Protecting our athletes – Sports work together

Australia’s three peak sporting bodies have created a working party with Sport Integrity Australia (SIA) and the National Sports Tribunal (NST) to develop a fully independent framework to deal with abuse, intimidation and other safeguarding issues in Australian sport.

You may have read a series of articles in recent times that highlight the need for further work to boost sport’s capacity to safeguard its members.

All sports receiving Federal Government funding are required to have a Member Protection Policy (MPP) and Child Safeguarding Policy (SGP) that outline the expected standards of behaviour (codes of conduct) for everyone involved in the sports’ activities. This covers athletes, coaches, officials and other support personnel.

There’s no place for abuse in our sports, but the missing link has been the lack of access to an independent framework.

We have started a process to develop a model that will ultimately provide access for athletes and other sports participants to an independent assessment of complaints, independent investigations and independent hearings.

A series of workshops will be held in the months ahead following this week’s establishment of the working party.