Hard yards already done on sports infrastructure

Member for Leichhardt Warren Entsch has urged the State Labor Government to get behind a Cairns Business and Sporting Group which is due to release its comprehensive sports tourism and sports medicine infrastructure plan this week.

Mr Entsch said he was honoured that the State Labor Government was plagiarising the group’s work by staging a sports infrastructure forum in Cairns at 5:30pm tonight (Monday, November 7, 2011).The Cairns Business and Sporting Group, comprising a committee of eminent local figures from business and sports,
has already completed the hard yards of formulating a regional masterplan identifying up to a dozen shovel ready projects to upgrade the Far North’s network of sports infrastructure.

“This is an eminent group of individuals who have given up their time over the past eight months and put a lot of work into the masterplan,” Mr Entsch said.
“I do take some pride in the fact the State Labor Government has been rejecting my repeated calls for sports infrastructure over the past two years and yet on the eve of an election they are now plagiarising it.”

“The state government must recognise that the work has already been done in consultation with sports groups and the broader community and I would hope they stop playing politics and instead get behind the report.”

“It is an incredibly comprehensive report, a framework that will allow us to build up a new industry, including a Tropical Campus of the Australian Institute of Sport.”

“Unfortunately the Sports Minister’s forum in Cairns tonight will only focus on playing catch up and address individual projects, in isolation of a broader plan that ties in the AIS tropical campus and JCU faculty of sports medicine.”

Mr Entsch said the Far Northern community was sick and tired of money being wasted on feasibility studies.

“The Federal Opposition has already committed $40 million to sports infrastructure in the Far North so instead of reinventing the wheel the state government just needs to commit dollars to shovel ready projects identified in the report,” Mr Entsch said.
“The Cairns Business and Sports Infrastructure Group has done this masterplan at absolutely no cost to the community so every dollar we raise can go straight to the building of these projects, instead of to consultants.”

The group’s report, titled “Sports Tourism and Sports Medicine Infrastructure Plan”, will be released on Friday.