Football Tasmania has welcomed the return of Ticket to Play program which was launched today by new Minister for Sport and Recreation Jane Howlett.
Football Tasmania CEO Matt Bulkeley thanked the Tasmanian Government for continuing the initiative, which was designed to reduce the cost of participating in club sporting activities for Tasmanian children. Children listed on valid concessions cards can use the voucher to receive up to $100 discount on the cost of a sports membership or registration.
“We know cost can be a barrier to sports participation access for many families, and we congratulate the Government for continuing to address this issue so that more Tasmanians can reap the benefits of playing sport,” Mr Bulkeley said.
“As Tasmania’s most played team sport, the program kicks a lot of goals for football by allowing even more children to enjoy the World Game.
“Instead of allocating funds to sports in an ad-hoc manner, the ‘user chooses’ system of Ticket to Play essentially allocates funding to sports based on their participation levels.
“This fair and equitable approach to funding should be applauded, and we call on the Government to continue to consider participation as a key performance indicator when allocating funding in the future.
“We are not in any way suggesting other sports don’t deserve funding. Quite the opposite. We are simply suggesting that in the interests of fairness and equity, there needs to be a transparent process for allocating funding.
“We accept that the State Government is limited in the amount of funding it can provide to sports in Tasmania – that is why it is even more important to ensure that there is a fair, performance-based and participation-based model for allocating recurrent funding between sports.”