From a legal standpoint, the 7's side will have to remain under ARU control as they are the authorised body(by the IRB) to provide representative sides from Australia.
I say let it happen, the ARU in reality doesn't have much to lose, 7's is a emerging market and the ARU isn't in a position financially to invest capital expenditure to develop this market.
Ive said it in the past and il say it again, its only a matter of time before there is a rationalisation of the 7's rugby market within Australia, its quickly developing into a marketable product and there are several smaller unions and organisations out there who have already tapped into investors. What i mean is, that we currently have tournaments like the Gold Coast 7's, Darwins Hottest 7's, Noosa 7's and the Central Coast 7's all operating independantly, with a few more to pop up over the next couple of years. What we need to do, is interlink these into some kind of Australian 7's tournament, ie:
Similar to the IRB 7's it can rotate between hosting cities, potentially New Zealand and/or Singapore might want to get involved. There are already regular 7's sides showing up at the tournament's across Australia so it would just be a matter of building on that. Hopefully in the long term someone like ONE HD jumps on board, but in the short term, we can hope that the investors and sponsorship provides enough prize money which will encourage further investment by the teams participating.
