Tennis Australia’s history of government love, CPAC your bags, and Hockey’s tone-deaf post

Game, set, cash!

The revelation this week that the Victorian government secretly approved a bailout of up to $63 million to Tennis Australia (TA) just before the last state election in 2022, raises the point — just how much dosh does the organisation snaffle in taxpayer money?

Even without the Victorian government’s largesse, TA receives tens of millions in government grants. And despite the governing body for tennis in Australia making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every year, and tens of millions in surplus, this government support just keeps going up.

Last we checked in, at the start of 2018, TA could bank on about $6 million a year in government grants. The next year, that figure more than doubled to over $14 million and in both 2021 and 2022 it was up to more than $19 million a year. The 2022-2023 report isn’t out yet.

That’s not all. TA’s annual report sets out “government grants” as a separate stream of income, but also notes that within the mammoth revenue it makes are “commercial, government and broadcast partners” (emphasis added). For example, the more than half a billion revenue TA made in 2021-2022 included “government revenues from Australian Sports Commission, Victorian Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions, Department Communities Sport & Recreation Tasmania, Destination NSW, South Australian Tourism Commission, Tourism and Events Queensland, and Visit Victoria”.

So amidst more than half a billion in revenue — even during the pandemic dip in 2021, it brought in $358 million, more than twice what it made in 2013 — why does TA need so many tens of millions in public money?

CPAC your bags

Australia’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the local branch of the SXSW for elderly reactionaries, is scanning around for the no doubt several young people in Australia keen to be yelled at about the woke mind virus in the United States. “We’re taking five Volunteers to CPAC USA”, they tell all the people under 25 who subscribe to their email correspondence, which, I think we can agree, is a very specific sort of person.

“To apply for this incredible opportunity, please send us a video, no longer than 60 seconds, explaining why you are the right person to join us at CPAC USA”, preferring video no doubt to check whether the young adult in question has the potential to really pop in what we can only imagine will be the world’s worst social media content.

The youngest person we can imagine having any interest in this is conservative commentator Caleb Bond who, as a 24-year-old, just makes the cut, while Sky News TikTok creator Carla Efstratiou has aged out of the competition. But mainly we wonder if these young go-getters who have aligned themselves with CPAC might find time for the trip in between their busy work schedules. 

Hockeying for attention

Former treasurer Joe Hockey’s Instagram, with its sartorial flair, dadaist captions and ineptly framed selfies, exuded a general air of harmless middle-aged cluelessness when people started happening upon it a few years back. That cluelessness was in full effect this morning.

This is the same Hockey who famously sorted Australians into “leaners and lifters” ahead of a budget that must rank among the most bizarrely punitive and politically catastrophic in history, topping it off by being pictured honking on a cigar afterwards (whether it was lit by a burning fifty was left to the viewers’ imagination). The same Hockey who proposed starving young people of Centrelink payments for six months while simultaneously claiming a grand a month in public money to sleep at his own wife’s house.

We’re not sure receiving an obvious scam text (“even this fails the scam test”, Hockey mysteriously observes) is worth bringing that to people’s minds?

God damn

Speaking of the US, remember yesterday we mentioned that Donald Trump was using even more extreme rhetoric this time around? We should have been more specific: over the weekend, his people were literally saying Trump was a gift from God, putting out an ad that would embarrass Saddam Hussein: “God said, ‘I need someone to wake up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay past midnight at a meeting of the heads of state’. So God made Trump” runs a representative sample.

The Lincoln Project has responded in kind, with “God Made a Dictator”, which posits Trump not as a gift, but as a test:

The Lincoln Project — the most high-profile of the “Never Trump” Republican groups — made a talent of appealing to precisely no-one in the years since Trump left office, facing allegations of sexual harassment and financial self-dealing by high-profile members. Co-founder Rick Wilson’s stated desire to see Trump as the 2024 nominee may be about more than just Wilson’s apparent belief Trump would be the easiest to beat.