Funding for the Sydney Hakoah Club’s White City mega-club far exceeded its building cost, including millions from state and federal governments. Andrew Brown reports.
I grew up with the Hakoah Club in Bondi. Now, a new club is being built in White City, between Bondi and the Sydney CBD.
My godfather, Andrew Lederer, and his great friend Frank Lowy were the two men who, more than anyone, built the institution I knew as a child. So it is with mixed emotions that I pen this article.
Hakoah was really two institutions. There was the football team, which played in the old National Soccer League against clubs like Marconi and Melita Eagles, a competition built and paid for by migrant communities. And there was the social club, the beating heart of it all. My godparents were Hungarian Holocaust survivors. Hakoah was where people who had lost countries, homes and families built a community in a new land. They built it themselves.
I loved that club. Which is precisely why I am entitled to ask what has happened at White City.
The 30,000 square metre project rising near Edgecliff Station is described by Hakoah as a $150 million world-class Jewish community centre.
Two swimming pools. A gym. Nine tennis courts.
A full-size football pitch. Restaurants and private dining.
Hakoah Club, White City
A grand project with even grander funding
More than $100m was raised from the Jewish community itself. Credit where it is due. That is philanthropy on a scale most institutions could only dream of, and it is exactly how the Hakoah of my childhood was built.
Then governments arrived anyway. As reported recently by the Wentworth Courier, the project has received $28.5m from the Commonwealth and $26m from NSW, with a further $32m in federal and state funding for security and infrastructure announced in March in response to the attack at Bondi Beach on 14 December 2025, during Hanukkah, in which members of the Jewish community were murdered.
Let me be clear. After Bondi, every dollar of genuine security funding is right, and no decent Australian begrudges it.
But add it up. Over $100m private. At least $86.5m public. That is more than $186 million for a $150 million project.
The funding exceeds the cost of the building by at least $36.5 million.
And Hakoah itself told us where the difference goes. The club said government money would reduce its debt and improve its long-term financial position. Read that again. Taxpayers are not finishing a community centre. The community already funded it.
Taxpayers are improving the balance sheet of a private club whose president comes from one of Australia’s wealthiest families and whose membership is drawn from the wealthiest suburbs in Australia.
Where is the justification?
There is more. Budget Paper No. 2 in the 2026 Federal Budget carries $22 million over two years for security and infrastructure at the Hakoah Club. Nobody has said what it is.
If it is the federal share of the March package, then the same money was announced at a lectern in March and again in the budget in June. Two headlines, one cheque, and generosity inflated by the simple trick of announcing one grant twice. If instead it is new money, then public support alone exceeds $108 million.
Sit with that. More than $100 million of public money for a $150 million project, on top of the $100 million the community had already raised itself. Neither government has published a reconciliation, so both readings remain open. Either answer is damning. One means the ministers dressed up old money as new. The other means
taxpayers have covered more than two-thirds of the cost of a private club that didn’t need it.
And because the March package is labelled security and infrastructure, the public is entitled to the split. How much hardens the site against the kind of atrocity we saw at Bondi, and how much simply builds the building? Genuine security spending deserves support. It does not deserve to be used as a wrapper.
Remember the script you have been recited for three years. Jim Chalmers says every dollar must be justified. Anthony Albanese says relief must be responsible and targeted.
Chris Minns says nurses must moderate their wage claims. There is no money.
Except at White City, where the money exceeded the price of the building. Chris Minns attended the topping out ceremony in a hard hat. Of course he did. Premiers attend the announcements. They never attend the audits.
Now come with me to the other Australia.
The other Australia
It is 6.30 on a Saturday morning in July. The frost is still on the grass. A mother in a beanie is setting up a trestle table outside a canteen that hasn’t been renovated since the 1980s. She will stand there for five hours selling sausage sandwiches for four dollars and cans of soft drink for two, and if it is a good day, if the weather holds and two hundred people come through, the club will clear perhaps six hundred dollars.
Six hundred dollars. The under-tens need new jerseys.
That is most of it gone. The seniors have been asking for lights so they can train after work through winter. Lights cost tens of thousands. At six hundred dollars a Saturday, that is years of frozen mornings, years of dads burning their fingers on barbecue plates, years of volunteer treasurers lying awake doing sums that never work.
This is how junior sport is funded in New South Wales. Not by lecterns. By sausages.
The ‘Don’t Worry Oval’ in Windsor, where my own kids play, does not have a public toilet. Children play sport there, all winter, and there is nowhere for them to go. Their parents have fundraised and lobbied and waited. The toilet has not come. The Hills Shire needs 40 new fields by 2036 just to keep pace with the families pouring into western Sydney. The fields have not come either.
Put the two Australias side by side. In one, a mother stands in the frost for five hours to make six hundred dollars for jerseys. In the other, a private club in Paddington with two swimming pools, nine tennis courts and private dining receives $86.5m, possibly $108m of her taxes, over and above the $100m its own wealthy community raised, for a project that was already paid for.
She was told there is no money. She believed it. She got up in the dark anyway.
And Marconi and Melita Eagles, built by Italian and Maltese families with the same sacrifice as Hakoah? Show me their line in Budget Paper No. 2. There isn’t one. There never is.
No sausage sizzle in history has raised $86.5m. Money like that is not raised. It is arranged, in boardrooms and ministerial suites, by people whose calls get returned. Australia runs a two-tier grants system and pretends it does not. Tier one is a minister, a lectern and a cheque. Tier two is a 40-page application, a capped grant and a letter of regret signed by nobody.
A question of fairness
These are not antisemitic questions, although that is how they will be framed by some. These are democratic questions, and they should be asked of any institution whose funding exceeds its project cost by $36.5m. My godparents survived the Holocaust. I will not be lectured about asking where public money went.
Who approved a surplus? Why? And where the hell was everyone else’s application form?
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MWM put questions about the project funding to the Prime Minister, the Treasurer, the Premier and the Hakoah Club. Freedom of Information requests are being lodged with both governments.
The Prime Minister and Treasurer did not respond.
The NSW Government released this statement:
“The NSW Government has provided funding of $11 million for safety and infrastructure at the Hakoah Club’s sport and community facility development in Paddington.
“The funding will contribute towards infrastructure and enhanced security measures for the club, which will be a centre for sporting, social and cultural activity open to the whole community.
“The NSW Government previously contributed $15 million to the $150 million facility.”
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Andrew Brown is a Sydney businessman in the health products sector, former Deputy Mayor of Mosman and Palestine peace activist