Automated Transcript – Breakfast
You think I’m crazy, brah? A moment ago you heard from Dee Madigan, and we were talking about the video that has been released from juice media under their honest Government Ads campaign. It’s their latest campaign using satire to get a political activism message across. And you heard some audio before about the Burrup Hub, but one of the other messages in the video is around resources companies sponsoring sporting and cultural events and teams. Woodside was the focus of this particular video, but it’s an issue that has been front and centre in recent weeks following the fallout from Netball Australia refusing sponsorship from Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting. Here’s some of the audio from the video around that issue. Hello, I’m from Woodside.
I mean the Western Australian Government and we’d like to begin with an acknowledgement of country and by paying respect to the traditional owners of this land, which is why you’ll see their logo everywhere on the city footy team, festival, uni theatre, orchestra, Ballet City, even on children. Woodside Nippers. Kids will need to swim a lot to survive the worsening floods we’re causing. So Woodside is helping them to learn young Zoe Rutherford is the president of local sporting club the Pilbara Trailblazers, which is a new sporting club, only recently having to go through the process of securing sponsorship.
I caught up with Zoe to get her thoughts on the issue.
I started Parkrun Baby Road Parkrun in Karratha and also Pilbara Trailblazers, two separate sporting groups in Karratha and both of them required a fair amount of money to get started. And because you need a fair amount of equipment to run a safe and professional series of events. So we started Pilbara Trailblazers to help with building community, helping people with mental health and physical health and to give people support. And just like I suppose around Karratha people move their families to places like Karratha or Port Hedland or whatever to make money in that. But it can be incredibly isolating and challenging, especially for mums at home with small kids or, you know, single people that come up there without a network or whatever. So when we first decided to start both of these groups, I applied to all of the local big resource companies for funding that had ground grant rounds opened and also some that didn’t have grant round opens at the time. And they’re really there’s not too many other options to obtain a reasonable amount of money of, you know, to fund a set up because you’re talking about, you know, $30,000 that you need to buy all of the equipment to run a professional operation. And you can’t it’s not feasible to do that as a small group without asking for money from the bigger companies.
So what do you think when you hear about all this controversy around, you know, who sponsorship comes from? So for you know, for example, Netball Australia, what was your thoughts on that when all that started breaking?
Look, I mean, I think that the companies, the resource companies have a vested interest in helping to build the community organisations that contribute to the mental wellbeing of the employees of the companies and also the families and the wider community. At the end of the day, they could choose not to give us money, you know, they could choose to keep all their own profits and not help out community organisations. But they do. And I’ll be totally honest, I’m really grateful for it because I would not have been able to start Pilbara Trailblazers or Baby Road Parkrun without the funding that we were given.
What are some of the other things that it can allow you to do as a community organisation?
You know, if you look at running an event and charging to cover your costs, so charging the participants to run in the event you really sort of limit the amount of people that can join in, you know, because some people can’t afford to join. So what it does for us, you know, them giving us funding gives us the opportunity to really keep our costs low so that more people are able to participate in our events. So, for example, we, you know, for the last the backyard altar that we ran, we only charged $60 per participant. And if you look at running one of those events anywhere in Australia, you’re looking at multiple hundreds of dollars to participate in them. So, you know, the fact that we’re given funding is just so positive to the community.
So you kind of come at it from the other end and say, well, you know, without this kind of funding community sport in communities like the Pilbara wouldn’t exist.
Absolutely. I mean, the other the only other ways that you could get funding is fundraising. And I think especially in this post-COVID climate where everyone has volunteer fatigue, you know.
