Days after the Wallaroos players' statement called out Rugby Australia [RA] for its poor treatment of the women's 15s, chief executive Phil Waugh has attempted to quell the players' simmering frustrations by reinforcing the governing body's commitment to women's rugby, but stopped short of addressing allegations that the partners of Wallabies players were being prioritized over the Wallaroos themselves.
RA on Wednesday unveiled its strategic "reset" that will shape the game over the coming years, with Waugh facing a series of questions on RA's approach to the women's program, so too the frustration within the group surrounding the allegations aired on Sunday.
Refusing to divulge whether the accusations were true, he said the sporting body would sit down with the players to talk through concerns and requests.
"I'm not going into the detail of each accusation, but we may in time," Waugh told reporters on Wednesday. "Until I meet with the girls, I want to give them the respect to listen and then clarify some of the accusations with the girls.
"We'll meet with the girls this week and have a listen and understand. There are certainly some inaccuracies in some of the commentary, but I think there's a broader conversation around the strategy of driving investment into the women's game and so that will get caught up in the inaccuracy and what's right and what's wrong.
"We're heavily invested, and it's one of our key strategic pillars, is investment in the women's game. And as I've said, we will listen and respect some of the commentary that's in the media, but most importantly we work through the Rugby Union Players' Association in talking with our players, we'll continue to do that.
"And we've got a conversation with a number of the female athletes this week to talk about what the concerns are and also what requests do they want from us that we can help with in the immediate term but also in the longer strategic sense.
"It's more actually as a governing body, we need to support women's game better than what we have and we've acknowledged that when we introduced our first phase of investment in women's rugby on the player contracting side, we acknowledge that we're only at the start with the infancy of the professionalism in the 15s game, and how quickly can you accelerate that through phase two and phase three."
Waugh said the latest changes were just the "first phase" of three to be implemented to help drive professionalism within the women's game, with much of the plan still to be ironed out, but a new centralized model would help develop pathways from local to national level under a new national high performance pathway.
Asked what exactly that looked like for the women's side of the game, Waugh failed to offer a clear plan, but stated the growth of the global calendar for the women's rugby allowed RA to create a more aligned system locally.
"Well, it's sort of fits all in, so when you think about our Super Rugby clubs, that includes our Super Ruby Pacific teams and our Super W teams, we think about them as the same," Waugh said.
"I mean the beauty of where the game is across the globe, in the 15s women's game at the moment you've actually got an opportunity if we get the right global calendar, which is going great with the introduction of WXV1, two and three, as well as Six Nations growing, and Pac4 [Pacific Four] growing.
"It actually allows us to set a more aligned system which is the same with the contracting of the Wallaroos players as the centralised contracting profile which is sort of where we're moving from because it's in its infancy in women's, to design it for what best practice looks like at the start, rather than what we're trying to move to in the men's side."
The Wallaroos pointed to the Matildas' incredible World Cup campaign in their social media statement, acknowledging the funding and professionalism the team had received. While RA has made many promises previously about the ongoing plans to create a fully professional program, Waugh stated a three-phase program was underway. But it remains short on detail until a decision was made in regard to capital.
As of now RA is continuing to discuss its third-party investment options, private equity or debt.
"From a design and high performance perspective, we're sort of in three phases view on what professionalism looks like and at what scale on the women's game.
"We only introduced centralized contracts this year, and you know people will say it's been a long time coming it should have happened earlier and they may be right, but we've been very invested in looking at the overall system and how can we afford the growth in the women's and men's games.
"Then it's around the timing, you know we're going to have a fulltime head coach next year, and we'll be hoping to come out with something with a lot more detail as soon as we go through a capital raise event.
"At the moment we are challenged financially in the game right now, so it's about how do we ensure that we fund the game appropriately across the women's and men's games through to 2025 for the Lions series to be successful then in '27 and '29."
Waugh also rejected assertions RA had underestimated the growing frustration within the Wallaroos playing group, who on Sunday said "future of our game hangs in the balance".
"No, I think we've moved really quickly," Waugh told reporters. "You know, we can say that we do have work to do, which is why we're in phase one of the three phase process. Clearly, the level of frustration has been there, and I mean it's our role to ensure we're listening to our players and ensuring that we respond appropriately and in line with that more strategic thinking on what the women's game."
While other sporting codes such as NRLW and AFLW are continuing to speed up their plans to make their competitions professional, Waugh confirmed RA's existing plan to make the Wallaroos fully professional by 2025.
"Yes. Again, through the capital availability, but it's our intent to have fulltime Wallaroos by 2025," he said.