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AFLW makes Jeff Kennett uncomfortable - so what?

Jeff Kennett (Quinn Rooney/Getty Images)
Roar Guru
22nd February, 2018
31

Funny place, Australia. We’ve got all these tales we like to tell about ourselves, like how no one person is more important than any other person, and no one should be allowed to tell anyone else what to do.

Not all Australians actually believe this in practise, it turns out, but whatever, we like to play pretend about who we are as a nation.

Or what about that other fun myth… that we’re an egalitarian country full of easy going, laid back people who live and let live and aren’t bothered by what other people do so long as it’s not hurting anyone?

Sometimes, living here, you could almost believe that it’s true – until Bob Whatisname from Melbourne, who was once someone Very, Very Important, pops up in the paper with a Very Important article informing us all in stern language that he doesn’t like women’s football.

The correct response to which, of course, is to smile benignly and say “that’s nice dear,” and ignore him. But the slightly schizophrenic nature of this very Australian phenomenon deserves further study.

My first question is always “why does he think we care?” I mean, he’s an Australian, he should know that the first response of every Australian to pompous self-importance, according to mythology, is “who gives a stuff what you think?”

But where commentary around women’s football is concerned, it seems that there’s an awful lot of people who think that everyone should give a stuff what they think.

“We don’t like having our culture changed,” is one refrain. “We don’t like the media telling us women’s football is great when it’s not.”

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Well women’s footy is a product. If you’re trying to sell more laundry detergent, you’d make big advertisements with big, smiling faces telling all sorts of exaggerations about how this incredible laundry detergent will change your life. It’s called advertising, it happens in a free market economy.

What slogan are they supposed to run with? ‘AFLW, it’s not for everyone?’

The AFL are a commercial organisation with a product to sell, and believing that it should somehow sell this product in a more low-key way so as not to cause high-pitched squeals of offence from those who are not the product’s target audience is daft.

If TV or newspaper coverage is ‘shoving it down your throat’, change the channel or turn the page.

Then there’s Jeff Kennett, who said on SEN a week ago that he feels uncomfortable watching women getting hurt on the football field.

It’s astonishing, really. What nation does he think he’s living in? Should all Australian women now ask Jeff’s approval before doing anything even vaguely dangerous?

Should we set up a hotline to Jeff, where young women can write him emails like, “Jeff, I really wanted to go riding my bike today, but I was worried it might make you uncomfortable. Do I have your approval?”

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Maybe we could rig scoreboards at women’s football games across Victoria, where alongside all the scores and stats, they display a ‘Jeff Kennett Discomfortometer’, which can be raised or lowered depending on how tough the collisions are out on the field. If the Discomfortometer level gets too high, the field umpire must immediately halt the match and phone Jeff directly, to get his permission to continue.

To be fair to Kennett, the comments were made in the context of an attempt to be constructive about the issue of injuries in the women’s game — an issue that was always going to be a problem in the first few seasons of what is, as far as I’m aware, the first major professional contact sport competition for women anywhere in the world.

But they were also framed within the context that Jeff apparently doesn’t believe women are physically equipped to play the game in the same style and rules that the men do, and that the game ought to be radically changed to something more approaching AFLX so that women can play it without getting hurt.

Whether these viewpoints come dressed up in fatherly concern as Kennett expresses them, or yelled in abusive rants in the comment section of internet newspapers, all are equally wrong, and at least as far as I’ve been brought up to understand the term, equally unAustralian.

They’re unAustralian because they’re telling people they shouldn’t do the things they enjoy. “You there, little girl! Stop it! Stop enjoying that sport! Stop kicking that ball! Stop having fun! Live your life the way I want you to! Don’t make me uncomfortable, or I’ll…”

You’ll what, exactly? We live in Australia. You can’t do a damn thing about it, and that’s the truth of what makes this country great — the truth that Bob Whatsisname from Melbourne, who used to be Very, Very Important, somehow managed to live his entire long life here without ever once understanding.

Yes he’s entitled to his opinion, and it’s an opinion doubtless shared by millions, not all of them men.

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So what? Who cares? In this country, believe it or not, no one needs these people’s permission for anything. Expressing your opinion is very fine and very Australian, but this opinion takes the form of disapproval with something that other people do that’s none of your business.

It takes an enormous amount of self-importance to think you’re so much better than other people that those folks ought to give up what they love because you feel uncomfortable.

In this country, I’ve always been told, that sort of self-importance is not on. And yet here they come, all these planet-sized egos and mini-dictators, brandishing their self-regard as though it meant something, sputtering about “let me tell you this!” and “I wanna tell you that!”

Fine, you tell everyone that. If Australia were really the nation we pretend to be, these people would have realised the fundamental contradiction of trying to uphold some version of traditional ‘Australian Values’, while trashing the very first and most important of those values, which is ‘Thou Shalt Not Presume To Tell Other People How To Live’.

Thankfully, at women’s football matches across the nation, very few people care, which is a far more faithful observance of Australian tradition than these critics will ever manage.

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