Donations and Sponsorships

“presently on hold – due to no money available”

Since we started Dick Smith Foods in 1999 we have been able to give away over $4.7 million in donations and sponsorships.

In fact, a recent check showed that we have given away to important causes over 30% of our income and over 90% of our profit.

This has caused Dick Smith Foods a real problem.

For a start, we have had little money available for marketing – we believed that Australians would support our brand because of the fact that we were supporting Australian farmers.

We have dropped from about $80 million turnover per annum to nearly $8 million per annum.

Just as I have suggested that all my fellow Australians who want to keep Qantas as our international airline should actually buy a ticket on Qantas, I make the same suggestion regarding requests for donations and sponsorships from Dick Smith Foods.

For people who are looking for donations and sponsorships from Dick Smith Foods, can you firstly actually buy a Dick Smith Foods product and get as many friends as possible to buy our products? That’s the only way we will be able to stay in business let alone return to the levels of donations and sponsorships we have had in the past.

In recent times our donations have come from borrowing within our corporate group as we simply didn’t have the cash in the bank. If we continue to give any donations and sponsorships we will quite clearly go broke.

Because of this, all donations and sponsorships are on hold. PLEASE do not write to us. We don’t even have the money to pay staff to answer all the hundreds of letters and emails we receive.

With the revitalisation of our new Dick Smith Foods we are hopeful that in six to twelve months we will be able to make profits again so we can once again reinstate our generous sponsorship and donation practices.

In the meantime, we suggest that you write to one of the four Bank Chief Executives personally and ask if they can assist. They each receive on average wages and bonuses of about $10 million per year and from what we can make out – publicly at least – they shirk their responsibilities for helping others.

Ian Narev CEO Commonwealth Bank of Australia 48 Martin Place SYDNEY NSW 2000	Gail Kelly CEO Westpac 275 Kent Street SYDNEY NSW 2000
Cameron Clyne CEO National Australia Bank 500 Bourke Street MELBOURNE VIC 3000	Michael Smith CEO ANZ Level 14, 100 Queen Street MELBOURNE VIC 3000

If you have no luck with the Bank CEOs, I suggest you try and obtain a copy of the BRW Rich List and write to some of the people on the list.

It’s interesting – in the United States you are considered a “social pariah” if you’re wealthy and not also a philanthropist. It used to be the same in Australia in the 1950s but now this has all changed. Whilst ordinary Australians are shown to be some of the most generous in the world, the wealthy in Australia generally appear to be quite selfish.

For example, figures show that in the United States the wealthy give away about 15% of their income whereas in Australia it’s less than 1%.

Return to About Us