Australian Rugby Union chief executive Bill Pulver laughs when asked if England national team coach Eddie Jones, who once held the same role at the Wallabies, is being paid for his marketing and promotion efforts.
Jones hit town late last week for England's three-match tour of Australia citing conspiracy theories supposedly hindering his team, including having his luggage searched by Customs officers upon arrival.
It has made for great theatre for rugby union and boosted interest in the sport that has led to the tests in Brisbane this weekend and then later in Melbourne and Sydney being on the verge of selling out. 
Notwithstanding some continuing financial and corporate governance problems at some of the Australian Super Rugby clubs, Pulver has a spring in his step these days after a few tough financial years at the helm of the ARU.
"Overall I'm pretty comfortable with the state of Australian rugby now," Pulver tells The Australian Financial Review.
The ARU is in the first year of a five-year $285 million broadcast deal that is worth more than double the previous contract, the Wallabies had a stirring run to last year's Rugby World Cup final and the women's sevens national team are world champions and gold medal favourites in the upcoming Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games.
Pulver says television ratings and attendances for the five local franchises are up slightly compared to last season, despite disappointing results for Queensland and the Western Force, and the ARU is on track to post a surplus for its 2016 financial year.
The latter is certainly good news for a sport that has been through some tough fiscal times. The ARU had a deficit of $6.3 million from $88 million in 2015 and ended that financial year in a negative equity position, and also had to cover more than $3 million losses by the Melbourne Rebels.
Pulver says the better financial result this year will include having the privatised Rebels off its books and the beginning of what will build to a $10 million future fund by 2020. "It is small amount but a good start, and we want to double that in the following five-year cycle."
What he is even more excited about is the potential for the growth of sevens rugby. The ARU's recently released strategic plan for 2016-2020 aims for a 15 per cent increase in female participation and 356,000 participants across rugby, sevens and a new non-tackle format called VIVA7s.
"Sevens is critical for our strategy," Pulver says. "And I think sevens at the Olympics will excite the public beyond their realisations now. And if we get our teams on the podium and it leads to more young girls and boys wanting to play rugby then it would be great."
But, as is always the case with professional sports in Australia, challenges remain for rugby when it comes to finances.
The ARU announced on Friday it had entered into an alliance agreement with the Perth-based Force, which has struggled on the field throughout its decade-long history and has lately been making million-dollar losses of it. While Pulver plays down talk of the move as a takeover, the ARU will handle many of the Force's back-office operations and its coaches will be answerable to the ARU high-performance coaching unit.
But he admits the Force alliance is a precursor to what he hopes are similar moves for the other four Australian Super Rugby teams, all of whom will almost certainly post financial losses this season.
It would be a centralised model along New Zealand lines, where the governing body effectively controls the five franchises that eventually feed up to what is a highly successful All Blacks national team. "What we want is these five clubs collaborating more off the field, but competing fiercely on it," Pulver says.
Anything to help alleviate the financial burden on the five teams would certainly be successful, because the very structure of the Super Rugby competition makes it hard for them to attract fans and sponsors.
This year the expanded 18-team competition includes teams from Japan and Argentina for the first time and a draw change means Australian teams play local 'derbies' against each other, which usually draw the biggest crowds, less often.
Super Rugby also takes a ill-timed break for several weeks for northern hemisphere teams such as England to tour, meaning fan interest is hard to maintain. The NSW Waratahs, for example, have no home games between   May 27 and   July 9.
Pulver says the ARU and its southern hemisphere counterparts are in talks with World Rugby to make changes to the global Test calendar that would mean Super Rugby is not interrupted in the future, though any changes will not come until after 2020. But now attention turns to the England matches, which will be hard-fought and should represent what is good in rugby. Later will come the more vexed matter of fixing the troublesome issues.