Top administrators paid big salaries as sports face cuts

Australia’s top sporting administrators are paid huge salaries, while the sporting system underneath them continues to crumble.

Sports Commission chairman John Wylie donates his $101,000 fee to charity. Picture: Britta Campion

Australia’s top sporting administrators are paid near half-a-million-dollar salaries, while the sporting system underneath them continues to crumble.

An investigation by The Australian shows that the former head of Sport Australia, Kate Palmer, received renumeration of $452,000 a year, while the head of the Australian Institute of Sport, Peter Conde, earns $426,000 a year. The long lease on a Canberra apartment for Conde, who flies in from Brisbane, is included in his salary package.

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Palmer stepped down from the role at the end of January after four years at the helm. An acting chief has been appointed.

The big salaries present a particularly embarrassing and awkward situation as sports stars and national sporting organisations face big funding cuts, dictated by these officials, after the Tokyo Olympics.

Some sports have been told their funding post-Tokyo will be slashed by more than 60 per cent, meaning job losses for coaches and performance directors who are directly involved in getting athletes in peak shape.

Australian Sports Commission board members are also paid, with the chairman, businessman John Wylie, getting $101,000 in 2019. Others including former distance running champion Steve Moneghetti and honorary life member of Australian Sailing, Andrew Plympton, received between $64,000 and $68,000.

Outside of the taxpayer-funded sphere, senior officials at the Australian Olympic Committee — which receives no direct government funding — are also on hefty pay packets. President John Coates is paid a consultancy fee of nearly $600,000 while chief executive Matt Carroll is paid $491,000. The AOC’s role is to send the Olympic team to Tokyo.

Coates has dubbed the multi-million-dollar spending by the Sports Commission on consultants as “incom­pre­hensible”.

He said on Friday he was shocked by the money splashed on consultants by Sport Australia.

“I am very surprised by where the money is being spent, particularly at a time when our senior athletes have been making representations for greater direct support,” Coates said.

Wylie has declined requests to be interviewed but his spokesman said his board fees had been donated to charity.

The Australian can reveal that a total of six executives at Sport Australia earn between $220,000 and $320,000 a year as well as two high-earning staffers, one on $259,000 a year and one on $337,000 a year.

Nearly $400,000 is paid each year to Louise Eyres, who left at the end of 2019 after less than three years as chief marketing ­director. Eyres, now head of marketing at Vanguard Australia, said on her LinkedIn page she had led the Sport Australia enterprise team accountable for marketing, media relations and communications, digital strategy and consumer insights to deliver a national agenda for sport and physical activity.

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Palmer knew of Eyres during her time heading up Netball Australia and she was hired to steer the Move It AUS campaign. This marketing push, launched in 2018 and estimated to have cost nearly $10m, was to promote sport and physical activity in daily life. It has been wound down.

Another big earner is Andrew Larratt, general manager of sport business. Larratt is a sports administrator who is described on Sport Australia’s website as one of Cricket Australia’s “great strategic thinkers” when he worked there between 2005 and 2013.

He was poached from Rugby Australia in 2018 and earns $354,000 a year.

Most of the executives live outside Canberra and fly in for meetings. With Conde in Brisbane, his deputies are also outside the capital. Head of innovation Ian Burns divides his time between San Francisco, Manly and Canberra. Head of strategy Alex Newton lives in Melbourne and Larratt lives in Sydney.