Sponsorship dollars diverted from Collingwood’s AFL team to new anti-racism campaign

A fresh take on the decade-long ‘Racism. It Stops With Me’ campaign, funded from the fallout of the Collingwood Football Club’s 2021 racism imbroglio, will begin this week.

Race Discrimination Commissioner Chin Tan. Picture: Stuart McEvoy

A fresh take on the decade-long “Racism. It Stops With Me” campaign, funded from the fallout of the Collingwood Football Club’s 2021 racism imbroglio, will begin this week with a new focus on discrimination across multicultural Australia.

Using $500,000 from CGU ­Insurance, formerly part of a million-dollar Collingwood sponsorship, the Australian Human Rights Commission’s new campaign calls on those who haven’t experienced racism to stop and ­reflect on its causes and impacts on others around them.

“Many of us are often unaware of racial and cultural biases, whether in ourselves or in society, but these biases have significant impacts on racial equity,” Race Discrimination Commissioner Chin Tan said.

“We see this in areas such as employment, justice, education and health, among others,” he said.

The long-running anti-racism campaign, first launched in 2012, has not been funded by the federal government since 2015, but its message of positive change has continued to resonate.

The private funding from CGU Insurance had its genesis in a ­ report last year commissioned by the football team it sponsored, Collingwood, exploring its issues with racism.

The report Collingwood commissioned of its own culture, named Do Better, revealed an “egregious history” of “systemic” racism within the club.

Despite its president Eddie McGuire describing the report’s release as a “proud and historic day for the club, CGU said it was troubled by the findings.

In February last year it told the club it would redirect $1m in sponsorship to First Nations and ethnically diverse initiatives, and in September announced that half of the funding would go to the Human Rights Commission to update the Racism. It Stops With Me campaign.

The new campaign comes at a time when, according to the ­Census data released last month, more of the Australian population than ever – over 50 per cent – was either born overseas or has a parent born overseas.

It also comes as Australia’s ­security organisations investigate increasing numbers of far-right extremist cases.

Mr Tan said the world had changed a lot since the original 2012 campaign, with the rise of far-right extremism and the Black Lives Matter movement. The new campaign had a broad remit to focus on racism across the multicultural spectrum, though First Nations would continue to be a critical focus.

“Racism continues to undermine justice and fairness in Australia,” he said. “We see it in continued anti-Semitism and ­Islamophobia (and) in the surge of anti-Asian hate during the pandemic,” he said.

Former Socceroos captain Craig Foster said racism was a far wider issue than harmful words.

“It is also about the barriers that prevent some groups from ­accessing equal opportunities in life, including biases in our society, its laws, institutions, and ways of thinking,” Mr Foster said.

“Racism affects us all and there is a role for everyone to play in ­addressing it.”