This was published 2 years ago
Opinion
Pat Cummins billboards show you can find fault in any sports sponsor
Gareth Parker
ColumnistI saw a city billboard in Perth on Tuesday, featuring man of the moment Pat Cummins, who was set to lead the bowling attack for his country at the T20 World Cup at Optus Stadium that night.
Cummins was representing the travel website Booking.com.
Pat Cummins.Credit: Paul Kane/Getty Images
It caught my attention because of Cummins’ outspoken stance against appearing in commercials for Cricket Australia’s major sponsor of the last four years, energy company Alinta.
Alinta has its roots in the gas retail assets once owned by the old State Energy Commission of WA, privatised by the Court Liberal Government of the 1990s.
After its parent company Babcock and Brown collapsed in the mid-aughts, Alinta has assembled a 3000-megawatt portfolio of gas and coal power stations to become one of Australia’s largest energy providers – and largest emitters, the fact that has caught Cummins’ attention.
The company is now Chinese-owned and those emissions keep the lights on, including, as talkback callers around the nation have noted this week, the lights that Cummins earns his multimillion pay packet playing under.
It also has 860 megawatts of wind and solar projects in WA, Queensland and South Australia, targeting 1500 megawatts of renewables and storage by 2025.
In short, Alinta – like every other energy company – is on a journey towards producing more, less-carbon-intensive electricity. The questions are how much, how quickly and at what cost.
Alinta’s chief executive Jeff Dimery predicts east coast power prices might rise 35 per cent, money that will come from the pockets of householders, including those who also buy cricket tickets and pay TV subscriptions, which are important revenue streams for Cricket Australia.
“More so than ever before you’re seeing players’ personalities and interests and passions shine through and have a bit more of a say than maybe in the past,” Cummins told the Sydney Morning Herald this month.
“I think the most obvious, front-of-mind things you can see is who we partner with. So I hope that when we think of who we want to align with, who we want to invite into being part of cricket, I hope climate is a real priority.
“I’ve got my own personal views so when it comes to personal sponsorships there are some companies I wouldn’t want to align with. When we’re getting money, whether it’s programs for junior cricket, grassroots, things for fans around Australia, I feel a real responsibility that, with that, we’re doing on balance what is the right thing.”
As leading Australian sports business executive Paul Kind told me on 6PR Breakfast this week, one way or another, modern professional sport is funded entirely by brands: those who sponsor teams or peak bodies directly, and those who attach those brands to both subscription and free-to-air broadcasts.
It’s the cold hard economic reality that underpins those lucrative playing contracts.
Booking.com, which Cummins was representing on the Perth billboard, is a T20 World Cup major sponsor.
Headquartered in the Netherlands, Booking.com is one of several online travel brands under the umbrella of parent company Booking Holdings, incorporated in tax-advantageous Delaware, including Agoda, Priceline, Cheapflights, Kayak and Rentalcars.com.
Modern professional sport is funded entirely by brands.Credit: Paul Kane/Getty Images
The global travel aggregators have been accused of destroying local travel agency small businesses and sucking up fees from small accommodation providers, who feel they have no option but to list their properties on the big multinational sites or miss out on custom.
Many climate activists decry the climate-destroying role of leisure airline travel, a boom Booking Holdings has helped turbocharge.
Another sponsor of the T20 World Cup is Aramco, the Saudi Arabian state-owned oil giant that is not just the world’s biggest fossil fuel company but also both cash cow for a kingdom accused of egregious human rights abuses and tool of geopolitical manoeuvring.
Other sponsors include car maker Nissan and airline Emirates.
All player of the match prizes are being sponsored by Aramco and the tournament will be played for a $US5.6 million prize pool, with $US1.6 million for the winner.
The point is that if you look hard enough you can find fault with any corporation – which is your right, of course, but leaves you plumb in front when yorked by the charge of hypocrisy.
The hat trick of sporting sponsorship controversies have had a strong West Australian flavour.
There was the call from a group of Fremantle identities, headlined by former Labor Premier Carmen Lawrence, novelist Tim Winton, and former player Dale Kickett, for the AFL’s Dockers to dump major sponsor Woodside.
Netball is picking up the pieces after the cancellation of a $15 million partnership.Credit: Fairfax Media
In netball, the concerns of West Australian indigenous shooter Donnell Wallam collided with the disgraceful 40-year-old comments of one of the fathers of WA’s iron ore industry Lang Hancock in a row that has cost the nation’s premier-but-broke female code $15 million.
Hancock Prospecting chief executive Gina Rinehart had sponsored swimming, artistic swimming, volleyball and rowing largely without incident but now the climate sceptic found herself called upon to renounce the views of her father.
After giving netball a week to get its house in order, she in the end withdrew, expressing her view that sport should be beyond politics while lamenting “division” between netball’s players and administrators that she did not want to worsen.
While Labor Premier Mark McGowan urged the sides to find common ground, he is in the camp of the resources companies, rejecting comparisons of the extractive industries to tobacco companies.
“Western Australia is a mining state,” he says.
And how.
Consider the contribution of mining to gross state product, $170 billion, or 47 per cent compared to next-placed construction, $18 billion or 5 per cent and manufacturing $15 billion or 4 per cent.
A senior resources industry figure sympathetic to Lawrence’s side of politics mused that the former premier no longer understood her own state.
Of course, governments have as big a stake in the resources sector’s state as anyone – just ask Jim Chalmers, whose $30 billion bottom line turnaround is almost entirely due to the outperformance of iron ore and gas prices spurred on by war in Ukraine.
And while activists at home demonise Woodside and co, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had to assuage his Japanese counterpart in face-to-face talks that contracts for Australian gas would continue to be honoured, with the fuel in demand for electricity and manufacturing for two decades and beyond.
All as we get a real-time lesson from Europe about what happens if the transition to renewables isn’t managed just right.