TRANSCRIPT
FAMILYANDCOMMUNITYDEVELOPMENTCOMMITTEE
InquiryintosocialinclusionandVictorianswithadisability
Melbourne— 26May 2014
Members
MrsA. Coote / MrsJ. PowellMsB. Halfpenny / MsD. Ryall
MrJ. Madden
Chair: MsD. Ryall
Deputy Chair: MsB. Halfpenny
Staff
Executive Officer: DrJ. BushResearch Officer: MsV. Finn
Administrative Officer: Ms N. Tyler
Witnesses
MrP. Ryan, president, and
MrL. Whitaker, football administration manager, Football Integration Development Association.
TheCHAIR— Thank you for coming before the committee today and our inquiry into social inclusion and Victorians with a disability. Before we start we have some preliminaries. You are afforded parliamentary privilege protection under the Parliamentary Committees Act 2003 while you are before the committee in its inquiry. Once you leave this room you are not afforded that same privilege. In addition to that, we are recording proceedings, and our Hansard people are here undertaking that. You will be provided with a transcript of today’s hearing, and you are able to make any grammatical or factual corrections to that. Our normal process is to grant you 15minutes to present to us, and then we will take the opportunity to ask some questions of you. Thank you very much for being here today.
MrWHITAKER— Thanks for having us. I am Logan Whitaker. I am the football administration manager at FIDA. I am the only fulltime employee there. Basically anything that comes through the front door is my business.
MrRYAN— I have been involved from the start, 23years ago. I was president for many years. I gave up my teaching job in 2008 to do the job Logan is now doing for four years, and then last year I decided it was about time to take a backwards step and we employed Logan. I was going to have a quiet time on the board, but I have been slipped back in as president again.
TheCHAIR— Famous last words!
MrRYAN— That’s right.
MrWHITAKER— We will start with a little bit of background of what FIDA is and where we are at the moment. We have just under 500players, all with an intellectual disability, playing in a regular football competition. We play every second weekend on a Sunday. We had games yesterday. We have 16clubs with 24teams playing between three divisions. I should correct myself, sorry. Saying that all of our players have intellectual disabilities is not correct. There are some players who do not have intellectual disabilities, but from where we sit, if it is a choice between them playing football with us or not playing football at all, because they do not fit into the mainstream football structures for whatever reason, we will let them play with us. We will make sure all the clubs are aware of that, and if they do start to get too good and can play mainstream footy, we will ship them off, but if it is a choice between no sport or no football and us, we will have them any day of the week.
We were asked to look at three specific areas where sport can assist with the social inclusion of people with a disability. In relation to the role of sport and the sporting club, we have prepared some short notes to answer those questions. We will talk about the purpose of FIDA, about what we do, about how we help people with disabilities integrate and be more included in society and about the role of families who support people with disabilities. I think that is a key one, especially with sporting clubs— bringing families together. At the start we will probably just bounce off each other a little bit, if that is okay. Obviously Peter has a hell of a lot of experience and some great anecdotal evidence for a lot of these things, but I guess we will start with the role of sport and the sporting club.
Without sport, without FIDA and without football, a lot of the guys we have playing in our competition would have little to no structure in their lives. There are plenty of guys who have been in and out of prison. We have some really highfunctioning players who drive cars and hold down jobs, and to look at them you would not think they have an intellectual disability, but unfortunately they get dragged into the dark side of society pretty easily because they are easily influenced, and they may not have had the best role models growing up.Coming to football keeps them going and gives them structure. If they were not at training, who knows where they would be, to be quite honest.I am not sure if it is a good story, but I find it difficult sometimes, because that line gets a bit blurred between personal life and professional life.
We have a state side every year that represents Victoria. This year we have a national carnival, with all the states coming to Melbourne, which will be fantastic. At state training last year there was a player that I knew was homeless. He had his big backpack on, and he was the last one to leave. I knew that he had nowhere to go, and I was so close to asking him to come and stay on my couch, but I had to draw that line. Having said that, without football and without him coming to that training, without that structure being provided, who knows where he would have been? At the very least for those 2hours he had somewhere to be and something to do, which is fantastic. By the way, jump in whenever you want.
MrRYAN— I will take over from what Logan said. My last 23years were spent teaching at a special school, the last 10 or so in Broady. It is easy to forget that many of the people we are dealing with who have an intellectual disability come from very underprivileged backgrounds. Their parents may have an intellectual disability, so they have come from the start without much structure at all. Obviously they have got to go to school, so they go through the special school system, but in many cases when they go out the top, as Logan has said a few times, there is no structure in their lives whatsoever. Many of them tend to get shunted around from residential unit to residential unit. The thoughts of socalled normal, good parents having people with an intellectual disability as a child is only a very small part of the people we are dealing with. Many of the players we deal with really do not have any structure in their lives whatsoever.
MrWHITAKER— That sporting club gives them somewhere to come, and it is so much more than just sport. As a lot of you will know, sport is such a powerful tool for teaching life lessons— teaching right from wrong, teaching respect for umpires, respect for team mates, how to socialise. We have got a lot of clubs where there are groups of players who will go out on a weekend together, whereas before they would spend the Saturday night sitting at home on the couch. They might go out and see a band play or go and have a few drinks somewhere, which is fantastic; that is exactly what we want. It gives them a reason to socialise. Without having sport and that place to go to, to be honest, they do not have a huge circle of friends. There is no reason to socialise without that club environment. Obviously it keeps them active, keeps them fit and helps them with their health.
At the moment there are a few players who are coming towards the end of their careers and are getting pretty big. Obesity with intellectual disability is quite a serious issue. I am genuinely worried about what happens once they stop playing football, because they are starting to blow out now. What happens when they are not active anymore? Having said that, for the ones who are active it will be the only exercise they get. They will not go for a run after work or after school or whatever, like we all might, but they would go and kick a footy with their mates. That is fantastic.
MrRYAN— Like any sporting organisation, in our clubs there are a huge range of——
MrWHITAKER— Abilities?
MrRYAN— Not so much abilities, but the situation in some clubs— some clubs do a fantastic job of not just providing footy but providing other activities over the summer months. They provide social activities during the footy season. Our Mazenod club, which is tied to Mazenod Old Collegians, had 250people at its presentation night. The Ringwood Spiders do an absolutely fantastic job right throughout the year with the footy, and they run netball. They have a junior development part of their footy. Obviously those three or four really fantastic clubs do a great job as far as socialising the players. As Logan said, for those players it is a major part of their lives.
MrWHITAKER— Further to that, the sporting club is so much more than just a sporting club. We have partnered this year through some funding that we have got through the AAA changes that have come through AFL Victoria and FIDA. AFL Victoria and FIDA put in a joint submission to get some funding through the Access for All Abilities program through Sport and Rec Victoria, and we have partnered with an organisation called Kick It Out Australia, which uses sport as a vehicle to teach other things— life things, basically. They do it within the football club. They are working at the moment with Wyndham All Abilities Football and Cricket Club, and they have started working with North Ballarat as well.
Sport is the reward. They will run first aid courses with them, they will run ready for work certificateII or III in work— I am not sure exactly what they are called— they will help them write their résumés, and they will help them with their job searches. Then at the end they will bring in an AFL footballer to run a football clinic with them or something like that. I suppose they get them through the system. They help them look for work and help them with other aspects of their lives by luring them in with football and with tours of AFL facilities, with football camps on the weekend and that sort of thing.
Football clubs are great places for that, because that is where they are anyway. They need that extra support with the other things in their lives. They are not going to go somewhere else and do it, or a lot of them will not go and help themselves. You have got to take it to them, and that is what we have started doing this year, and it is starting to work really well. Wyndham is flying, to be honest. Their numbers have jumped up by probably 20 or 30 this year from what it was last year. I really think it has got a lot to do with that offfield stuff. Yes, they are doing well on field, but that offfield stuff— that support that they had not got before— the opportunities that they have now to have a résumé that is updated, that reads well and is well formatted that they have not had to put together themselves and had noone to show it to. They love the confidence that they can get from practising job interviews with these guys. I think they are bringing their mates in to get that support, which is great. Unless you had something else to cover in that, we might move on to the FIDA purpose.
Quite simply, our purpose is to give people with a disability the opportunity to participate in football. Through that we see some fantastic little wins along the way. We see increases in selfesteem and selfconfidence. Their social skills are incredibly increased. It is quite funny when you are talking to a coach or someone, and they will come running up to you. You are engaged in a conversation, and you hear, ‘Logan, Logan, Logan, Logan!’.I say, ‘Hang on 5minutes. I’m talking here, and I’ll talk to you in a second’. It can be teaching them little things like that— basic social conventions that we all understand quite well but that do not quite click with those guys.
There are volunteer positions within football clubs. Ringwood Spiders is another fantastic example of that for nonplaying roles. Not everyone can or wants to play football, but a lot of them want to be involved somehow, so Ringwood Spiders has a cheer squad for explayers. When they get there they have got their banners, they stand on the side, and it is fantastic to see. They run water or help with the scoreboard— all sorts of things. Once again, all that adds to employability. They have been volunteering at a football club, which is something else they can put down on their résumé, and that can help them in other avenues of their lives.
Realistically, it provides an option. We are never going to say, ‘If you’ve got a disability, you have to play with us’. If you want to play mainstream, go and play mainstream football. We are all for that; in fact that is what we want. We want to get players to a level where they are confident enough to go and play in mainstream football. We have a couple of clubs that have players who play in both at the moment. We do find some players who go and play mainstream football and end up coming back. Whether it is the big fish in a little pond thing or whether they are more comfortable playing FIDA football, who knows? But we are there as an option. If they want to play with us, we are going to be there. If they want to play mainstream football, we will do everything we can to get them to a level where they can do that.
MrRYAN— I should butt in there and say that when we started back in the early 1990s, it was when disability was starting to come into local government. Many of our clubs were run by organisations; they were not attached to the local footy clubs. Now we would not let any side come into our competition that is not attached to a local footy club. It has its pluses and minuses, obviously, but the good thing about that is, as Logan said, once they are appreciated for their abilities, they can fill in and play reserves footy or fill in when the club is in need of a player. They can run water, they can help out at the club and they bring more people into the club as far as supporting their own team. I suppose the last 10years have pushed that link to local footy clubs.
As I said, it has its good and bad things. Local footy clubs are generally very taxed as far as volunteers themselves. We had 39players at the local footy club near me in Moonee Valley. Unfortunately they were short of volunteers to run the senior club. In the finish there was just noone to take the FIDA side, so they disappeared. What we do then is we get the players and move them to another club. But that is how fickle and fragile it is even just dealing with local footy clubs.
MrWHITAKER— That integration, which is part of our name, is so important. Yes, they are playing football, and they are a member of the club, but they are socialising. You should see their faces light up when the senior footballers come down and help out with training. They will be the most loyal volunteers you will ever have. If you want them there at 9o’clock on a Saturday morning, every Saturday morning, to do the scoreboard, they will not miss; they will be there every time.
That is what we say to clubs when we go out to talk to them about taking on a FIDA side. Realistically sports clubs are run as small businesses these days, so you have to appeal to that a little bit and say, ‘Look, this is going to increase opportunities for grants, it is going to increase opportunities for sponsorship, and you are going to have more hands helping out around the club. But also you get a fantastic feelgood factor about it as well’, and that is what really makes those clubs listen.
There does need to be a driver within that club, and that can be a struggle. Often the clubs we have that I have to deal with most often on a daily basis are the ones that do not have that support from a mainstream football club’s committee. The best models are the ones where there is a senior club committee, the FIDA committee and then a member of the FIDA committee sitting on the senior club’s committee as well, so there is always conversation happening between the two clubs. They are working together, they go to the same functions, they do awards on a Saturday or Sunday night and it just works really well. That probably covers off what we wanted to talk about under the purpose of FIDA.
We will move through the role of the families, which is so vital. Once again it really all harks back to the sport and sporting club as a community hub where people can come and feel like they are a part of something and that they belong. I am managing the disability programs at AFL Victoria at the moment as well. We are running an Access for All Abilities Auskick project to try to initiate better access to Auskick for people with disability.