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Why John Howard is out of his league

23rd October, 2009
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23rd October, 2009
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Wallabies captain George Gregan (right) joins Prime Minister John Howard on his early morning walk in Canberra, Wednesday, Aug 16, 2006. The Wallabies will play the All Blacks in new Zealand on Saturday in the Tri - Nations Cup. AAP Image/Alan Porritt

Wallabies captain George Gregan (right) joins Prime Minister John Howard on his early morning walk in Canberra, Wednesday, Aug 16, 2006. The Wallabies will play the All Blacks in new Zealand on Saturday in the Tri - Nations Cup. AAP Image/Alan Porritt

The brutal execution of John Howard’s hope to be the Chief Commissioner for a new independent Rugby League Commission by the Labor Left hard man, the Federal MP Anthony Albanese, was totally predictable.

Rugby league, traditionally, has been the Labor Party in NSW and Queensland at play. There is no way the party is going to allow a doyen of the Liberal Party to play with its game.

Howard has been a long time St George supporter.

One of his last acts as Prime Minister was to give $10 million to the NRL to help build a new headquarters for the new commission. But these gestures are irrelevant in considering his right (or lack of any right) to a leadership role in rugby league.

The Rudd Government cancelled the Howard funding under the pretence of cost-cutting. But it found the money to grant nearly $100 million to football for a number of projects, including the bid to host a Football World Cup and money to support women’s football.

Presumably this was a Rudd concession to trying to win over the fabled ‘soccer mums’ voting bloc.

The new Sports Minister, Kate Ellis, an AFL tragic from Adelaide, famously did not know the difference between rugby league and rugby union. But this information gap was put right by Albanese when he revived the Howard offer, slightly topped up to $10.4 million, on the day before the NRL grand final.

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A few days later, Albanese (according to an exclusive report by Phillip Coorey in The Sydney Morning Herald) rang the NRL chief executive David Gallop and shot down ‘the stupid idea’ of a former Liberal leader becoming a rugby league power broker.

Albanese was acting totally in the tradition of the Labor Party with this initiative.

As sports historians have documented, the rugby league code in Australia (and in England, too) is predominantly working class in composition and because of this constituency has close ties with the labor movement and the Labor Party.

In my history of the rugby union battles between Australia and New Zealand, The Gold and the Black there is a section of about the Great Split in the rugby code that puts some context on all of this:

“A week before the All Golds (a New Zealand rugby league side) started on their great adventure of a tour of the United Kingdom, on 8 August 1907, a fateful meeting took place at Bateman’s Hotel in George Street, Sydney, a popular drinking spot near the centre of the city.

“About 50 rugby players, some of them nervously looking around before entering the hotel’s door, met to discuss the possibility of starting a professional football league, a rugby league, with some older men of great charisma.

“The leading light at the meeting was James J Giltinan, a well-known cricket umpire and a persuasive personality. Backing him were the legendary cricketer Victor Trumper and a local politician, Henry Clement Hoyle, who was a strike agitator on the railways in the 1890, a Labor MP for the inner-Sydney electorate of Surrey Hills and later a State Minister …”

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The Labor Party affiliation with rugby league was permanently forged a year later when the Sydney entrepreneur James Joynton Smith, a Labor-supported Lord Mayor of Sydney in 1917 and a long-time Labor member of the Legislative Council, financed four cross-code games of rugby league between the 1908 Wallabies (who then became league players) and the 1908 Kangaroos.

These four matches (with each side winning two matches) effectively ended the dominance of rugby union in Sydney and set in place the new sporting hegemony of rugby league.

The rugby league historian Sean Fagan argues that Smith’s motives were less about high-jacking rugby union for his own financial benefit and more about his lack of sympathy (as a strong Labor man) for the NSWRU’s refusal to provide better player benefits.

Players who were injured in a rough game that was called at the time ‘the undertaker’s friend’ were not given payments to make up for their loss of wages.

This was the same issue that provoked the rebellion of the northern unions in England in 1895 to form their rugby league.

Smith provided the large amount of incentive money demanded by the 14 rugby union rebels and the much smaller match payments to the rugby league players. He also insisted that the substantial profits generated by the matches go to South Sydney hospital.

As the owner of the excellent sporting magazine The Referee in the 1930s, Smith profited by the growth in popularity of rugby league in Sydney. He was president of NSW Rugby League from 1910 – 1928 and Patron from 1929 to his death in 1943.

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Smith set the pattern of Labor Party benevolence towards rugby league that has persisted to this day. The $60 million Sydney Football Stadium was the Unsworth Government’s gift to the game, for instance.

Smith would have understood Albanese’s intervention against Howard, and would have applauded the continuation of the decades-old policy of dolloping out big grants of money to the game.

When he was Prime Minister, Howard was frequently seen jogging ostentatiously in a Wallaby jersey. How he believed the Labor Party would allow him to come across to the other code and play an administrative role in their games defies belief.

Howard needs to read some social history.

The Wallabies of 1908 had something to offer to the upstart rugby league code, namely their credibility. But Howard, as a former Liberal Party Prime Minister, is out of his league in even contemplating a major role in the Labor Party’s game.

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