{"id":32791,"date":"2026-06-17T02:41:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T02:41:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/32791\/"},"modified":"2026-06-17T02:41:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T02:41:10","slug":"federal-government-announces-more-than-half-a-billion-dollars-in-sports-funding-ahead-of-brisbane-2032-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/32791\/","title":{"rendered":"Federal government announces more than half a billion dollars in sports funding ahead of Brisbane 2032 Games"},"content":{"rendered":"

The federal government has announced more than half a billion dollars in funding to boost the sporting landscape ahead of the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games.<\/p>\n

The $513 million package will be delivered by the Australian Sports Commission (ASC) over the next two years.<\/p>\n

It is an increase over the last round of funding, which came in at $489 million.<\/p>\n

The package includes funding for 68 sporting programs and a record $42.8 million to assist athletes with daily living and training expenses.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Also included is high-performance funding for Winter Olympians and Paralympians and $102.8 million for subsidised access to Australian Institute of Sport facilities.<\/p>\n

Para athletes will also get a boost, with $54.9 million allocated for better classification, training environments, and coaching and support.<\/p>\n

Federal sports minister Annika Wells said the government was “laser focused on what sport does from playground to podium”.<\/p>\n

“Athletes do a lot for our country. It’s not just the health benefits, it’s not just the social cohesion, it’s not just the community building that keeps us all together,” she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"annika<\/p>\n

Federal sports minister Annika Wells says the government is “laser focused” on sport from “playground to podium”. (ABC News: Ian Cutmore)<\/p>\n

“Athletes light us all up, give us something to talk about … sport makes you want to hug strangers.<\/p>\n

“You can’t put a price on that, but with all the budget constraints, we’ve put it at $513 million for the next two years to try and give them everything we can to make sure that we’re successful in Glasgow in a month, in LA 2028, in the French Alps in 2030, and of course here in Brisbane 2032.”<\/p>\n

Paralympics Australia welcomed the announcement, saying the funding would provide “critical certainty” ahead of big events.\u00a0<\/p>\n

President Grant Mizens said the government’s support would bring Paralympic sport into reach for more athletes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“Maintaining this historic investment will continue to reduce longstanding barriers and inequities across the system while strengthening pathways for the next generation of Paralympians,” Mr Mizens said.<\/p>\n

Athlete pay a point of tension<\/p>\n

Athlete pay has been under the spotlight, with IOC chief Kirsty Coventry receiving public backlash last month over comments she made arguing Olympic athletes should not be paid prize money.<\/p>\n

“I don’t believe in paying athletes. I come from a small country, I came from a sport that doesn’t necessarily pay athletes very well and I still don’t think we should be paying athletes at the Olympic Games,” she said in an interview.<\/p>\n

Ms Coventry later clarified she had been talking about prize money, but the statement sparked debate over financial compensation for elite athletes.<\/p>\n

Olympic swimmer and gold medallist Kyle Chalmers last month said the sport was reaching a “tipping point” in terms of athlete pay.<\/p>\n

Kyle Chalmers’s fears for swimming’s future<\/a><\/p>\n

Kyle Chalmers spent more than $5,000 to compete at the Australian Swimming Trials, and he says that sort of thing could drive stars away from the sport.<\/p>\n

“It’s such a hard sport \u2026 you make a lot of very hard decisions and sacrifices for what I feel is very little reward. I really hope our governing bodies can actually start to create change,” he told reporters at the Australian Swimming Trials earlier this month.<\/p>\n

“It’s very easy for a lot of us swimmers to voice our concerns but nothing seems to change and there’s millions of dollars left in bank accounts [of] people using our image and our performances that we don’t reap rewards of, which is unfortunate.<\/p>\n

“It’s not on Australian taxpayers to cover that, I’m not expecting any of that. I’m [expecting it of] the organisations that are generating so much money out of our races.”<\/p>\n

One of Australia’s most recent Olympic gold medallists, moguls skier Cooper Woods said gold medals “open doors” but still do not give direct financial support.<\/p>\n

“We’re not professional athletes, in that sense. We’re not signed on with the Sydney Roosters or anything like that,” he said.<\/p>\n

“I had teammates that went to these last Olympics that were still paying. They would have paid almost six figures to go to the Games that year.”\"A<\/p>\n

Cooper Woods says some of his teammates paid six-figure sums to attend the last Winter Olympic Games. (ABC News)<\/p>\n

He said children with a passion for an Olympic sport might choose to pursue rugby league instead due to the bigger paychecks.<\/p>\n

“We do it not for the money and we’ve been doing that our entire life,” he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“But funding like we’ve just received \u2026 that creates opportunities for us Australians to go out there, be the underdog, beat everyone, and that inspires the next.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The federal government has announced more than half a billion dollars in funding to boost the sporting landscape…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32792,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[8611,29586,29585,29587,99,9843,29584,1366,3139,7269,156,18996,3229,29589,29588],"class_list":["post-32791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brisbane","tag-anika-wells","tag-annika-wells","tag-athletes","tag-australian-sports-commission","tag-brisbane","tag-brisbane-2032","tag-brisbane-olympic-and-paralympic-games","tag-federal-government","tag-funding","tag-kirsty-coventry","tag-labor","tag-olympic-games","tag-olympics","tag-olympics-and-paralympics","tag-paralympics-australia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32791\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}