*
THE Australian Rugby Union is running out of patience with the Rudd Government after waiting quietly for two years for federal funding assistance.
One of the first acts of the new Rudd Government was to review all grants approved by the Howard Government in its final months in office.
One of the biggest casualties of the review was the planned National Rugby Academy at Queensland rugby headquarters, Ballymore, which lost the $25 million in funding promised to it by former prime minister John Howard in June 2007.
Also cancelled was the $10m in funding approved for the construction of an NRL Hall of Fame.
Senior federal government officials privately advised ARU boss John O'Neill that if the union took the setback on the chin and did not make waves, ways would be found to assist the sport through other projects.
Since then the ARU has publicly supported the federal government-backed FFA bid for the soccer World Cup, unlike the AFL which has openly stated its competition will not take second place.
But O'Neill finally has reached the conclusion that the private promises made to him, that the lost funding would be restored during the next political cycle, will not be honoured and that rugby has been penalised for staying silent.
"Being Mr Nice Guy doesn't seem to reap too many rewards," O'Neill told The Australian yesterday. "Rather it seems to be a case of he who shouts the loudest gets the most help.
"This is a timely reminder to the federal government that rugby is not a minority sport.
"We're a game with a big national presence and a big international presence. We have been good citizens in helping the south Pacific rugby nations, but we have our financial pressures too.
"Rugby is played and followed by an awful lot of men and women. And we vote."
As a result of the cancellation of the National Rugby Academy, which would have been made available to all other rugby nations in the Asia-Pacific region, Ballymore has gone from being a major asset to the game to becoming a millstone around the neck of the Queensland Rugby Union.
It generates virtually no revenue yet costs the union $1 million a year in upkeep and the mounting debt it has created forced the QRU last month to request a financial bail-out by the ARU, which is expected this week to announce a loss of nearly $300,000.
While rugby has gone unrewarded for its silence, the federal government has poured approximately $46 million into soccer, primarily for the World Cup bid. Recently, rugby league was given new funding, not for a Hall of Fame but rather for the construction of a new headquarters.
The Australian Government-funded aid agency AusAID last month provided $308,000 for the development of AFL in South Africa, an allocation even ARL boss Geoff Carr described as "weird" given South Africa's main sports are cricket, soccer and, ironically, rugby, in which the Springboks are world champions.
Certainly it appears a weird allocation given that the AFL had an operating profit of $214m last year.
O'Neill said there were any number of rugby projects that could use government assistance, starting with a new headquarters to relieve it of the need to rent office space in Sydney.
