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http://www.smh.com.au/sport/santa-t...-of-promised-federal-gold-20101223-196mt.html
Santa to Scrooge: Olympic sport stripped of promised federal gold
Roy Masters
December 24, 2010
The federal government has played Scrooge with the $48 million sack of gold it gifted sport in the May budget, according to the bosses of the Olympic disciplines who are angry at what they perceive to be excessive diversion of funds to bureaucracy and the professional football codes.
When Australian Olympic Committee president John Coates won the money from Canberra, he was hailed as the Santa Claus of the sports whose funding had been effectively frozen during the government inertia that followed the commissioning and release of the Crawford report.
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Now, on Christmas Eve, with the Olympic sports expecting the money to finally flow, they have discovered the Australian Sports Commission has held back almost $8m for its its own programs.
Furthermore, professional sports such as the AFL have been allocated double the participation funding of some of the Olympic sports that deliver the medals and international prestige, such as swimming.
While Olympic sports praise the performance of the new federal sports minister, Senator Mark Arbib, and the recently confirmed chair of the ASC, Warwick Smith, they are critical of the ASC's chief executive, Matt Miller, a long-term bureaucrat. Smith, a former sports minister in the Howard government, has been busy over the past two months placating sports angry at Miller's allocation of the $48.3m granted in May.
An ASC spokesman claimed $40.9m of the $48.3m had been paid directly to national sporting organisations and $2.9m to athletes under the Direct Athlete Support scheme.
The ASC admits $2.32m ''will be used to administer the large increase in program delivery to sport''.
However, sports see allocations of $1.25m to a women-in-sport program; $1.5m in NSO business development and $1.57m for a local sporting champions program - from within the NSOs' allocations - as evidence of further inflation of an already bloated ASC bureaucracy, which numbers well over 400.
The ASC claims it will use a further $5.06m to ''deliver 17 programs and initiatives to build capacity in sports including coaching and officiating; volunteer initiatives; althlete education and support and women in sport''.
The Olympic and Paralympic sports argue they already have their own programs fulfilling these needs, and claim some of the ASC allocation is double counting, with women in sport receiving $1.25m under high-performance funding and a share of the $5.06m devoted to participation funding.
Arbib offered a tepid defence of the allocations as a necessary response to the recommendations of the Crawford report, a review of sport that effectively wasted the three years the former minister, Kate Ellis, held the portfolio . The report recommended a redirection of funds to the mass-participation sports, prompting Coates to lobby cabinet, pointing out Australia puffs its chest out at each Summer and Winter Olympics when government-funded athletes and coaches deliver a swag of medals disproportionate to the nation's size.
Swimming won 43 per cent of the medals Australia secured at the Beijing Olympics, yet protests the sport received only 6.5 per cent of the total distribution to NSOs in 2008.
Coates did win money in May for elite sport, with nearly half of the $48.3m of new money allocated for use in high-performance sport ($23.24m) and $2.9m in DAS funding.
Nevertheless, the mass-participation sports did well, with cricket, tennis and the AFL each receiving $750,000 annually for four years.
Swimming received only $400,000 in participation funding - allocated on the basis of the number of registered participants - yet points out that an Australian Bureau of Statistics report in October said swimming had the highest number of participants aged five to 14.
The ASC ranked swimming 12th, well below tennis, AFL and cricket.
There are also complaints by professional sports at the allocations, with rugby league receiving only $400,000 while rugby union was allocated $450,000.
A bewildered ARL chief executive Geoff Carr sought urgent talks with the ASC to protest the allocation, saying: ''There is not one box where rugby union has more ticks than rugby league in terms of the number of registered players, male or female, modified rules or full-field rules.''
Asked to explain the disparity, an ASC spokesman said: ''Rugby union presented the ASC with an investment opportunity to develop a new participation product on a national scale utilising existing infrastructure. Rugby league delivers a quality participation program but resourcing is focused on two states with limited national coverage.''
The ASC is rapidly becoming an institution with a turnover dwarfing all sports except that of the AFL, rather than a clearing house of government funds to sport.
A new division titled ''Systems Leadership'' has been created, with positions of director, deputy directors and general managers advertised.
The ASC has also assumed control of the European Training Centre in Italy, taking responsibility for it from the Australian Institute of Sport.
