Apparently Freddie Mercury of Queen wrote “We Are the Champions” about football, and in Canberra in winter there’s a feast of football around town, from the Raiders and Brumbies right down to juniors. Sadly, we’ve heard quite a lot lately about sportsgrounds: lack of maintenance, not enough grounds to go around, and even e-bikes and motorbikes tearing them up. That means disappointment for scores of children, parents and officials when games can’t go ahead. It also means we, the ratepayers, eventually foot the repair bill — money that could have been spent on something else in the ACT.

I chatted recently to James Milligan MLA, Member for Yerrabi and Shadow Minister for Sport and Recreation, about some of the issues plaguing our sports fields. If you’ve had a Saturday morning footy game cancelled because the ground’s underwater — again — you’re not alone, and you’re not imagining it.

The problem, in short: our ovals are tired. Fields that don’t drain properly turn into small lakes after rain, and instead of a day’s delay, clubs can be locked out for a week or more — training cancelled, games washed out, and yet the invoice for hiring the ground still turns up like clockwork. One club, Mr Milligan says, was billed in full for a field it couldn’t set foot on. Try explaining that one to under-12s.

Layer on top of that the damage done by e-bikes tearing up ovals across the territory — enough of a problem that the AFP has stood up a dedicated task force — and you’ve got sporting infrastructure under real strain, with more than a decade passing since any serious investment went into fixing the surfaces themselves.

To his credit, Mr Milligan didn’t just come to vent. Back in February, he moved a motion in the Assembly — which passed unanimously — calling for an independent audit of sporting infrastructure right across the ACT. The idea: get an unbiased picture of what’s broken, what’s needed and where, by talking to the associations, clubs and everyday users who know these grounds best. The audit is due to report back in March next year.

Here’s my worry. Five months on from that motion passing, the government still hasn’t gone to tender, still hasn’t locked in budget costings, and is apparently waiting on other reviews to land first. Do the maths on tendering, consultation and drafting, and there’s precious little runway left to produce something thorough by March. A rushed report helps nobody — least of all the clubs still filling in rain delay forms.

None of this is a simple fix. As Mr Milligan points out, we’re not rebuilding every oval overnight — more a fifteen-to-twenty-year job, prioritised sensibly and done in the open. But that only works if the audit gets moving. Hopefully Estimates hearings over the next couple of weeks will provide some answers — or, perhaps more likely, bureaucratic double-speak non-answers. That’s one thing this government is a champion at. You can listen to my full chat with James Milligan on the Bite-sized Politics podcast on Spotify