Australian high-performance expert Ric Charlesworth said that the country "would never return to the top five on the Olympic medal tally without a significant boost to sports funding," according to Nicole Jeffery of THE AUSTRALIAN.
Australia’s sports system "has been significantly restructured" since the country's poor performance at the London Olympics, but Charlesworth said that "the necessary work would do no more than arrest the slide unless it was accompanied by a greater financial commitment to Olympic sports."
Charlesworth "painted a bleak picture of Australia’s future in international sport without a new approach to funding" -- but he believes he has the answer: a national sports and arts lottery, similar to that introduced in Great Britain in '96. Charlesworth: "There needs to be a big jump (in funding). We’re up against money and numbers. We’ve worked hard on governance and getting the structure right but unless there’s a paradigm shift for those sports that aren’t getting any traction, it’s devilishly hard." Charlesworth argued that sports funding "has to be removed from the political sphere where it falls prey to the whims of the government of the day, which leaves national sports organisations unable to make long-term plans." Charlesworth's "brutal assessment" is that without an improved funding model, Australian sport is "going south" (THE AUSTRALIAN, 11/13).
