WIN Entertainment Centre and WIN Stadium are multimillion-dollar complexes owned by the State Government on behalf of the people of the Illawarra.
The land on which these facilities are built has had a long history of people and organisations campaigning to preserve and improve the precinct for the community and the varied users.
If you look back over 100 years, the development of the site evolved from a burial place to a showground, a dog track, a sporting stadium, to a multi-purpose events precinct.
Different and diverse community and business groups worked to support the users of the facilities. The Steelers Club worked with the Wollongong Sportsground Trust (WST) and the South Coast Labour Council back in the 1980s to secure funding for the southern grandstand.
They also worked with local companies like Cleary Bros to improve facilities. The community got behind them to stop the government selling off the showground site to developers.
In the late ’90s the Illawarra Basketball Association worked with the WST to secure funding for the Entertainment Centre to have a new home for the Wollongong Hawks. Again in 2001 the Wollongong Sportsground Trust worked with the government and the WIN Corporation in early 2001 to secure the naming rights for the stadium, which enabled the construction of the northern grandstand.
It was the Illawarra Venues Authority (IVA), with local business, unions, and the broader football fraternity, who campaigned for the funding of the new western grandstand. Nearly $80 million in infrastructure has been gained over the past 15 years.
The point is: these things weren’t just given to us because some politician or bureaucrat thought it was a good idea. They happened because the former boards WST and IVA made decisions to push for these things.
Time will tell whether the government’s decision to abolish the IVA will have an impact on the region’s ability to gain funding for improved infrastructure.
Some say spending money on entertainment centres and stadiums is a waste of money.
This is short-sighted. I have a view that people should work to live, not live to work.
People deserve to have places they can go and enjoy life. Going to the footy or the basketball, watching their kids perform in a schools spectacular, or attending a rock concert, is for hundreds of thousands of people all part of enjoying life. Every big event at WIN Entertainment Centre or the stadium generates hundreds of thousands of dollars for the city’s economy.
Facilities like WIN Entertainment Centre and the stadium have expanded our cultural, sporting and community footprint in ways that were not possible 30 years ago.
These facilities not only need to be protected and enhanced, but the new NSW Venues Authority will need to get the balance right between making a profit and opening up the facilities to community organisations.
The IVA worked hard to try to get this balance right.
Finally, the role of the IVA has also been to champion the reasonable expectations of the community with respect to the use of our facilities.
It is for this reason that the IVA, like its predecessor the WST, has maintained a policy position of not signing a long-term venue hire agreement with the Dragons unless they were committed to playing half their games in the Illawarra. They are yet to commit to this. Let’s hope they do.
Chris Christodoulou is outgoing Illawarra Venues Authority chair.
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