As the Fairfax investigative unit continues its heavy campaign against Football Federation Australia’s World Cup bid, you have to feel a bit sorry for former Fairfax veteran Rod Allen who has crossed to the PR dark side and is battling hard to limit the damage.
Allen is a former chief of staff of The Sun Herald who only joined the FFA late last year, and in January succeeded the feisty Bonita Mersiades who departed as the FFA’s head of communications in rather acrimonious circumstances.
Mersiades was a contributor to News Ltd’s The Punch site before her departure and she certainly was talking up all the economic benefits for Australia. It would be interesting to know what she now thinks about all these documents that have fallen into the hands of Fairfax’s crack duo of Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker.
The continuing stream of Fairfax stories is certainly doing plenty of damage to the credibility of Australia’s bid, which probably explains why the FFA has lobbed a classic defamation stopper writ in the NSW Supreme Court. Margaret Simons reported on Wednesday that FFA chairman Frank Lowy has been ringing Fairfax directors to complain about the coverage.
This wouldn’t surprise given Lowy’s command and control approach to management, although the FFA denies it and point out Lowy has been busy in South Africa and Europe during Fairfax’s jihad.
There was a time when Lowy was perceived to have some influence over Fairfax courtesy of three cross-directorships between Westfield and the media company, namely former Fairfax chairman Dean Wills, former Fairfax CEO Fred Hilmer and David Gonski. However, even that didn’t stop Ian Verrender’s extremely damaging front page reports for the Sydney Morning Herald back in 1998 about Westfield funding bogus community groups.
John Howard’s welcome reforms to defamation law ended the right of companies to sue for defamation, but this doesn’t cover the FFA because it is a not-for-profit incorporated association.
The FFA is most enraged about Fairfax’s suggestion it was somehow running a Melbourne Storm-style system with two sets of books that has hidden the spending of up to $10 million in government money.
As the documents and statements continue to flow from the government, the FFA and various auditors, it is looking like this inference will be very difficult to stack up. A strategic withdrawal and apology on this point would be a sensible move for Fairfax, thereby allowing it to continue to deploy this treasure trove of internal documents which have come its way.
That said, the Fairfax editors do need to think about the national interest. Taxpayers have committed $46 million to winning the 2022 World Cup and victory is still considered a reasonable prospect.
Is it really worth running a long and protracted campaign? Okay, the contracts with some of these colourful European lobbyists look generous but the facts are now on the table and the majority of the payments are success fees.
Every last dollar of taxpayer money has been accounted for to the government and Fairfax runs the risk of being captured by a disgruntled former staffer and Andrew Jennings, who has been running a long jihad against Peter Hargitay.
The harsh reality of the situation is that you don’t win global sporting events such as the World Cup without playing the game. For mine, the ‘scandal’ of the FFA bid is nothing like as bad as what McKenzie and Baker turned up with the Reserve Bank’s subsidiary Securency and it is time to wind things back and allow Australia a chance to put its best foot forward ahead of the December 3 decision for 2022.
So Ramadge should suppress these yarns from now and tell the staff that it’s a national interest issue?
Stephen, you are a total fake.
Just because it is so-called sport, why should we go soft in the head and leave our ethics behind?
Don’t we just love the term “playing the game” in the final paragraph. This isn’t playing and the game is fraud. Success fee” translates to me the same as “bribe” in this context.
Imagine if someone was doing a job for you. Would you be happy to see the first few million dollars going towards greasing palms, with promises of many more millions to follow as things progress? Not with my money.
John Bennetts, can you name one national or international event, whether sport, politics, religion or culture – conducted in a publicly funded stadium, race track, pool or ‘centre of excellence’ – that never ever involves greased palms. Just one.
Hugh (Charlie) McColl might just be correct that all international events involve greased palms.
That proposition, if true, in no way removes the need to distance ourselves, our nation and our money from events which are demonstrated to be founded on backhanders, graft or corruption.
Stuff the Opympics, FIFA and the international underwater speed basketweaving championship and the rest of the lot. This might just mean that car racing, boxing, wrestling, various other codes of football, ballet and acrobatics, ballroom dancing and many others, if shown to be corrupt, are not publicly funded by State and Federal Government sponsorship. A line needs to be drawn and that line should be determined on the basis of ethics, not expedience.
I am not saying that international sports meets should be outlawed, only the unethical practices involved with them. I am not saying that private sponsorship or personal expenditure to run these events should be banned, only that public money and governmental support should be refused after due process akin to a public enquiry and that the reasons for this must be explained unequivocably to the nation as a whole.
How about an indefinite ban of events shown to fall short of the ethical test, at least until the unethical people and practices are removed and shown to have been removed at a similar enquiry which considers a request for reinstatement to the list of supported sports?
Perhaps, Charlie, you are of the opinion that international sporting contests staged in publicly-owned facilities and with public funding to support them are, one and all, not worth the money involved. If so, I tend to agree with you, but the yardstick of ethical principles is the tool with which to exclude the worst performers, rather than just to trust my own, inevitably biased, judgement.