I still can not believe – or I don’t want to believe the information that John Key brought to our attention this week.
Key claims that bureaucracy is gobbling up huge amounts of the government’s contribution to sport in this country. He claims that Sparc, the government’s sports funding agency, spends a third of its budget on administration. We are told that Sparc employs 86 full-time staff, 47 of them on over $100,000 per year and 14 of those on over $150,000 per year. And despite this army of highly paid and therefore one would hope highly skilled employees – they plan to spend $5.5 million on their website this year.
Frankly I find this outrageous. Surely the government allocates funds to Sparc with the intention of improving the health and well-being of all New Zealanders. Surely the government allocates funds to Sparc to foster sport in such a way that champions are produced. People we can all be proud of.
I am sure Sparc was never set-up to produce a large number of highly paid semi-civil servants who no doubt bolster the numbers on the Wellington cocktail party circuit.
The minister who allowed this to happen should be sacked although - in the interest of costs – we can probably wait until November when that will happen anyway.
But it does raise in my mind the so-called regional sports park.
I say so-called because it is clearly a Hastings District Council initiative – if it was truly regional, others would have been consulted in the region.
For instance – and I accept that this project has been underway since 2004 – I have never been asked if I think a velodrome is a greater asset than a swimming pool, or if gym-sports were more important then badminton.
It is my view that the opportunity to build this park has been lost. We are now into a severe downturn in the economy and corporate backing is going to be extremely hard to obtain.
But if Hastings do manage to complete this ambitious project, they are going to have to be very careful that the planned administrative offices are not full of overpaid bureaucrats eating from the hands of real sports people.
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