'Whoever speaks loudest, or whoever has the ear of the Rugby League at the time, probably gets their way.'

Very good article, wonder who he is talking about here?

In the American draft system that can happen in theory, but in practice what the lowest team who has the first draft pick does is trade players.
So they swap round 1 pick, usually a star quarterback, for 3 round 3 picks.
In that way they get probably 9 good prospects for 3 star ones.
This in time drags the rubbish team back up.
It only works of course because even the worst team can afford to pay the wages of an entire squad, and star players if they decide to go down that route.
In order for it to work in our sport there would need to be an entire centralisation of funds.
That means all clubs hand over all revenue, and the RFL split it with the tv money equitably.
Can you imagine any of the big clubs going for that?

If we were in Oz complaining about our best players being picked off by the Brits, I would agree. The answer would be to use the youth development. Oz seems to have lots of talented youngsters coming through from what I can understand. But we have two pressure points, top players being lured away, and a much smaller pool of youngsters coming through. The change to the age groups eliminated the U15 and U 18's, essentially cutting in half the number of youngsters being trained by SL clubs. Even worse, as TS points out, the current U19's that are coming through now have nowhere to continue their development unless they can get a DR berth in the Championship - and a number of these teams don't wan't this anymore as they are looking to the new Promotion / Relegation regime of 2015.

So from a supporters pov, we are faced with falling standards from the loss of our top players, and a lower quality set of juniors coming through from the bottom. It's a mess at the moment, but even worse, a ticking bomb for the future. With SL clubs struggling to pay for their first team squad, the prospect of getting them to cough up more money (£160k) for another team at U21 or U23, doesn't look good.

I don't think you were saying the same thing when you lost Gregory to Wigan, Harris to Leeds and Scully to Saints?
FWIW I do agree that transfer fees did/do help some clubs to survive or reinvest.

And I do agree with Smith that 19 is too young to make a permanent decision on a player. Personally I would go back to U18's and U21's (with three overage players allowed in the U21's)
I know there is a cost to it, but it's a hit that the game needs to take, and maybe one of those age groups could be centrally funded.

I think may be there isn't as much talent available in Oz as we are led to believe these days who want to play RL ,especially when our top players are being head hunted by NRL clubs.

I can't work out whats going on in Australia these days. Having followed the Aussie media coverage recently in cricket, despite their success in this Ashes series, there is a general atmosphere of concern in Aussie cricket that the game is losing its status. Most Aussie cricket fans put Test cricket as the pinnacle and are not happy about Big Bash league and 20/20 cricket and the focus on making the game short and accessible to a 'new audience' but Cricket Australia says the game has to do that to compete because all the talented young athletes are being lost to the "codes of football" that offer more glamour, money and celebrity.

So either AFL is really monopolising Australia now or something isn't true.