Sport funding reform advocated

Press, 30 July 1986, Page 6

Sport funding reform advocated

By OLIVER RIDDELL in Wellington

Urgent reform of recreation and sport funding and administration is not going to be hijacked, the Minister of Recreation and Sport, Mr Moore, told the New Zealand Assembly for Sport in Wellington yesterday.

He said absurd and selfserving assertions had been made about what the reform should do, but factional victories of some over others would not be tolerated.

There was no choice but to reform considering the dimension of the problems. It was a matter of shame for New Zealand that 23 per cent of South Island primary schoolchildren, as shown by surveys, had never stood on a beach, Mr Moore said. It was also a matter of shame that 58 per cent of the population listed watching television as their most preferred freetime activity.

Educators were now warning that New Zealand was developing a nation of physically illiterate children who averaged up

to 30 hours a week before the television set, with many of them underexercised and overweight, he said.

It was an horrific effort of stereotyping that half of New Zealand’s youngest women opted out of physical activity at high school, that women’s sports were denied proper news media coverage, and that women’s sports were denied millions of dollars in sponsorships.

New Zealand could not be proud that its sport and recreational heritage was denied to most elderly, most disabled, ethnic groups and the young. “We cannot be stupid enough to go on picking up the huge cost of this in health bills and crime rate,” Mr Moore said. Instead of providing children with the benefits of sport, New Zealand had 39,500 children aged less than 10 years breaking the law each year, 108 child offences a day. “Across the country, thousands of sports administrators are running their organisations on the smell of an oily rag,” he said.