Australian rules football is like a religion in Victoria.
The buzz that the city experiences in March when footy returns to the MCG, and the last week of September in the lead-up to the Grand Final reminds us of a pre-Covid Melbourne.
People are out and about in their team colours, revelling in the greatest game on Earth.
It acts, as any sport does, as a brief yet blissful distraction from not just the challenges of everyday life but also the more pressing problems that ordinary, everyday Australians are concerned about.
But just like religion, footy should not involve itself in politics.
The Australian Football League unfortunately has, for a few years, misunderstood this dynamic, repeatedly inserting itself into the political space.
The AFL issued a demand to Victorian Opposition Leader Jess Wilson to take down a video of her at the footy where she wonders how many Four’N Twenty pies could be bought with the $15 billion given to the CFMEU.
This is a grotesque intrusion into the political space, especially given it’s an election year in Victoria.
The AFL’s official reasoning for this demand was that the post included two seconds of match footage.
This could have been a legitimate reason, except that Premier Jacinta Allan posted match footage on her social media during the 2024 Grand Final, with no public complaint from the AFL.
While the AFL has since retracted the demand, it is just the latest example of the league politicising our beloved sport, and largely in one direction.
In the opening game of the season in Sydney, the AFL and Sydney Swans removed all references to the Jewish community in the pre-game ceremony to remember the victims of the horrific terrorist attack at Bondi, thinking that it wasn’t ‘inclusive enough’.
This commitment to ‘inclusivity’, like all woke buzzwords, is strikingly inconsistent, considering the AFL’s ardent passion for welcome to country ceremonies, which by definition exclude all non-Indigenous Australians.
In addition to all this, one can’t forget that the AFL fell obediently into line with the Labor Party and supported the Voice to Parliament, a proposal that would have permanently divided Australians by race in our Constitution.
All of these decisions are a slap in the face of the majority of Australians, who pay to see the footy and want it kept out of politics.
IPA polling revealed that 61 per cent of Australians believe that sporting codes like the AFL have become too politically correct, 63 per cent agree that welcome to country ceremonies should no longer be performed at sporting matches, and 77 per cent believe it is wrong for professional athletes to use their positions to campaign for their own personal political causes.
It is disgraceful that overpaid executives at the AFL are actively contributing to the polarisation of our community, particularly given footy has traditionally been one of the nation’s great unifiers, something we can all watch together, whether at the game or the pub.
Yes, we have our club loyalties and the barracking is passionate, but love of the game itself transcends all that.
How regrettable that the body with responsibility for that game has opted for division.
Saxon Davidson is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs and an Essendon tragic
