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As every AFL fan would have noticed, a particular banner was displayed at the Collingwood and Richmond game containing two slogans.
One of them was guaranteed to offend millions of decent people. The other, “Stop The Mosques”, was also pretty bad.
The banner was produced by the so-called United Patriots Front, a tin pot collection of degenerates mostly known for failed barbeques and posting YouTube videos sniping at each other.
The banner achieved its aim. The wannabe Mosleys holding it would have expected to be ejected and then publicly sledged by all and sundry, but the plan was to appeal to the small, crusty smear of human garbage on the outer fringe of society that could be attracted to fascism.
Fascism is a strong word. Quite a few members of my extended family died because of it, along with 60 million other people. It’s not a word to be thrown about lightly. But, if you dig beyond the Aussie flag capes and folksy rhetoric, the UPF is a fascist outfit.
Rather than devour column space, and your time, analysing the decrepit and often baffling history of the extreme Right in Australia – this piece will look at the broader question: is there a place for politics in sport?
In 1969 small protests had begun in Australia against tours by cricket and rugby teams from South Africa, as well as other sporting events involving the white-supremacist regime. At first the public was overwhelmingly hostile to the demonstrations outside games – spitting on, insulting and occasionally assaulting protestors. The idea was they should “keep politics out of sport”. Also, a lot of people didn’t give an iota what happened to black people in South Africa.
By 1971, mass protests against the Springboks tour caused the planned Proteas tour to be cancelled, and no other South African sides visited Australia again until after apartheid was dismantled and white-minority political rule ended.
The thing is, it was the South African regime that forced politics into sport – not the protestors. They extended apartheid to everything, excluding non-whites from their teams, and barely tolerating mixed-race sides from visiting nations.
It would have been worthwhile to protest against what they were doing back home in general, even if they allowed non-whites to represent them – but the very fact they applied their crackpot racial purity theories to their sports teams made it pure madness to claim politics could be “kept out of sport”.
It would be a bit like saying Nicky Winmar shouldn’t have pointed to the colour of his skin that day at Victoria Park, after he and Gilbert McAdam had been sprayed with racial abuse for a couple of hours.
Adam Goodes didn’t bring politics on to the field with him. Yes, his Australian Of The Year speech upset a few people who didn’t get around to reading what he’d actually said, but his war dance and invisible boomerang (it was a boomerang, not a spear) were, as he said after the game, just a celebration – a shout-out to the young guys who’d recently taught him the dance. The hysterical overreaction to the dance, on the other hand, put politics front and centre.
I’m fresh off the boat myself, but were I an Aboriginal bloke or a Torres Strait Islander and had a public profile, I’d probably talk about the issues this country faces as well. Jesus, who wouldn’t?
In regards to the UPF banner…
I’ve never been in a mosque. My understanding is that people go there to pray and you should leave your shoes at the door. UPF and Reclaim Australia et al obsess over mosques as an alleged symbol of sharia law and all that. I reckon if you don’t like mosques, don’t visit them. Do whatever you do on a Friday night instead. You, and the people in the mosque, will be better off for it.
But whether or not you have a problem with minarets, we must ask… why the MCG? Why Collingwood and Richmond? Is the AFL building mosques? Is Eddie McGuire running a fleet of halal food trucks? Are these ‘patriots’ threatened by the irresistible masculinity of Bachar Houli’s beard?
Whatever the case, it was a terrible thing to say at a big public event that is, in the end, all about people getting together as football fans – whatever their religion or lack thereof – to have a good time and enjoy a match. There’s no place for attacks on religious freedom – a key characteristic of a healthy democracy – anywhere, and certainly not in our great game.
There are times when, like in 1971, people need to bring politics into sport. There are other times when it’s a bit pointless but also harmless. For example; if someone held up a banner at a match that said “Albo, Roll Shorten!”, “Put Some Socks On Di Natale!”, or “Hey Turnbull, where’s my NBN?” it would be a bit weird but it wouldn’t hurt anyone. Not really.
A blanket ban on “politics in sport” would be entirely contrived, unrealistic and even undesirable. What is needed is a common sense approach that says yes to the public interest; okay to a bit of harmless fun; and piss off to fascism.
POST SCRIPT: Of course, what constitutes ‘the public interest’ is a pretty complex question…
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