Australia at risk of sports brain drain ahead of home Olympics as AIS cuts jobs
Twenty-six years after Cathy Freeman crossed the finish line at the 2000 Olympics, the impact of that moment still gives her – and many other Australians – chills.
“It was just a phenomenon,” she said, speaking at an event in Melbourne following the official launch of the 2032 Brisbane Olympics emblems. “When athletes are given that opportunity to compete on home soil, magic can happen.”
But with major job cuts recently announced across the Australian Sports Commission (ASC) and its high-performance arm, the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), experts say there is a real risk young athletes won’t have the same opportunities to follow in Freeman’s footsteps.
“To win at the Olympics, it’s not an overnight thing. It takes six, seven years being with a coach to get onto the national team, make a push and finish on the podium. So there’s no time between now and 2032 to take backward steps,” high-performance expert John Fowlie said.
The ASC performs a wide range of roles, including driving policy reform, providing financial and governance advice, designing training courses, managing high-performance centres, developing new technologies, facilitating mentor programs for coaches, conducting sports medicine research, and helping transition athletes into retirement – to name a few. During the Olympics, Paralympics and Commonwealth Games, its staff also provide medical and communications support to teams.
Last month, it began the process of cutting around 40 to 50 roles – including at the AIS – a reduction of roughly 10 per cent of its almost 550-strong workforce, to account for a $15 million funding shortfall.
The ASC told this masthead the redundancies were part of an “organisational realignment” that was necessary to ensure it remained sustainable and focused on its priorities.
It said the revised structure had been finalised and included changes to sports science roles.
One source close to the situation but not permitted to speak publicly said over a dozen sports science roles are understood to be on the chopping block. Other teams affected, and the exact number of jobs to be cut, are yet to be confirmed.
“We are currently working through the redeployment process … We recognise this is a difficult time for those employees and are committed to supporting impacted staff through the transition,” an ASC spokesperson said. “Out of respect for employees who may be impacted by these changes, it would not be appropriate to provide further detail on individual roles or teams while the process is underway.”
The federal government said it recently committed record funding of $513 million over two years to high-performance sport. Separately, it has put $250 million towards a major redevelopment of the AIS campus, including three new facilities.
“What doesn’t make sense is the federal government announcing $250 million to invest in facilities at the AIS, and then you’re directly going to cut 50 of the best professionals in high performance at the same time. So you’re going to build these things, and then they’re empty, there’s no one to run them,” Fowlie said.
Fowlie grew up seeing his father work at the AIS before he himself went on to coach swimming there across four Olympic campaigns, including nine medals. His mother has also worked at the institute, and is affected by the cuts.
He said while sports bodies might not notice the effects immediately, the loss of decades of accumulated knowledge and experience would be felt in the long term. He said it put Australia at risk of a talent exodus, which he had observed following previous ASC cuts, most notably the 2012 AIS restructure, which saw the organisation divest itself of the 29 sports programs it had previously managed directly.
While there is an opportunity for some of the larger national sporting organisations (NSOs) to recruit outgoing ASC staff in-house, Disability Sports Australia (DSA) chief executive Ayden Shaw said the redundancies could place further pressure on smaller, less well-funded sporting organisations in particular, like DSA, which helps organisations create more opportunities for people with disabilities to participate in sport.
Shaw said ASC had helped DSA develop its online “Building Inclusive Sport Clubs” course when it lacked the resources to do so alone, while its governance team had also supported the development of DSA’s strategy.
“That support has been incredibly valuable [as] smaller sporting organisations don’t always have the resources or expertise to do this work themselves,” Shaw said. “That could put further pressure on areas like diversity and inclusion, where greater support is already needed. For us, that challenge could be compounded because we’re also working with other sporting organisations to help more people with disability take part in sport.”
It is a double whammy for DSA, which recently had its funding cut by almost 40 per cent, from $217,000 to $135,000, following a reduction in the federal government’s investment in Play Well – the grassroots participation side of the government’s sports strategy – as opposed to Win Well, which is focused on high-performance. Win Well funding for para sports has increased.
ASC said all national sports bodies had been assessed against the same criteria, and while DSA’s allocation was ultimately reduced, seven of the 10 NSOs for people with disabilities had received a funding increase.
It said the commission’s revised structure was designed to strengthen the way it works with sports organisations, and it did not expect to reduce the level of support provided.
However, sport information consultant and former AIS researcher Greg Blood said he would have liked to see more investigation into other parts of the business that could have been trimmed.
Blood added that if Australia wanted to replicate the success of Sydney, the government needed to provide longer-term certainty to organisations and athletes by locking in funding to 2032 – a call recently backed by 2032 Brisbane president Andrew Liveris when asked about it by this masthead.
“The Keating government in 1994 put about $140 million into the Olympic Athlete Program which guaranteed money all the way to the Olympics,” he said. “My problem with Brisbane is there’s no guarantee of government money for the next six years. They tend to commit to funding roughly two years at a time … It makes it hard to achieve long-term results and retain coaches,” Blood said.
Funding is currently locked in a two-year cycle. When asked, the federal government did not comment on whether it would consider extending this. A spokesman for Sports Minister Anika Wells reiterated there had been no cuts to high-performance funding in its most recent budget, and that participation funding including Play Well, Sporting Schools and Water and Snow Safety had been extended.
Speaking alongside Freeman on Tuesday, Liveris said he was pleased with the level of government investment so far, acknowledging its significantly higher investment in new infrastructure for the Brisbane Games compared to Sydney.
He said high-performance sport in Australia should explore other funding avenues, including inviting more philanthropic investment, and that athletes needed to be front and centre of all decisions going forward.
“I think we’ve got to look after our athletes in a way that’s sustainable, so that there’s more Gout Gouts out there, and there’s more Cathy Freemans and Al Vineys out there. We’ve got to do this to make sure that the next generation sees the support,” he said.
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