Sport Legislation Amendment (World Anti-Doping Code Implementation) Bill 2026

Mr MATT SMITH (Leichhardt) (18:52): I rise to speak on the Sport Legislation Amendment (World Anti-Doping Code Implementation) Bill 2026. I know WADA intimately. The locker room is a sacrosanct place for professional athletes.

It is where we unwind after the game. It's where we talk about the things that happened. It's where we have it out with each other because something went wrong.

It's where we celebrate our wins. You walk in after the game, and there's somebody in there who doesn't belong. They've got a black polo on and their lanyard—it's WADA.

They take you to the room and they hand you the cup, and they spend a bit of time with you until you fill said cup. If you cannot fill said cup, as happened to a few of my teammates over the years, you've picked up a friend for the evening; they will follow you until the absolute bitter end. Unsurprisingly, they're not always popular.

If you get to a level beyond mine and become an Olympian, they can show up at your house. I had a mate who was taking the dog for a walk, and WADA showed up. They were like, 'This is what we're doing today.' They came with him for a walk with the dog and went to the pool with the kids until they got the cup.

It's inconvenient and it's kind of annoying, and we were not always as polite to them as we should have been, but they gave us the confidence that every game we played was fair. We didn't know when they were showing up. We weren't given any warning.

The last time I got tested was in Ballarat, at a 'Taking it to the Streets' Cairns Taipans home game. There was no indication that they might be there; it was a nothing game in the middle of the season against Sydney that didn't matter. But there he was, ready to do his job.

He put up with the attitude that he got from a whole bunch of spoilt brat athletes and the jokes that came along with it. He took his sample and he went away, and you wouldn't see or hear from him again unless you were in trouble. WADA did more than testing; they gave us the parameters in which we had to exist.

As an athlete, you have to be incredibly careful about what you put in your body. You have to know where it came from and what it is. They drilled it home to us every single pre-season.

They get the entire NBL together in a room, and they sit down and they go through it piece by piece by piece. 'Stay clear of pseudoephedrine,' 'Don't have too much caffeine,' 'If you are going to use supplements, make absolutely sure that they are clean,' Please don't smoke weed'—that went sideways for a few of my mates, but we knew. We knew the rules, we knew the parameters, and we knew the consequences.

Most importantly, we knew the consequences. Basketball is not a great sport for performance-enhancing drugs. It's a highly skilled sport.

If I were 20 or 30 per cent stronger, it wouldn't have made a lick of difference to how good I was as a player. If I had been able to dribble better or shoot better, that might have helped. Maybe I'd have gone to the Olympics.

But, for other sports, it can make a massive, massive difference. You can change the way your body moves or the amount of power that's available to you through a decent course of anabolic steroids. If you are playing a sport that requires you to slow your heart rate, be it shooting, golf or even lawn bowls, a decent set of beta blockers will fix that up for you.

If you need to be quick off the blocks, pseudoephedrine is the way to go. All of these things give people an inherent advantage, and, when you're at that very top level, you're measuring things in millimetres and you're measuring things in fractions of a second, so any single advantage that you can get is worth something. The fact that these chemicals exist out there, for some, is a temptation that's too high, and you see not only people go down that path and what it does to their bodies and what it does to their reputations afterwards, but what it does to the athletes they're competing against.

Winning, getting a trophy, getting a ring or a medal or whatever is a fantastic thing, but it's the moment that matters. Crossing that finish line and having the crowd erupt matters. Making that shot matters.

If you're competing against someone who is not competing clean, they can potentially take that moment from you, and that is the heartbreaking tragedy. They can give it back to you years down the track. They might disqualify things as doping testing catches up with the dopers, but you've lost the moment, and the moment is everything.

I don't know where my championship rings are, but I remember the moments, and the moments are distilled into everything that you've worked for, and, for Olympians, you might only get one shot. Your peak athletic performance is measured in not a full decade—27 to maybe 32 at your absolute peak. If you're lucky, you can have two.

If you're really lucky, like the member for Hunter—shooting debatable—you can have five. An honourable member interjecting— Mr MATT SMITH: Look, we discuss it every day. But, if you've worked your entire life for that one moment, you want to know that that moment is fair.

You want to know that the work that you've put in is equal to the work that the person next to you put in, and, if it's not and they beat you because they've worked harder, because they've got some natural abilities or because it was just their day, you can live with that. You can live with whatever outcome you're given, provided you know that it's fair and provided that you've given it your best and provided you've given it your all.

The great tragedy of doping and the people who put that into our sports and the mechanisms around it—it is an industry. Let's not mistake it. Doping athletes is an industry at this point in time.

They're taking those things that matter so, so much. The sacrifices that you have to make to be that good are incredible. Speak to Stephanie Rice.

I think she is a good example. She spoke about how, in her entire lead-up to the Olympics, she allowed herself, once a week, one tiny little block of chocolate just so that she could maintain that level of discipline just so she could keep her the body fat percentage where it needed to be for optimum floating. All of these things are just hammered, hammered, hammered into you.

That one little chocolate was her reward, and obviously so were the three gold medals, but she earned those. She earned those fair and square. She made the sacrifices.

She didn't look for shortcuts. She didn't find a mad scientist, a chemist, who could do the things that she needed to do. She went out and she did the work and she paid the price, and the people around her paid the price.

You sacrifice family time, your time and physical time. There is the emotional toll of working that hard all the time, the emotional toll of not being successful, what that does to you and what that does to your immediate loved ones who are on that journey with you. Even if they're not in the water, on the pitch or running beside you, they are.

They want to believe that it's clean. They want to believe that it's fair, because they're the ones who are sitting right next to you, helping you through that entire process. I do want to say one thing, though.

When my career was over and I got to try Sudafed for the first time when I had a cold—amazing! It made me feel so much better. I was like, 'This stuff is great.' We'll get to the nitty-gritty of it all.

This is an international framework. It has to be even right across the planet, particularly when we're dealing with international sports. There have been a few little strange things in there which have been Australian specific, and those are going to get ironed out to make sure that we are all on the same page.

The code will be implemented in 2027 through an integrated package of primary legislation, regulation and sporting policy. The bill makes amendments to the Sporting Integrity Act 2020 and the National Sports Tribunal Act 2019. Detailed antidrug rules will be implemented through amendments to the SIA regulations, including the national antidoping scheme and through the 2027 ANADP adopted by the Australian Sports Commission, recognised by NSOs and NSODs.

These instruments will provide the framework going forwards so that, when the Brisbane Olympics hit, everything will be in place. Whenever there's a change, you've got to have those conversations, particularly with the athletes, with the bodies around it and obviously with the poor guys with the cups to make sure that everyone knows what's happening and how it's going to happen.

This gives us a good run-in time. It'll let us understand the strengths and weaknesses of the system that we've put in and close up any holes that might arrive throughout it. We're strengthening the appeal rights for the therapeutic-use exemption, and this is important.

I played with guys who had asthma, and they've had to fill out a whole bunch of forms for their asthma pumps. Cortisone shots are quite common throughout the year, and you need to know that people are taking these drugs to make sure that they can heal to deal with the pain. They might have a broader medical condition that requires medical intervention.

People should not be punished for that. Strengthening these rules, allowing that therapeutic exemption and making it easier to actually implement is really important for athletes. There was a case a few years back where an NFL player failed a drug test, and he failed a drug test because he was taking fertility drugs because he wanted to have a child.

The exemptions at the time didn't allow for that. The NFL doesn't subscribe to WADA. It exists as its own thing.

They were able to hear the appeal and allow him to continue playing, but he wasn't trying to get an advantage on the field. He wanted to be a dad, and that was an important part of him, but he shouldn't have had to give up his job for that or risk losing his job because of the drugs he had to take to become a father. That's an example of why the therapeutic exemption is going to be so important.

As a member for Barton said, during this appeal process it is very important to separate the decision-maker from the review body. People don't like to be proven wrong, so it is always important to have that separation of powers. I think that's as important in WADA as it is in just about every single part of our society.

The second part is reinforcing the independence of the doping system. It needs to be a completely independent body. I think everyone knows now that sport is awash with money.

The codes are becoming more and more powerful. In the United States, they split from WADA completely. The NCAA takes no part in WADA at all.

Their testing is all over the place, and there are no real guidelines around it. Each school is doing their own thing. Each conference is doing their own thing.

You can fail in one place and pass in another. It needs to be fair right across the board. The concept of fairness is such an integral part of sport and the Australian psyche.

I think it is an important part that, when we have the Olympics in 2032, we display that fairness, that the fair go that we really pride ourselves on as part of our national identity is understood by the rest of the planet—that when you compete in Australia, you compete by the rules. If you win, you'll have won clean. If you lost, you'll have lost clean, but you'll have got there on your own merits, not the merits of a chemist in some far part of the world, not the merits of the beta-blocker that's slowing down your heart rate as you're lining up your shot, not the merits of the pseudoephedrine that gets you off the line that little bit quicker and not the merits of the steroids and peptides that you can use to give your body that extra five or 10 per cent.

Without these kinds of rules, you get the Enhanced Games, which is a joke and an insult to every single athlete who's ever played fair and is dangerous, with people encouraged to put things into their bodies that they have absolutely no idea about. It sets a terrible precedent and example to our children, who are increasingly looking up to sport. Our children need to know that we're clean.

Our country needs to know that we're clean. Any athlete that feels like doping is the answer needs to know that Australia is clean and we will not stand for it. I'm looking forward to the 2032 Olympics.

I was in the United States during the 2000 Olympics, so I didn't get to go, and then I wasn't talented enough to go to any of the other ones. So I'm very excited about having an Olympics in my home state, just down the road from Cairns. I commend this bill to the House.