Gina Rinehart’s sponsor withdrawal raises awkward questions for sport | Michael McGuire

Gina Rinehart’s decision to pull her netball funding raises awkward questions about sport, politics, money … and freedom of speech, writes Michael McGuire.

Mining billionaire Gina Rinehart is obviously free to do what she likes with her money. But when cancelling her $15m sponsorship of Netball Australia, Rinehart also said it is “unnecessary for sports organisations to be used as the vehicle for social or political causes’’.

Which is a line that is often trotted by the powerful when sporting bodies don’t roll over to have their tummy tickled. When and where politics and sport is allowed to mix tends to be a one-way street.

Former prime minister Scott Morrison once lashed Cricket Australia for not using the words “Australia Day” when promoting games played on January 26.

“Australian cricket fans would like Cricket Australia to focus a lot more on cricket and a lot less on politics,’’ the ex-PM said. Of course, Morrison was one of those politicians who took every opportunity going to don sporting gear, whether it be Cronulla Sharks or Australian colours, or plonking himself in a V8 for a ride around Bathurst.

Morrison was using sport for political advantage.

Australian Diamonds player Donnell Wallam. Picture: Richard Walker

In much the same way, Rinehart uses sport to pursue her social and political ends. As do all corporate sponsors. Rinehart sponsors sport. Sponsorship is not charity. Those giving the money tend to expect something back, whether that be for commercial ends or improving the sponsor’s public perception.

Rinehart’s statement on the netball controversy also included the line that there are more “targeted and genuine ways to progress social or political causes without virtue signalling or for self publicity’’. But isn’t virtue signalling and self-publicity more or less the definition, and the point, of corporate sponsorship?

No doubt Rinehart has only the best of intentions. But the nexus where sport meets money has become a point of discussion recently, helped along by the apparent discomfort of Australian cricket captain Pat Cummins and the team’s sponsorship by fossil fuel company Alinta Energy.

Mining magnate and businesswoman Gina Rinehart. Picture: Bradley Kanaris/Getty

The term sportwashing has had a lot of air as well. Sportwashing being the practice of spending money on sport to improve your reputation.

You see it in the actions of states such as Saudi Arabia, with its penchant for repressing women’s rights and murdering journalists, who are spending billions on sport. It is funding Greg Norman’s LIV golf tour, it has bought Newcastle United in the English Premier League, it has funded Formula One, boxing, wrestling and even chess. The Saudi’s state-owned oil company Aramco is sponsoring the player-of-the-match award at the T20 World Cup, which could be interesting if Pat Cummins has a good game.

The world’s biggest sporting event, football’s World Cup, will be held in Qatar next month, another state with a shocking human rights record.

But does putting money into sport also buy an implied right to silence athletes as well?

In the case of Rinehart’s sponsorship of Netball Australia, does $15m also override a player’s freedom of speech and right to voice an opinion? The nub of the matter was reported to be the discomfort of Indigenous netball player Donnell Wallam about wearing the logo of Rinehart’s company Hancock Prospecting on her uniform. Surely, that’s not that difficult to understand.

Rinehart inherited the company from her father Lang Hancock, a man who advocated for genocide against Indigenous people. No one is suggesting Rinehart holds the same poisonous views as her father, but that doesn’t mean Wallam is wrong to feel uncomfortable at the idea of playing sport while wearing the Hancock name.

Of course, this latest collision between sport, money and freedom of speech has provoked cries of “wokeness’’ gone mad, with people telling Netball Australia “go woke, go broke’’. But apart from the utter imbecility of the term woke, as a cast-iron rule it is used as an insult by people without a credible argument to mount, it also points to a complicated time ahead for sport authorities and their athletes.

Athletes today who are in their 20s and 30s have grown up in an era where much has changed in terms of what is acceptable in social discourse. They are interested in subjects such as climate change, and more inclined than previous generations to support causes surrounding sexual and gender identity or racism. And they have many more avenues through social media to express those opinions. Whether we like it or not, or even believe it or not, this is a golden age of freedom of speech. It is certainly unquestionable that globally there are more people giving more opinions that ever before.

And young athletes are part of that.

But it will be complicated. Rinehart won’t be the first or last to take issue with the views of people she is ostensibly funding. The question could become whether people such as Cummins are prepared to earn less money in support of their principles, or whether corporate supporters such as Rinehart are prepared to accept some dissent among the ranks as a price worth paying for the greater good of the sport.