Sport ‘key’ to communities

By Jim Mynard
FOOTBALL teams play an important role in community building, according to the director of the Monash University Centre of Population and Urban Research, Bob Birrell.
Addressing the community building research seminar held at the Monash Berwick campus on Wednesday, 13 July, Dr Birrell said football clubs were strong focal points for communities and provided a basis for social events.
He said football teams provided links between men and women because of the association between netball and football teams.
“There is a high level of participation because a high percentage of young men in a place are engaged in football,” he said.
Dr Birrell said the City of Casey lacked this participation.
He said much of the reason for this was that Casey was doing development “on the cheap” and this had led to a low level of involvement in football.
He said the council needed to generate more money from developers to pay for more sporting facilities and infrastructure.
“Developers in the City of Casey pay $3000 a block toward infrastructure while developers in other places pay as high as $50,000 a block.
“By comparison, 20 per cent of Casey children aged five to 12 took part in Auskick as opposed to 42 per cent in the City of Boroondara.
“This indicates that something is seriously wrong.
“In the outer shires junior football claims a 67 per cent participation compared to 34 per cent in Cardinia and only 13 per cent in Casey.”
However, Casey’s manager of youth and community development Janette Green said provision of facilities was not necessarily the problem because there was also a lack of volunteers to support the sport.
Casey records also show a diverse range of ethnic communities and other sports such as soccer and rugby.
Human powered vehicle racing is another sport pulling heavily on the numbers of young people who may otherwise have gravitated to football.
Dr Birrell said Casey and Cardinia was a dormitory area and a lack of employers tended to diminish “the sense of place”.
“Because it is a dormitory region and because of the Melbourne 2030 plan the region doesn’t relate to separate communities,” he said.
“There will be no break between Berwick, Beaconsfield, Officer, and Pakenham.
“We will have one long swathe of suburbia.”
Dr Birrell said there was a high proportion of families in the region with children zero to four years of age.
“We have a chronic problem because developers contribute very little toward the provision of infrastructure,” he said.
“They provide little or nothing to the social capital of our community.
“We are starving communities of necessary startup capital, such as money for roads and this all comes back to the government and the councils.”
Dr Birrell said he realised the Scorpions Football Club was moving to Casey and that the council was involved in the move.
He said, however, that there was a need for a far more systematic campaign of a similar kind to develop sporting teams in the area.