know that the research continues to tell us that girls are dropping out of sport. And there's always this idea that it's because things get too busy and they're losing interest. But in fact, what we know is that it's a sense of belonging that's missing when it comes to teenage girls in sport. And there's been recent research that's come out of the UK, it's the Let Her Dream results, that indicate that girls are less likely more than ever to see themselves at the top of sport. Is that something you think is happening in Australia as well?

WELLS: We have research that comes out of the Australian Sport Commission too that says similar, AusPlay data. So we tried to address that in one way through Play Our Way, which was the $200 million fund to try and boost women and girls' participation in sport. And what was unique about the way that we ran that program is that we said, you tell us what you need rather than us saying this is a change rooms funding facility, and you either meet the criteria or you don't. You tell us what you need, and then we had a panel of high-performance female athletes adjudicate what should be selected. So it took lots of different forms.

Like, remember I visited a swimming pool in Melbourne and they had migrant women learn to swim class and because of cultural dress, they closed off the pool on a Sunday night. These women now have kids who are being born in Australia, who might be native swimmers, but they themselves have never been taught to swim. And this was giving them access and getting them into swimming in a way that was helpful to them to be able to go to the beach with their family. But also, it's good for us and life-saving. So other initiatives I can remember is, this is a community that has lots of kids who want to play sport but not necessarily parents with cars to drive them, we need a bus to pick everybody up and drop everybody off. Or we need lights because field time is so contested if we get lights, and everybody wants lights, I must say.

[Laughter]

L TRICKETT: Yes.

WELLS: Every single field in Australia needs lights because everybody needs more field time. But what we also said is when you make your pitch to us about what you need, tell us what you're going to do differently around the club. So, for example, if it was a pitch about fields, they'd say, and we're not just going to have the men's seniors side have the best training times and the best field times and have the women train at 9pm on a Friday night. We’re going to prioritise women and girls training so that it's more accessible. So I think there's so many of those stories coming through, will warm the cockles of your heart that we are doing more, but it's just such a big project. That was a $200 million fund, which was double, I think, than had ever been invested before. We were oversubscribed to the tune of a billion dollars. Like, we could have done it five times over.

L TRICKETT: It's incredible. We're still hearing stories of women leaving national and state-based organisations in the leadership teams because we hear again and again about how males are just uninterested in women's sport and women's perspective on sport. As the leader of the Sports portfolio in Australia and one of the highest profile women in sport, why is female leadership so crucial to that sporting ecosystem?

WELLS: You can't be what you can't see. Sounds trite, but it remains emphatically true and important. We have put in a policy about women in governance where you now have to have 50 per cent women representation on the boards of sports. That'll kick in next year.

G TRICKETT: Is that all sports?

WELLS: Well, basically, if you want to be funded by the Australian Sport Commission, which is how we hand out money to sports and to national sporting organisations in Australia, if you want funding certainty, you will meet 50/50 board requirements. Now the day I announced that, some sports met it already, they've been doing the right thing all along. There'll be some sports that will be asking for exemptions when we hit the deadline next year, and that speaks to the cultural issues you're talking about.

I've also now been lucky enough to be Sport Minister for four years and we've seen waves, I think. I remember a time early on when we had a whole lot of women CEOs and people were really excited about what that meant. But then a few of them left at short notice in tricky circumstances, and it was a greater disappointment that we thought we were making progress and it had fallen away. And I think something we say in progressive politics is, progress isn't a linear line, it zigs and it zags. And we have to keep fast to our values and keep plodding away, even when it feels like all our progress has been eroded.

G TRICKETT: Building off that, we've just seen Emma Lawrence become the first female play-by-play caller in the NRL. How much do you think we need to see more female voices in that world of sports media?

WELLS: Yeah. Too much is never enough, as they say in sport. But congratulations, Emma. We also have Kelly Underwood on the AFL side, and I really enjoyed Alyssa Healy over summer…

G TRICKETT: Brilliant.

WELLS: …in the cricket. I actually, again, as Comms Minister, said to Seven, sorry, I've crossed over to the Foxtel coverage this summer because I enjoy listening to Alyssa so much. But I wanted them to know that females have pulling power. Like, I really like how Alyssa does it. So yes, it is just as important for our little boys watching sport. And I don't know if you find this with your kids, but the apparatus that my kids pick up really seems to depend on what they're watching on the TV. So when Dolphins trials were on, they were jumping off the couch and pretending to lap swim to the TV and back. They're picking up the netball, they're picking up the soccer ball. It's important what they see on TV because it influences their decisions. So we must have females in all positions, not just playing, but commentary, production, CEOs of media companies, editors of newspapers and running the new media. Because that is ultimately the editorial decisions that our kids experience.

G TRICKETT: And it's actually- really, it's an interesting point about the influence it has on children, because I think as well in our household, my son didn't realise that boys played soccer because his first experience of soccer was the Matildas. And he literally sat at Suncorp and just looked at me and said, do the guys get to ever do this? And I thought, it's so amazing. We have now taken him to some men's sport. But it's really interesting of what you expose kids to and what they then accept as normal in the world of sport.

WELLS: Yes, we had the same - boys play soccer too. And when Celeste, my nine-year-old, was seven weeks old, I took her to the first AFLW Grand Final. I now realise this was sort of new mother delirium, driving myself down the M1 to get to Metricon Stadium.

G TRICKETT: That's impressive.

WELLS: I spent the whole game breastfeeding her, like just absolute cluster. But I really wanted her to see the first AFLW Grand Final. It was really important to me that she saw it and the Brisbane Lions were in it. And I remember, obviously we have the Springfield in Brisbane facility, which makes going to the AFLW a really lovely experience. And I remember some years later, one of them said, I didn't realise there were boy Lions as well.

L TRICKETT: What?

G TRICKETT: We're doing something right.

L TRICKETT: I know, that's it. I think it’s so nice to be of a generation of parents of kids who just realise that everyone’s- it’s just sport. Like, it's not necessarily women's or men's sport. It's just sport.

WELLS: Boy Matildas. [Laughs]

L TRICKETT: Yes, we need the boy Matildas. As we've all alluded to, we're all born and bred Queenslanders, and I think you would probably be pretty hard pushed to find three more excited people than us for Brisbane 2032, the Paralympics and the Olympics being hosted here. A lot has been said about those big ticket items of stadiums and venues, and as part of that, we'd really, I guess, just love to understand from you about the investment in Parasport and what will come as part of those upgrades?

WELLS: Well, I think prepare yourself for another seven hours of chat around Brisbane 2032. We might have to regroup.

[Laughter]

L TRICKETT: We'll have a little break.

WELLS: I think one of the most exciting elements of being the Australian Sport Minister is Brisbane 2032. But as a Brisbane girl, it helps you be a better politician when rather than 24-hour media cycle or the week-to-week churn, you stop and think, how do you want my hometown seen in the eyes of the world in what was 10 years' time, what is now six years' time, and work backwards from that? And I think when I go around to schools and ask kids and ask students, high school students, who should be the mascot? What do you want to see in the opening ceremony? What sports should we have? You can just sort of see people's eyes light up and think about possibility and it's a bit of wonder, you know, in a world that can seem quite dark at the moment.

It's the world's biggest media event. That means from our Communications perspective, we've got to have everything ready. But it also means, like you're saying, we've got to have, and we've talked a little bit about this already, the high performance funding in place so that the pathway and the runway for our elite athletes is sufficient. We've got to have a nice broad participation base. Everyone has that sport that they think, maybe if I just turn my mind to it, I could get there in time.

[Laughter]

L TRICKETT: Absolutely. It’s so true.

WELLS: Give everybody their shots.

G TRICKETT: European handball, every time.

[Laughter]

WELLS: But it isn’t just the opportunities of sport. It's all our volunteers. We're doing some work on that in the federal Sport portfolio about how do we incentivise volunteers, because you would know around the sports clubs that you frequent. It's one person who does four different volunteer jobs. You know, they ask us all to give an hour a week, but actually it's five, 10 people giving eight hours a week. And how do we sort of incentivise people to give an hour or two a week when everyone's just so busy and feels so under the pump? So thank you to all our volunteers who are listening on your show.

L TRICKETT: [Talks over] Yes, we love our volunteers.

WELLS: Yes, we love our volunteers. How do we reward them through the prism of what's coming in Brisbane 2032? But also, Sydney 2000, I mean, obviously you had goals by then and you were on your journey, but I remember someone said to me: Anika, you're Sports Minister, what did you wish you were in Sydney 2000? I'm like, I wish that I was Nicky Webster in the opening ceremony.

[Laughter]

G TRICKETT: All of us.

[Laughter]

WELLS: And I think for all Australians, the opportunity of Brisbane 2032 isn't just sport, it's the artistic side of what we present to the world as Brisbane 2032, the opening ceremony, the closing ceremony. It’s the air traffic controllers who are going to guide in this huge volume of planes over a month. It's kids who want to be the regional cadet based in Cairns reporting on the different sports that are happening at Barlow Park for that four-week program, and then using that as an opportunity to go and report on sport elsewhere. There's so much that gets opened up by Brisbane 2032 that isn't just how many medals do we take away.

L TRICKETT: We've spoken a little bit about the fact that you co-founded parkrun in Brisbane's Northside in 2015. You didn't just start it, but you were actively part of the management of it for a number of years, as you mentioned, through pregnancies and babies and all of those sorts of things. Parkrun is one of Australia's biggest participation movements we've seen in this country. What drew you to turn up on Saturday mornings every week and be part of it?

WELLS: I still feel badly that I'm not on the regular volunteer roster.

G TRICKETT: Anika, you just can't do everything.

L TRICKETT: You're allowed. We'll allow it.

WELLS: Well, we lived in Sandgate, which has a great parkrun, and then we moved to Chermside, and there was nothing between New Farm and Sandgate. Again, apologies for the super niche Brisbane geography for your national listeners. And it just made complete sense - well, we should start one. We've got this beautiful mangroves to mountains corridor across the Northside, so much parkland. Why doesn't Chermside have one? So I wrote to Parkrun. You guys have had Tim Oberg on?

I love Tim. wrote to Tim, and he put me in touch with another guy called Mark, who lived nearby and had the same idea. So I also love that because Mark and I never met each other before. We're completely different people. We got together and started parkrun and it's still going 11 years later. I try and show up as often as I can, but I do have five different parkruns across my electorate.

L TRICKETT: That's a lot of running.

WELLS: I do try to share it around, and I've had the twins in the twin pram. One of the twins now likes running parkruns, so it's something he and I do together. But I try and do it incognito now because everyone wants to smash the Federal Sports Minister in a running race and they can.

[Laughter]

L TRICKETT: I feel like that too. Everyone's like, oh, we beat Libby Trickett, Olympian. I'm like, I'm a swimmer. I'm not made for land.

G TRICKETT: Anika, what did you learn about volunteers through that parkrun experience?

WELLS: Well, again, thank you. Just the salt of the earth, that people re-prioritised time that is already allocated elsewhere in their lives. But also, what I love is the relationships that form across complete strangers over this shared purpose, which helps bring communities together. And when you have Brisbane, we love an extreme weather event, don't we? Like, we have our floods, we have our tropical cyclones. It's another way to rally the community together and to get word out and to look after one another that isn't just your traditional methods. And if people can get together on a weekend and - a couple of hours in the sun, enjoying each other's company, doing something healthy, we're all the better for it.

L TRICKETT: I wanted to know, how does being a mother influence, especially as your kids are getting older with sport and experiencing different things through school, does that influence how you approach your kind of Sports portfolio, or is it changing the way that you think about it? Because I imagine that there’s so much that you’re kind of having to just run with on the fly. Is it nice to sort of think more broadly, as you mentioned, about potentially Brisbane 2032 and things like that?

WELLS: I think with Communications and Sports and off the devices onto the field, I genuinely feel like we are saving a generation of kids from the harms of what they experience on algorithms and in sort of the toxic features of social media. It is really tricky for the kids who have lost something. You know, if you're between 13 and 16 and you’ve had an account taken away and you’re being told you can't use it anymore, that's a lot harder than if you're under 13 and you haven't got it yet and you've just been told you won't get it until you're 16. So I'm expecting three years of untidiness, and as a mother of young children, used to a lot of untidiness, doesn't faze me at all.

But my mind is on- we have this three-year wash through and we'll have this whole generation of young Australians whose expectation is that they aren't on social media until 16, which means what are they doing? And so many people - I mean, I get lots of feedback. I get lots of parents dobbing on their kids about various ways they're getting around the ban, which I always appreciate. I also had so many people send me all the social accounts, photos, like, I haven't seen my kids in the backyard for years and here they all are because they're not allowed on their devices. So that is at the heart of putting the portfolios together.

Obviously, with my own kids, I'm making observations about what they see and how they react. Bbut also, you can't govern by micro example. It is funny when I'm at sport, and you're looking at how people treat the umpires or the refs and how the different sport clubs engage with their volunteers or how they recruit. Like, I'm definitely looking at it with an analytical eye because it's all helpful research. Though, I'm certainly less incognito now than I used to be. And my husband pointed out, I was trying to do this the other day and he's like, you're literally standing in front of a sign of yourself. And I turned around and I didn't realise.

G TRICKETT: You're like, oh.

WELLS: Yeah, I had a baseball cap on. I thought I was really pulling it off. And he's like, turn around.

[Laughter]

L TRICKETT: Like, damn it. Proudly supporting.

L TRICKETT: It's so funny.

G TRICKETT: Anika Wells, thank you so much for joining us on Sportish today.

WELLS: Such a pleasure.

L TRICKETT: Anika Wells is the Federal Minister for Sport and Communications, as well as the member for Lilley in Queensland. Georgie, what was your big takeaway in that conversation?

G TRICKETT: For me, it has to be Brisbane 2032. I love that we're building off a participation base. I think that's so important. And it's only six years away. And we've always been talking about 10 years, 10 years – no, we're at six years now.

L TRICKETT: Yeah, it really feels like that momentum is building now. I think for me the biggest takeaway and that I love to hear was, you know, the Minister for Sport is thinking about women in leadership roles in sport, and that's really at the top of her mind. She's creating these systems and rules that sports have to kind of engage with if they are wanting to access grants and money from the government- where 50 per cent of the board are women. That makes me really excited, especially as women in sports media, to know that is top of mind. It makes me really excited.