Why Steve Price has fallen out of love with ‘woke’ Richmond Football Club
The AFL has been corrupted by political correctness and over-the-top hollow gestures around Indigenous politics, but some clubs are much worse than others.
Opinion
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It’s very hard to confess this publicly but I think I have fallen out of love with my football club.
It has nothing to do with their on-field performance or any of their players but everything to do with following one of the most politically-correct and woke sporting clubs in Australia.
Feeling like the drunk uncle no-one wants around the Christmas table is not a comfortable feeling. This is the same sort of feeling I have about our country – Australia – right now.
Let me explain. I follow the Richmond Football Club. As a Gold Member for 29 consecutive years, I pay annually for three memberships for myself and my two daughters, who don’t even live in Melbourne.
On top of the basic membership, I have two Richmond home game seats in the Olympic stand which are used sparingly.
Last Sunday I was one of nearly 60,000 fans at the match against Hawthorn. Most of that crowd were Tigers supporters, including a lot of families with young kids proudly wearing Dustin Martin’s No. 4 four on their backs.
Wandering through the crowd Sunday I wondered how many of those supporters were invested in a debate about the Voice to Parliament or getting set for the Welcome to Country, the inevitable Treaty and then compensation.
Richmond are not the biggest offenders when it comes to over-the-top hollow gestures around Indigenous politics, but they are very politically correct.
The Melbourne Football Club and Fremantle even changed the name of their teams when they played each other during the Indigenous round to take out the Woke title jointly.
Melbourne became Narrm and Freo was to be known as Walyalup – imagine using those names in passionate vocal support of your team.
At least Richmond has always been just that, the Richmond Tigers.
What a hollow meaningless gesture that little exercise was, particularly coming from the Melbourne Football Club that calls the MCG its home and plays in front of the exclusive silver spoon set seated in the MCC members stand.
This divisiveness is of course driven by an AFL that thinks they need to put their hand up for every politically-correct cause going.
Gay Pride and Indigenous round and their money-draining obsession with AFLW — a competition with little public interest beyond family and friends — are just a couple of examples.
Supporters of the AFL are ignored as the competitions executives fall over themselves to be loved by every vocal lobby group in the nation.
Despite this, average Australians continue to support individual clubs with an extraordinary 1.194 million people registered as financial club members Australia wide. That’s one in 25 Australians.
The Tigers, along with the West Coast Eagles, are at the top of the membership ladder with Richmond for the sixth year running topping 100,000 paid up members.
These are numbers codes like Rugby League could only dream about, but the AFL would be wrong to automatically believe this endorses their passion for political stances like support for the Voice.
Cash strapped Aussies put their hands in their pockets because they love the game, admire the players and want to be part of a tribe following a team.
Voice support, meanwhile, as poll after poll shows, is declining across the nation despite the endorsement from the AFL the NRL, cricket, rugby and just about every other sporting body in the country.
It’s no surprise that AFL teams with several Indigenous players on their lists would want to be seen as Voice supporters but they should not ignore the fact that those players are well paid professional athletes.
The life of an AFL Indigenous footy star is so far removed from the struggles of impoverished Aboriginals in remote communities with little or no health care or education as to be incomparable.
Many I’m sure support relatives back in communities where they grew up, but words are easy, and it has not been proven the Voice is going to do anything to help those people.
The best these players can do is be an example of what can be achieved with hard work, discipline and talent that hopefully inspires other young Aboriginal kids to have a crack.
My personal unwanted uncle feeling isn’t confined to football.
It now crosses into many aspects of life in Australia where activists are trying to shame us out of who we are.
Example? I note in political media appearances now the Australian flag has been moved to the left of the three flags on display, away from being in the middle.
It’s a not-so-subtle change with the Aboriginal flag in the middle now and the Torres Strait Islander flag on the right.
What other country has three national flags?
The pace of changing place names has accelerated too with Fraser Island now known as K’Gari and even dingoes have a completely different name in Indigenous languages.
A departures board at an airport in Queensland – Mackay – lists Brisbane as “Meeanjin” and Tourism Australia has adopted a dual naming policy for our capital cities.
As we know it starts small with the little changes and then accelerates and becomes normal practice while all the time not helping one disadvantaged first nations person in the slightest.
Anyone in the suburbs of Australia wondering why support for the Voice is in decline only needs sit in a footy crowd and watch and listen.
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Originally published as Why Steve Price has fallen out of love with ‘woke’ Richmond Football Club
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