Loretta Lynn might have been proud to be a coalminer’s daughter but if you’re a netballer from a mining family, that is probably not something to advertise in today’s new world.
That said, there has been a tsunami of support for Gina Rinehart’s decision to walk away from her $15m sponsorship deal with Netball Australia. Rightly, outrage has been directed at players spurning an exceedingly generous and altruistic deal for reasons that range from the businesswoman’s own political views to offensive remarks made by her father 50 years ago.
Australians have clearly had a gutful of overpaid but under-informed sportspeople who think their personal opinions on matters outside their areas of expertise are worth inflicting on sport.
If only Woodside would likewise demand the Fremantle Dockers either stand up proudly for their sponsor or stop taking its money. It’s high time too that Cricket Australia told the hitherto sainted Pat Cummins to put a sock in his criticism of Alinta Energy, the company that pays at least part of his enormous salary. Ricky Ponting was brave to point out the political posturing of older, richer players hurts young players who have not had the luxury of sponsorship deals that pay for big lifestyles replete with first-class flights and shiny four-wheel-drive cars. There is no doubt politics and sport cannot be completely divorced but it is tiresome to watch everything from netball to footy being subjected to, and damaged by, zealotry from undergraduate political activists dressed in green and gold.
It has now come to pass that every two-bob political opinion from every minor sport star not only deserves to be aired but indulged. Hypocrisy is no barrier. Jetsetting ex-footballers whose carbon footprint is surely only just less than Al Gore’s think they are entitled to chide Woodside for keeping the lights on in Western Australia and employing so many of their fellow West Australians. Woodside, whose activities are regulated to within an inch of its corporate life, and which pays a big chunk of the taxes Mark McGowan is now using to build everything from mental health facilities to desalination plants, is entitled to tell these sporting politicians to keep their personal political views out of sport.
Likewise, netballers are free to harbour whatever political views they wish, and indeed to act on their individual consciences. They can leave sport and enter politics if they are passionate about changing the world off the field. But for so long as they are on the field, and receive sponsorship money, the decent thing would be to say thank you to Rinehart for her generous deal.
Alas, good manners and gratitude are now apparently optional extras for our pampered players. No wonder so many Australians might be thrilled that Rinehart called their bluff.
Rinehart has been a terrific supporter of Australian sports from rowing and swimming to volleyball and synchronised swimming. And, of course, netball. Hancock also inked a deal with the Australian Olympic Committee to sponsor Australian teams at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games, Paris 2024 Summer Olympics, the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics in 2026, as well as the Youth Olympics and Pacific Games. Dismal results at the London Olympics led many sponsors to withdraw funding from Swimming Australia. After Rinehart stepped in with financial help, Australian swimmers in Tokyo produced best-ever performances.
Rinehart’s money goes directly to sports people so they can focus on their sport, rather than try to hold down a job and train too. During the Tokyo Olympics three-time Tokyo medallist Cate Campbell recognised the businesswoman’s contribution: “I don’t say this lightly, but Gina Rinehart saved swimming.”
The Hancock deal with Netball Australia would have provided a significant pay increase to players at a time when NA has millions of dollars of debt and the country faces a challenging economic outlook. The objections to Rinehart’s deal need to be understood against behind-the-scenes shenanigans by some players who apparently want NA to revisit a private equity deal rather than take money from Rinehart.
Diamonds players driving this fiasco have shown themselves to be both selfish and foolish. Imagine telling those who care for children afflicted with cancer to refuse $2m donated by the Hancock Group to the WA Telethon this past weekend. In total, mining companies donated millions more to the same terrific fundraiser, as did the WA government, using mining royalties.
Now it is over to NA to hold out the begging bowl in search of suitably woke corporate sponsors who will both indulge every political thought bubble an individual player has and keep paying the bills when those thought bubbles insult or injure the sponsor. Or will taxpayers be forced to foot the bill for the misdirected political activism of their players?
At a more macro level, what role should politics play in sport? Whatever may have been the original intentions to have welcome to country at footy matches, it’s now become open slather for activists to inject racial politics on to the field. Witness the history lesson to spectators about the 1883 Aboriginal Protection Board when the Wallabies played England in Sydney in July. Uncle Lloyd Walker, an eight-Test Wallaby, is a fine role model but why must a major match, indeed any match, be injected with racial politics? Time and place, please.
Purists, of course, don’t win arguments. It is not the case that sport and politics should never mix. Without wanting to prescribe the circumstances where the two must collide, there will be a limited number of cases where politics will trump sport. For example, if Russia were a cricket-playing nation, one would expect Cricket Australia not to play a Test series there.
Russia is now so far outside the pale of acceptable moral behaviour that we should not be sending our national sporting teams there.
But these cases are matters of great geopolitical moment that attract bipartisan and nearly universal views, and will be few and far between. To apply that thinking to domestic matters of daily political contest is to abuse our national treasure – sport – for mundane political advantage. We have enough activists who have no compunction about dividing us by reference to all kinds of varying characteristics, from race to religion to sex. Can’t we just agree to leave sport out of it?
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