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Wayne Smith, Rugby Editor | February 09, 2008
AT 1.22pm on Wednesday, Queensland Rugby Union boss Peter Lewis sent out his regular "Chairman's Letter" in which he dismissed rumours first put to him by The Australian that the Rudd Government was planning to scrap $25million in funding for the national rugby academy at Ballymore.
"I don't believe for one moment that the Rudd Government would consider this grant inappropriate," Lewis wrote.
Believe it or not, but that's exactly what the Rudd Government considered it, inappropriate, prompting Lewis to send out a second email at 4.14pm, this one headed "QRU shocked by unexpected axing of federal Ballymore grant".
"I feel like a lineout jumper whose lifters have suddenly walked off with me still in mid-air," Lewis volunteered, presumably just before crashing heavily to earth.
Clearly, no warning was given to rugby authorities before the federal Government took the axe to the rugby academy, a project that would have assisted not just rugby but a wide range of minor sports. And it was not just Australian rugby that would have benefited but the struggling south Pacific islands, one of which runs its international program out of a tin shed.
The first the Australian Rugby Union knew of it was when an enterprising agency journalist telephoned the ARU's headquarters seeking a comment even while federal Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner was still delivering his slash-and-burn speech to the National Press Club.
Needless to say, the ARU was dumbstruck. There had been no heads-up, no advance warning from the new federal Minister for Sport Kate Ellis. But then no-one else has heard from her either, and for some considerable time.
A computer search of major metropolitan newspapers around the country reveals that before this announcement, the only media mention Ellis has received since mid-January came on January 31 when The Age reported that AFL Coaches Association chief executive Neale Daniher was going to her with a good idea - note, not the other way around - about setting up a sport specific graduate qualification.
For some time now, The Australian has been seeking an in-depth interview with Ellis to get a handle on her hopes and aspirations for her new role. So far, all requests have been denied, although the self-described passionate AFL fan did have a brief chat shortly after the election in which she foreshadowed an unspecified hardline policy on drugs in sport.
Otherwise Ellis apparently needs more time to get her head around her portfolio.
Just as well she doesn't work for Hillary Clinton who is vowing not just to be ready from Day One if she wins the US presidency, but also right from Day One. The thrust of the Rudd Government's rationale for axing the National Rugby Academy was that, one, the project hadn't been properly researched - this is laughably untrue as Lewis held his first meeting with the former federal Sports Minister George Brandis in April 2006, with the ARU later hiring a firm of lobbyists to guide them through the labyrinth of applying for federal funding. And two, that it was a shameless piece of pork-barrelling by a desperate and doomed administration.
If it was election largesse, a conservative government's parting gift to its old-school tie mates, the ARU clearly wasn't counting on it. If it really had been "a done deal" why did the ARU go to the expense of engaging lobbyists? And if it was a deliberate vote-buyer, the Howard Government clearly was counting on voters having long memories. Fully a year before the November 24 election was held, ARU heavyweights Gary Flowers and Brian West were pitching their case in Canberra. And it was on June 30, nearly four months before the poll date was set, that John Howard flew to Brisbane to make the funding announcement.
Note that date, the last day of the 2006-07 financial year. The project was deliberately announced then as a means of safeguarding it, yet the Rudd Government has included it in its hit-list document entitled: "Reversals of measures announced in 2007-08 mid-year economic and fiscal outlook and 2007 pre-election economic and fiscal outlook".
Let's assume, then, that it falls into the second part of this grim document, the "2007 pre-election" part. And if we are talking funding windfalls for national sports just as the election gales were really starting to howl, what is one to make of the Howard Government's $16million contribution to the Football Federation of Australia to underwrite the Socceroos and the national women's, junior and paralympic teams? Announcement date: a somewhat ill-omened September 11.
This Howard Government allocation - which has been left untouched by Rudd's razor gang - followed hard on the heels of the $15million program that politically influential soccer powerbroker Frank Lowy persuaded the former government was needed to re-struture the FFA and set up the A-League.
That makes $31million poured into soccer in recent years, a considerable portion of it to keep alive a national competition the round-ball code desperately requires if it is to continue growing.
But it raises the question of why taxpayers should keep alive one such competition at the same time as the ARU was left with no option but to abandon its invaluable Australian Rugby Championship because the new series couldn't pay its own way?
If it's sporting bricks and mortar the Rudd Government philosophically objects to funding, why perchance is it honouring the Howard Government's $14million commitment to help lift the seating capacity of AFL club Geelong's Skilled Stadium by 5000?
It would be tempting to suggest that the Labor Government is engaging in some good old-fashioned class warfare by kicking the leather-patch brigade where it hurts the most. But this makes no sense given that rugby league, the archtypical working man's game, also took a hit, with the razor gang slashing the NRL's Hall of Fame funding to shreds. In short, there seems no logic to the Ballymore decision. If the Howard Government really was pork-barrelling, it did so by demonstrating a degree of long-range planning and farsightedness the Kevin07 campaign always complained the Coalition lacked.
And if the rationale is that the project wasn't properly researched, then maybe it's the Government itself that hasn't done its own homework.
The economic benefit assessment of the academy estimates the creation of $145million in direct and indirect added expenditure during the development stage and the creation of a further $618million over two decades once the centre is up and running.
Some 514 full-time jobs will be generated by the construction phase, another 264 to keep the centre ticking over.
If the decision to axe the funding is not overturned, everyone loses.
But there is a compromise - for the Government to give Australian and Queensland rugby not a grant but a $25million interest-free loan repayable in five years when the centre comes on line, with rugby then able to re-finance a going concern.
"We could live with that," said Lewis.
Yes, but can Kevin Rudd?
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...012430,00.html
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