Australian Sports Commission Chair John Wylie will "push for a dramatic overhaul of federal-state relations that could see the Australian Institute of Sport merged with state-based institutes and academies and the traditional, federated structures of Olympic sports scrapped in favour of a national governance model," according to Chip Le Grand of THE AUSTRALIAN. The reform plan "will be pursued against the backdrop of disappointing results in Rio," a "bitter feud" between Wylie and Australian Olympic Committee President John Coates and an "austere economic environment" in which the ASC has "warned Olympic sports not to look to government for increased handouts." Wylie said, "We are encouraging sports to be responsible for themselves rather than having a welfare-state mentality." While he did not mention Coates by name, Wylie "rebuked criticisms" made by Coates about the funding model for Australian sports, the operations of the Australian Institute of Sport and the leadership of Swimming Australia. Wylie said that the ASC, at a board meeting earlier this week, "recommitted unambiguously and unanimously" to the Winning Edge high-performance funding model adopted four years ago. Wylie said, "One response to Rio would be for Australian sport to reject the Winning Edge program and to retreat to the comfort of the past. We believe the opposite is true; we believe that Rio has made it clear that in an environment where funding is likely to remain constrained for Australian sport ... the need for further reform has become in our view even more compelling." Wylie’s "most ambitious" proposal is to establish a British-style national lottery that would generate, according to ASC estimates, additional funding of between A$50M ($38M) and A$100M ($75.5M) a year for high-performance sport programs. Australian sports will "also be asked to follow the leads of sports such as swimming and, more recently, rowing, in attracting increased corporate sponsorship and philanthropic support." Wylie admitted that "any changes perceived as a federal takeover of sport were doomed to fail." The state institutes are, and "will need to remain, best placed to identify and develop emerging athletes" (THE AUSTRALIAN, 9/2).
