Speaking via interactive livestream he said that postponing the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, the first time this has occurred in history, because of the COVID-19 pandemic presented challenges, but that they were manageable. 

“It’s not simple and it’s going to be exceptionally expensive,” he said.

“The sport economy is very important to Australia. It’s about $50 billion annually and there’s knock on effects.

“It suffers, as well with obviously suppliers and retail, infrastructure, travel, and tourism.

“Looking beyond 2021 we're very positive of the Winter Games in Beijing in 2022, Paris 2024 and L.A. in 2028. Strong opportunities both in generating support of the community for sport, but also for the commercial opportunities to maintain the investment.

“Looking a bit further ahead to the 2032 Queensland Olympic Games, we’ve put this candidature on the backburner during this particular crisis.

“For the Queensland candidature the economic benefits are still there and if you think about it in a different way, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, additional investment and drivers to bring tourists back into Australia to build towards 2032 is actually I would have thought an incentive to look towards hosting the games.”

Speaking on the AFL and the preparedness of clubs to ride out the pandemic, Richmond Football Club President, Peggy O’Neal AO, said the club had already been planning for a crisis before COVID-19.

“As part of our strategic planning, because we thought there was going to be a recession in the next 10 years, we started thinking: if there is, how long can we go without any money?" she said.

“How many members can we afford to lose and still maintain what we're doing?

“We hadn't developed that very far, but we were starting to think the good times can't go on forever.”

She said that while AFL clubs were dealing with financial pressures, the COVID-19 pandemic has also made Australians realise the role sport played in their lives and how it was taken for granted.

“I think of the community cohesion and the family time that people have around sport,” she said.

“Sport is a great way to integrate new communities in Australia, because once you have a team or once you're part of a sport, or once people know that you're interested in the same thing they're interested in, you feel like you belong.

“I think that we can't underestimate the value of people finding their feet in the new environment by having sport to turn to.

“Sport makes a contribution to the community in a way that we did perhaps take for granted and now we know the primary place that it has for all sorts of reasons, physical and mental and just good public health.”

EY Government and Public Sector Senior Manager, Nicholas Hudson, said the economic and social benefits of sport are well understood by all levels of government.

“Sport provides a range of positive benefits, society health benefits, mental and physical health, social benefits, social cohesion, national pride, economic benefits with major events and tourism as examples. It's even been used as national security benefits on countering violent extremism,” he said.

“It’s a tool that government and a lot of areas of society uses to get these outcomes.

“Now with the arrival of COVID-19 the government has taken a health protection strategy approach and in doing so has committed a lot of money around job protection and other measures into supporting industries during the shutdown and this is leaving a really big deficit and a very tight budget setting now and into the future that will really start constraining non-essential services and especially non-recovery efforts.

“As we start emerging from COVID-19 and start slowly reopening and governments focus their attention from health protection to economic recovery across the country, easing of restrictions for sports will mean re-engagement.

“Sport is in a relatively good place post COVID-19 to really contribute to Australia's recovery, but it does have some challenges and the key one being around that the benefits of sport can be very difficult to quantify especially when presenting a funding proposal for government.

“We can, if it's a major event or a tourism attraction, quantify the economic benefits, bed nights, tourism dollars etc, but the bigger questions and these have been around for a while, how do you measure the social cohesion? How do you prove avoided hospitalisation from improved physical health? How do you measure improved well-being and happiness?

“From the sports sector position it's well documented about the social and economic benefits that everything provides and it is in a good place.

“I think the challenge going forward, especially with when, how and how much government will fund and how they'll go about that, is it purely a funding or is it a policy or regulatory mechanism they may relax to support the economic recovery?

“How can we position sport to be a key contributor in that recovery especially on the social side in bringing communities together? So some really interesting challenges coming forward.”