Executives win as sport stars miss out

The Australian Sports Commission has spent up big on executive staff with swish offices in Melbourne and Brisbane.

Cathy Freeman receives her 400m gold medal at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Picture: Craig Borrow

The Australian Sports Commission has spent up big on executive staff, with swish offices in Melbourne and Brisbane, paying more than $8m on executive training and an outlay of nearly $5m on recruitm­ent consultants.

Athletes who have been forced to turn to their parents for support will be particularly dismayed at how sports executives have been generously looked after, apparently at their expense.

The priorities of the organisation appear badly skewed away from their main clients: athletes.

The Australian has already revealed­ that the top Australian Institut­e of Sport executives are on eye-watering salaries of more than $400,000 a year and that another handful of staff earn well over $220,000. AIS chief Peter Conde earns $426,000 a year while the former Sport Australia head Kate Palmer earned $452,000 a year. The chairman of the Australian Sports Commission, John Wylie, a multi-millionaire, is paid more than $100,000 to oversee the AIS — although over the years as chairman, Mr Wylie has donated his board fee to sports foundations and charities associated with sport.

Further investigation by The Australian shows that, in addition to lucrative pay packets, there have been extraordinary sums paid to recruitment companies. In 2018 the ASC spent $2,018,947 to recruitment companies and last year it paid them about $2.785m. The payments were to big firms such as Hudson Group, Hayes and Balance Recruitment, including one worth $796,000 to Balance.

This is as well as paying nearly $2m for leases on office space in Brisbane and Melbourne up until 2021. AIS executives prefer to fly in and out of the main AIS campus in Canberra rather than live there. Travel costs to attend meetings in Canberra have skyrocketed in recent years, and a travel figure is estimated to be more than $3m.

In comparison, that amount of money is in the ballpark of funding an entire sport such as water polo ($3.89m a year); surfing ($2.73m) or softball ($2.26m). The ASC has had to provide loans to Cycling Aust­ralia of $1.5m and the Australian Paralympic Committee for $2.25m to help with their budgets.

While several national sporting organisations have struggled to pay coaches and high-­performance directors to oversee the next generation of sporting stars, executives and senior staff of Sport Australia and the AIS have been enjoying as much as $7m of professional training from the Melbourne Business School.

Extra training was also provided by a former Melbourne Business School employee, Matt Williams. Mr Williams’s company, Artem Consulting, billed sport another $449,000 in four payments.

While professional training may be justifiable, espec­ially as large tranches of AIS staff have little experience inside the organisation, it is unclear how the training has directly helped athletes. One recipient of that training has left the AIS to work in real estate.

Littered among the consultants were physiotherapists and a sport psychologist: services that the AIS used to provide as part of the sports science and medicine unit. Mike McGovern left the AIS but was rehired as a strategic consultant on $245,000 for a 12-month contract in 2018 and another short-term contract of $134,820 last year. Other consultants used were expert­s in organisational change and workforce strategy.

One perplexing payment was to the Seven Network for $499,000 in June last year.

All the while, some middle- and lower-ranking sports say they will not be able to hire full-time coaches for their athletes later this year.

The documents show contracts to the ASC in 2018 included Balance Recruitment ($115,000 and $474,688); Hayes Specialist Recruitment, $125,000, $133,138 and $280,629; Hill Executive Group, $109,824; Hudson Global Resources (Aust) $274,428 and $172,260; Sports Recruitment International, $208,800; and Bastion Reputation Management $125,180. Last year the same firms picked up contracts split between them of at least $2.785m, including one worth $796,000 to Balance Recruitmen­t.

Opening offices out of Canberra has been costly. One in Brisbane leased from Colliers International from February 2018 to December this year costs $499,068. The Melbourne office in Collins Street is leased from January 2015 to April 2021 at a cost of $1.47m.

Another big expenditure for the commission has been marketing and advertising campaigns. As much as $17m was spent on consultants over two years in this area, including two payments to the Dentsu X company of $6.6m and $492,700 and Universal McCann of $6.7m and $209,000.