The outcomes of the two-day Australia-India Sports Excellence Forum will form the basis for the next India-Australia Annual Summit to be held this year that will co-incide with the fifth anniversary of the Australia-India Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in 2025.
Sharing more details on this with The Indian Express, Paul Murphy, Australian Consul-General in Mumbai, said: “We will produce our own reporting and recommendations internally on that (outcomes). When our Prime Ministers met in November last year, they said they wanted to see cooporation in sports. So when they meet again this year, we’ll all be ready to tell them, this is in more detail what that sort of cooperation should look like.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese held the second Australia-India Annual Summit on the sidelines of the Group of 20 (G20) Summit in Rio de Janeiro in November 2024.
The timing of this forum is also considered important as Australia just released two key documents last week that define its policies for taking the Australia-India cooperation forward.
On how the forum will help achieve the collaboration and the importance of these two policies, Murphy said, “One is the economic roadmap but within that there’s a sports component of the Australia-India economic roadmap. That’s how policy guide is to take this sort of cooperation forward. We also released, on last Friday, our new sports diplomacy strategy to 2032. So those two strategies are the policy framework we are taking forward. And now what we have from this is actual conversations, intelligence, discreet ideas, just to think about placing within those policy frameworks, we will be actioning this straight away. Since a lot of it is a long-term thing it’s about how we build the foundations for that collaboration going forward to the bigger objectives in the future.”
Some organisations, Murphy added, have already expressed interest in the way Australia develop policies on sports and how these policies can be used locally.
“The forum’s been very diverse covering all aspects of potential sports cooperation. Some specific things around coach training, that’s a real priority, sports science and our universities can be a key part of that — there’s a lot of collaborations there. Some of the partnerships between the top bodies and the way we train to lead athletes, the way we find talent as well and doing all that in a way that’s useful to build the sports within India and Australia, and also on inclusivity … is so important for India too. There’s a lot of lessons we can share on that. And some of that also goes down to specific policies. Some organisations are very interested in the way we develop policies around our sports and how they can use those policies here, locally. What they’ve been saying is Australia’s a little bit further along the path in some of those areas that can be picked up and assessed to see whether it’s applicable in the Indian context,” Murphy told this paper, expressing immense potential in a lot of areas of collaboration. “We want to work together closely in the lead up to Brisbane 2032 and in the lead up to the future Olympics here in India and Gujarat is an important place for that. But not just Gujarat, there are other states that are important in that too.” he said.
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The two-day forum that has brought together leaders from India and Australia, as well as Indian and Australian premier sporting institutions, higher education institutions and companies invested in advancing both countries’ standing in sports, held at GIFT City, concluded on Thursday.
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