"Australian Institute of Sport pays more than $3m to abused athletes"

Boy, lucky they weren't the Catholic Church or an AFL player because then the usual suspects would have been calling for gallows to be built.

But this is a government organisation so it gets a pass on abuse of the kiddies.

Still, it's good that they were compensating the abuse victims from their own funds. Oh wait, their funds are our funds. The AIS is almost fully funded by the federal government. So it's no skin off their noses if they throw our money around to buy silence. $3 million here and $3million there and pretty soon you're talking about real money.

Of course the AIS is funded by the Australian Sports Commission to the tune of over $600 million per year. Add to that the odd quarter of billion dollars thrown in to fund a vanity project called AIS Podium Project, Oh and the "$513 million two-year investment package for high-performance sport leading into Brisbane 2032". (Notice how they call it an investment. Governments used to just spend our money...now they invest it!!. Investing in what is never stated).

So the next time you hear the government tell you that they can't afford this or that and the budget is already overstretched, remember that there are dozens of these frivolous spends that are the cause of the budget deficit. In the 1980's Finance Minister Peter Walsh talked about 200 bloody programmes that couldn't be justified on equity grounds. 40 years later and I'd guess that would be more like 2000 bloody programmes.