THIS isn’t another one of those “back when I was a young fella” columns at all, but back when I was a young fella, I remember money raining from the sky. At least, that’s what it seemed like. Pokie machine money seemed to rain down (to a certain level, of course) with no accountability required. I met a club official once who had received a reasonable sum to replace his club’s training ground lights.
They had spent it on recruiting a couple of Fijian rugby players instead. When I asked what would happen if the XYZ Charitable Trust found out, he laughed and said “they don’t care, so long as we’re not pocketing it!”
Which, it has to be said, was an exercise in semantics, given the lack of accountability. Nowadays, every time I put an application for a sports club to a pokie funder, the accountability seems to grow.  We spend more time on accountability reports than we do on the application. Clubs run by volunteers achieve this in their spare time.
However, the appearance is that the further up the sporting food chain you get, the less accountability (or at least open accountability) there is.
Take, for example, the fact that Bike NZ is getting a substantial wedge of cash between last December and the London Olympics. Part of this is tagged (according to my well-placed sources) for new track cycling bikes for our high performance team.
The bikes are well overdue, to the point where we are riding bikes older than any other team (apart from Colombia). Pah, you might say, we’ll still do OK – a bike is a bike.
In the case of international track cycling, it isn’t. Gear failures, advances in technology, and wear and tear are making the difference between World Cup medals and also-rans. So why hasn’t SPARC, as funder, asked where the new bikes are?
The athletes themselves can’t speak up, because of their completely airtight and threatening high performance contracts with BikeNZ.
The athletes are the ones held accountable, but further up the food chain something isn’t happening – and there appears to be no accountability until it’s too late – like after the London Olympics.
Accountability also seems to be lacking in other areas. The Waikato Rugby Union owes $953,000 in back rent for Waikato Stadium. Where was the accountability there – firstly from the WRU board to its debtors, and secondly from the Hamilton City Council as creditor to act in the best interests of its ratepayers? This problem hasn’t just surfaced – they went into arrears in 2009
Had a local rugby club not paid rent on its grounds, both the WRU and the Council would no doubt have come down on them hard. But this problem has been allowed to blow out to an extent where the union is at least $1.5 million in the hole.
Rugby Southland is another classic example. Some bad financial decisions have led to a massive loss, bordering on receivership, but community funders and the NZRFU are going to bail them out to the tune of $1.5 million.
These are supposed to be commercial enterprises – so we’re told. But it seems that unlike the clubs and volunteers they administer, regular rules of accountability don’t apply.
While volunteers and clubs burn the midnight oil to be accountable, and in some cases have to give back unspent funds, those at the top can do what they like, knowing they won’t be subject to the same rules of accountability as everyone else.