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Aussie supporters at the Olympics. Photo by Elizabeth Chapman
John Coates, the wily president of the Australian Olympic Committee has sent a letter asking the Sports Minister, Kate Ellis, a number of leading questions, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, designed to test the independence of the Independent Sport Panel looking into the funding of Australian sport.
The panel made recommendations that funds should be diverted from Olympic Sports to professional sports like Australian Rules football. This funding change has been furiously attacked by Coates.
His questions, on the face of it, make a strong case for the notion that Ellis was indulging in gold medal spin in naming the panel an Independent Sport Panel.
1. Coates wants to know if the author of the report, businessman David Crawford, informed Ellis or declared any association he may have had with the AFL.
2. He wants to know whether Crawford requested, recommended or suggested the appointment of the AFL commissioner Sam Mostyn or AFL foundation board member Colin Carter.
3. Did Mostyn and Carter declare or inform Ellis of their AFL connections?
4. Did the hockey administrator Pam Tye tell Ellis that in 2001 she was an unsuccessful candidate for all seven vacent positions on the AOC executive?
The details of this letter by Coates to Ellis were revealed by Jacqueline Magnay in the SMH. Magnay is an excellent sports journalist with an expertise in investigations (she was part of the team that broke open the Firepower affair). She covers all the sports and has been a brilliant reporter at the Olympic Games.
Interestingly, the columnist on the SMH who has been most supportive of the Crawford recommendations is Richard Hinds, a talented columnist who covers the AFL for his paper.
Ellis’ initial response to Magnay’s story was hardly convincing: ‘We are committed to increasing government support for Olympic and Paralympic sport and also community sport.’
This is not good enough. On the face of it, Ellis set up a supposedly ‘independent’ panel which had obvious conflicts of interest regarding the their funding recommendations. In the case of Tye, there is a history with the AOC.
Why wasn’t a more representative panel co-opted?
If Ellis did know about the sports interests of the panel why didn’t she balance it out with people from other sports?
If she did not know the sports interests of the panel, why didn’t she?
It is hardly a secret that the South Australian Ellis is an AFL tragic. Her knowledge of other major sports in Australia was not up to speed, even after she became the Sports Minister. She rather famously remarked once that Australia needed world class women’s sports teams, not long after the Australian Women’s Rugby Sevens side had won the inaugural World Cup.
Ellis’ over-loading of an ‘independent’ panel with AFL devotees coincides with an era of triumphalism on the part of the Australian Rules community.
In New Zealand, for instance, Hawthorn are putting in a program in some primary schools and demanding a government subsidy.
There has been the swaggering attempt to force the NSW State Government to subsidise the development of another ground in the western suburbs of Sydney for a new team intended to turn the area from a heartland of rugby league to an AFL growth area. The embattled Premier, Nathan Rees, has finally squashed the idea.
There is a great deal of hubris involved in all of this. The cost to the AFL of the push into the western suburbs of Sydney is estimated at about $200 million. If the AFL want to spend their own money on such engrandisements, then so be it. It is their money and however they spend it is their concern.
But Coates’ point is, and many Australians will feel that it is a valid point, that this empire-building should not be subsidised at the cost of a number of Olympic sports.
If there is to be increased subsidies, why not to a genuine grassroots sports like touch football – which just happens not to have an AFL component to it?
If Ellis want the Australian sports community to accept the Crawford recommendations, she needs to deal fully and convincingly with the questions that Coates has raised. So far, Coates looks like winning Olympic gold in this argument and Ellis is looking like an also-ran.