Australia’s Olympic sports organisations have been warned they must fight for a slice of the extra sports funding cake baked by the Federal government earlier this week.
The government announced an extra $195 million in new funding for sport in the budget, which equates to an extra $48 million per year.
Australian Olympic Committee president John Coates and Australian Sports Commission chief executive officer Matt Miller made it clear at Saturday’s AOC annual general meeting in Sydney that the Olympic sports would not get a uniform percentage rise and would have to compete against each other and non-Olympic sports for additional funding.
The ASC will elaborate on the procedure in Melbourne this Wednesday and the additional funds are not expected to start being allocated until July at the earliest.
“This is about how do you strategically invest that money, it’s not about just supplying percentage increases across the board to the existing 65 funded sports,” Miller said on Saturday.
“Where are we going to get the best return on investment from the smart use of that money.”
Miller said inevitably there would be disappointment for some of the Olympic sporting organisations who were after additional funding.
“There’s will be some people who are disappointed that’s the nature of having to make decisions,” Miller said.
Coates said the different Olympic sporting federations would need to put up a coherent plan to tap into the additional funding.
“It’s not a give away,” Coates said.
The long-standing AOC boss said the additional funding was slightly higher than he had anticipated and would give Australia a fighting chance of retaining their top five status in the Olympic medal count at the London 2012 Games.
Coates joked he wanted to rain on the parade of old sporting rival Great Britain, but stressed Australia faced threats to their top five status from other European nations.
“Our other big problems are Germany and France, all three of those countries are very well funded,” coates told AAP.
“They’ve got bigger populations than us, but we’ve done it before.”
He reported the AOC had accumulated around $31.6 million of corporate sponsorship toward its $36-million budget for preparing and sending the Australian team, to the 2012 Olympics.
A top five place on the medal table apart, Coates also wanted to field a full team of around 430 athletes and win medals in more than the 14 sports than they had done in the Beijing 2008 Olympics.
Nicholas R.W. Henning
Guest
Australia is already a heavily taxed country; so a tax for local, state, and national sport is likely to be not so appealing to many. However, the dirty contribution in sports funding made by gaming at pubs, clubs, RSL's, and betting on sports is a filthy way to make a buck. I admit that this is not a sole source of income, but we need to stop causing members of communities financial hardship with easy access to gambling, so a few scraps can get allocated to our local community sports, and a chunk to professional clubs i.e. Parramatta Leagues Club funding for the Eels. Poker machine revenue is a disease, and the moot arguments put forward that gaming creates jobs and employs many is offset by the amount of people who suffer financial ruin, which I admit the individuals themselves are responsible for, but the vice of gambling needs to be allocated more responsibly. If we want to better fund our sport we need a local tax linked to our council rates, a state tax for elite state based sports and development programs, and a national tax for sports that represent the country. Hypothetically if each tax payer paid $100 towards these three areas ($300) a year, we would have a lot more money to spend on sport, and less broke people. Note that this is in addition to budgeted sport funding, thus making the coffers much deeper. Restrict gaming by reducing poker machine numbers or better still designate all such gambling to casinos. Western Australia has some of the more responsible gaming laws in Australia. With twenty million people in Australia, we need to find more clean cash to better fund our sports. Nicholas R.W. Henning - Australian Author