We absolutely loved Newcastle Olympic Football Club director Kosta Patsan's testimony at a Senate inquiry in Canberra into the so-called sports rorts scandal.
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We listened to Kosta's testimony live online and reported on it for the Newcastle Herald's news section last week.
Kosta gave the politicians and bureaucrats in Canberra a big serve for rejecting his soccer club's application for a $500,000 grant.
The club applied for the grant to help fund a new grandstand and dressing sheds at Darling Street Oval in Hamilton South.
The club met the criteria and put its application in on time. Other clubs that didn't meet the criteria and put their applications in late did get funded in a shocking and widely publicised case of pork barrelling.
Kosta didn't pull any punches. He told the inquiry straight what he thought of the Morrison government's handling of the matter and the dodgy way it divvied up $100 million in sports infrastructure funding.
"Our grandstand - essentially it's not a grandstand - it's five levels of metal tiered seating with a roof that was built by volunteers over 30 years ago," he said.
He also made us laugh out loud when he asked why the government hadn't fixed the problem it created by finding some extra funding to give to the clubs that were dudded.
"Surely the cost of running this inquiry would be close to what that extra funding round is," he said.
It was pure gold when he said, "As a taxpayer, I expect you to spend my money better". He described Parliament as a "citadel of waste". If the sports minister could simply hand out grants in whatever way she liked, Australia may as well be a "banana republic".
"That's how it looks outside of these cloistered confines in the real world," he said.
"We live in the real world."
He spoke about how Newcastle Olympic had "always been grassroots-funded, essentially by the local Greek community".
"We make a lot of schnitzels and sell a lot of cans of drink. We raise all of our money ourselves," he said.
"That small grandstand and little shed we have was purely built by volunteers, local concreters and guys welding steel together."
He spoke about all the hours that volunteers put in to keep the club running.
He said the club's ambition was "simply to have more people playing football".
"We measure ourselves on having as many people playing football in Olympic colours as possible.
"We love seeing kids play football."
He added that the club now had popular women's teams. New dressing rooms were badly needed, so males and females could have their own areas to get changed.
His club had been selected as a training venue for the Women's World Cup in 2023.
"Goodness knows what FIFA will do when they come and see the state of this grandstand," he said.
Kosta, you're our hero.
Lemon-Aid
We wrote last week about Bob Skelton's bush lemons on his Minmi property. Bob had mentioned that the bush lemons probably weren't native.
In response, reader Sam said bush lemons probably shouldn't be considered native "anywhere in the world".
He referred us to horticultural research looking at the origins of cultivated citrus. It found that lemon was "derived from citron and sour orange".
So the creation of lemon was kind of aided by orange. That sounds like lemon-aid to us.
