Andrew Bolt: Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s meddling is all about politics
WHEN Malcolm Turnbull and Waleed Aly gave references for banned footballer Bachar Houli, they were playing a game of identity politics, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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THE AFL Tribunal has made a bad mistake by letting Malcolm Turnbull and Waleed Aly help a footballer mate escape full punishment.
Doesn’t it realise Australians are sick of the cultural elite looking after its own? Playing identity politics?
WHY IS THE FOOTY COMMUNITY SO OUTRAGED OVER RICHMOND’S DEFENCE OF BACHAR HOULI?
DOES HOULI’S TIME FIT THE CRIME?
It seems not, because the tribunal on Tuesday banned Richmond’s Bachar Houli for only two weeks for knocking out Carlton’s Jed Lamb, after taking into account comments about him from Prime Minister Turnbull and a reference from Aly, the Gold Logie winner.
That is bizarre. Does this mean any footballer who doesn’t know Turnbull would have got the standard four-week ban instead?
Does that mean a player Aly didn’t like as much as he likes Houli, a fellow Muslim and star of Aly’s Tigers, would have been rubbed out for longer?
Wow. I can only imagine how I’d go before this AFL Tribunal for my own striking offence in Carlton last month. Turnbull and Aly would have had me locked up for a year.
I agree Houli is a good man and a clean player. But his fine record of sportsmanship on the ground should have been the only relevant mitigating factor in deciding his punishment for having lashed out with his elbow to shake off Lamb’s tag. This is not just my view, the view of someone who thinks Turnbull is a lousy politician and Aly an apologist for Islamic radicals (of whom I don’t include Houli). Hear it also from Eddie McGuire, the Collingwood chairman and a man of the Left: “This is ridiculous by the tribunal to take this (Turnbull’s comments) into account … You can be Mother Teresa but if you knock somebody out on the ground you get four weeks. Simple as that.”
Former AFL Tribunal member Daniel Harford said: “(Houli) should be looking at six weeks.”
Match Review Panel member Nathan Burke was scathing about the AFL Tribunal relying on Turnbull’s words: “What we end up with are disparate sentences. If somebody goes in next week and does exactly the same thing, but doesn’t know Waleed Aly, doesn’t know the Prime Minister, does that mean they get three or four weeks?”
Well, yes.
At least Aly is a Richmond fan, but his reference played the Muslim card: “(Houli is) the first devout Muslim to play AFL … and bears the burden of a community that is desperately short of heroes and role models.”
He should get a lighter sentence for being Muslim? But what makes Turnbull’s public testimony on Monday — which was then used by Richmond — even more irrelevant is that his own interest in AFL is minimal and driven by his need to appeal to Victorian voters. His interest in Houli has little to do with football and lots to do with politics — particularly identity politics.
Houli was one of the Muslim celebrities Turnbull invited last year — along with Aly — to his Iftar dinner at Parliament House. Houli even led the room with a sung prayer.
And this week Turnbull dropped in at Richmond’s Punt Rd Oval to announce he was giving $625,000 of our money to the Bachar Houli Academy the footballer set up to help Muslim students get into football.
Would Turnbull give half as much attention and money to a Christian footballer? Would he be able to write a character reference for a Buddhist or Jewish AFL footballer?
I have long praised Houli as a fine man and am sure his foundation does good work, even if I’d much rather Muslim students were helped as Australians, not Muslims, by programs open to everyone.
But for the AFL, the issue is whether its tribunal should have taken seriously a character reference for Houli from a Prime Minister whose interest in him seems largely political. More fundamentally, should the tribunal really apply the rules of the game differently, based on what a player does off the field, what faith he has or whether he can find a prime minister or celebrity to speak for him? That is not the Australia I grew up in. I thought we were fiercely egalitarian and taught to treat people as we found them, regardless of their race, faith, class or wealth. And regardless of which celebrities they could find to pull some strings.
The AFL is now appealing Houli’s punishment as “manifestly inadequate” — good.
It must defend the ethos of not just the game but the country. That means judging Houli entirely by how he conducts himself on the field.
We’re Australians together, right? One rule for all.
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