On New Year’s Eve I was waiting to see the Sky Tower light up at midnight. To pass the time I decided to read the 2017 Swimming New Zealand Annual Report. There is much to talk about in the report. It seems to me that Swimming New Zealand have cut their expenses to reflect their reduced welfare handout from the government. It is sad that the spending Swimming New Zealand has cut the most appears to be anything related to the participants. That is to be expected. It is not unusual for the office bureaucrats to look after themselves first.

The effect of the reduced government subsidy is obvious. But I was surprised how the word seems to be getting out, among normal charitable organisations, that Swimming New Zealand is a bad investment. Overall funding from this source was down by a modest $18,548. Swimming New Zealand’s problem though is that their bacon was saved by a huge increase in two grants from Auckland City. I would imagine this reflected Swimming New Zealand’s involvement in special events such as the World Master’s Games. I doubt that the two large grants had anything to do with the organisation’s main-stream swimming business.

But Cotterill and Johns must be panicking about their inability to attract support from the organisation’s 25 other charities. Cotterill calls it a challenge. That’s like calling the sinking of the Titanic, a boating mishap. In one year funding from this group fell from $742,176 to $481,084; a drop of $261,092 (35%). The table below summarises the pretty awful performance of Cotterill and Johns when it comes to raising money from charitable sources. Only four organisations increased their funding and one of those was the Brian Perry Charitable Trust, a body that has to be influenced by Swimming New Zealand Board member, Simon Perry. The other 21 charities either did not contribute at all or gave less than the previous year.

But the Annual Report comment that caught my eye was this masterpiece of Swimming New Zealand spin.

“An astonishing 49 New Zealand swimming records were broken between July 2016 – June 2017, including six open records and forty three age group records.”

As you read that remember this is the Annual Report. This is the document signed by Cotterill and Johns telling us, the members, what has happened during the year. Cotterill and Johns have an obligation to be brutally honest with the truth. I accept it is open to debate, but I cannot help but believe that the description, “An astonishing 49 New Zealand swimming records” is fake news on a Donald Trump scale. I accept Cotterill and Johns might have meant “astonishingly bad” but the impression certainly is that Swimming New Zealand has had the biggest crowd of records ever. And that is not true.

The table below gives you the numbers.

With only 49 records 2017 was an astonishing year. It was 69% worse than 2011, 57% worse than 2012 and 64% worse than 2013. And those numbers are astonishing.

It is stuff like this that can quickly undermine the credibility of those in charge. Can we believe what they are saying? I am surprised that the regional representatives who attended the AGM did not ask about this sort of nonsense. If Cotterill and Johns are going to publish and sign-off on rubbish like this they need to be held to account. There is little enough democracy left in Swimming New Zealand without the members letting appointed bureaucrats peddle this sort of misleading garbage.