‘So ridiculous’: Why Craig Foster wants Australia to give King Charles the boot

This story is part of the April 22 Edition of Good Weekend.See all 15 stories.

Marwa Moeen remembers feeling puzzled. “Who is Craig Foster?” she wondered. “And why is he helping us?” It was August 2021. Kabul, the capital city of Afghanistan, had just fallen to the Taliban, and 20-year-old Moeen was hiding in a room in her parents’ house with 14 other young women, most of them fellow university students. Taliban fighters were roaming the neighbourhood, knocking on doors and taking people away. Moeen and her terrified friends had decided they would rather kill themselves than be captured. In the midst of it all, this guy halfway across the world contacted them. Hang in there, he said. Help is on the way.

Foster, 54, is a sports broadcaster and former champion footballer. He is also a leading social justice advocate and human rights campaigner. Moeen knows that now. At the time, he was just an unexpected ally: a steady voice on the phone, a sender of reassuring WhatsApp messages, a procurer – miraculously – of Australian visas for her and all the members of her group. “He did everything for us,” she says. “Craig became our hero.”

On a warm autumn morning, I visit Foster at his pleasant home in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. I’ve often seen him on television but it is the first time I’ve met him, and I am struck – as everyone who encounters him must be – by his appearance. The perfect white hair. The salt-and-pepper stubble on the chiselled jaw. The generous mouth. The cheekbones. Especially the cheekbones. He is wearing a black T-shirt, grey pants and white sneakers, and retains the lithe physique of an athlete. In the words of artist Julian Meagher, whose portrait of him made the final cut for the 2021 Archibald Prize: “He’s such a handsome silver fox. Ridiculously nice to look at.”

Foster’s manner is arresting, too. Perhaps it’s because I associate him with the Socceroos, the national men’s football team in which he starred, but the term that comes to mind is “on the ball”. Everything about him is hyper-alert, as if at any moment he might spring sideways and score a surprise goal. He doesn’t do small talk. No sooner have we taken our seats in a downstairs room opening onto his garden than he is explaining his guiding philosophy. Some people are dealt a difficult hand, he says. Refugees. Indigenous Australians. The poor and the powerless. He works on their behalf because they are just as entitled as he is to the chance of a decent life. “It’s all about my underlying belief that ultimately we are all equal.”

Craig Foster with Marwa Moeen, one of the Afghan refugees he helped escape the Taliban and reach Australia.

That conviction is the reason that Foster will not be part of the global audience for the coronation of King Charles III on May 6. “I’ve always had an aversion to the concept of royalty – the concept that one set of humans is more special than any other,” he says. Late last year, Foster took on the leadership of the Australian Republic Movement (ARM). He accepted the job because he believes it is high time that this country became fully independent. To him, it is embarrassing and not a little galling that
a 74-year-old Englishman is, by right of birth, the king of Australia.

“It’s embarrassing to an increasing number of Australians actually,” he says. “And that is in part because of who Charles is. Australia is able to look at our new king and say it’s obvious to us all that we would not elect him to any position in this country.”

Not to a seat on Gannawarra Shire Council. Not to the board of the Woolgoolga Surf Life Saving Club. Foster is aware that many people, his mother included, had a soft spot for Queen Elizabeth. But Charles? “I don’t think Australians have affection for him.” Foster isn’t a royal-watcher – “I never have been” – but it seems to him that Charles just isn’t our kind of bloke.

The Taliban had been tipped off. When they came to Marwa Moeen’s house, they told her father they believed there were girls inside. Her father denied it and the visitors left, but their return seemed only a matter of time. News that Moeen and her friends were in peril was conveyed to an expatriate Afghan in Australia, who got in touch with Rosanna Barbero, chief executive of the Addison Road Community Organisation in Sydney’s inner-west. Foster is a supporter of the charity, which provides food and essential services to people in need. He was in Barbero’s office when she talked to the young women in Kabul. “They were crying, and the Taliban were going up and down the street,” he says. “So the first message I sent to Marwa was, ‘Listen, I heard the phone call. Let’s have a chat so I can find out exactly how many of you there are.’ ”

Barbero knew Foster was adept at stirring people in high places into action. She was familiar with his technique: “He goes, ‘My name is Craig Foster and I’d like to talk to the minister because we’ve got a crisis and he needs to hear what I’ve got to say.’ The next thing you know, there’s a meeting set up.” Sure enough, within a week Foster had rustled up a batch of temporary protection visas. He then helped arrange for the young women to travel by road to the Pakistan border, where they transferred into cars sent by the Australian High Commission in Islamabad. “He basically saved their lives,” Barbero says.

They weren’t the only ones. Because the rights of females were likely to be brutally curtailed under the fundamentalist Islamic Taliban regime, Foster had worked with Greens senator Nick McKim and independent federal MP Zali Steggall to engineer quite a number of evacuations. “I actually don’t know how many visas we got,” says McKim. “But dozens, maybe more than a hundred. There are a lot of young women and girls from Afghanistan who are now safe in Australia thanks to Craig Foster.”

McKim tells me that at the height of the emergency, Foster barely slept: “I’d come into work in the mornings and there’d be emails he’d sent me at all hours of the night, where he’d finally got somebody’s ID card number, or the detail that we needed to provide to the minister’s office to get a visa for them.” At no stage did Foster lose his composure. “The higher the stakes, the more calm and focused he becomes,” McKim says. “That really shone through during the fall of Kabul, when it was literally a life and death situation for so many of the people we were helping.”

“Craig’s got that ability to pull people together. To get them to lift for the common good, and a common goal.”

Among those who escaped were the members of the Afghan national women’s football team, who are now affiliated with Melbourne Victory and play in Victoria’s state leagues. It seems to Zali Steggall, herself an Olympic medallist in alpine skiing, that Foster’s capacity for staying level-headed and resourceful under pressure is a legacy of his long experience competing in top-level sport. Similarly, she believes his key role in the Socceroos squad helped prepare him to lead the republic movement. “He’s got that ability to pull people together,” she says. “To get them to lift for the common good, and a common goal. To give their best performances. He is doing everything he can for Team Australia to be the best it can be.”

After the death of Elizabeth II last September, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was obliged to sign a proclamation promising “faith and obedience” to the King. For Foster, this brought home the need to sever ties to the British monarchy. “It was just so ridiculous to have our elected leader pledging loyalty to someone who we don’t know, we don’t like and we don’t particularly respect,” he says.

Foster with then Opposition leader Anthony Albanese and businesswoman Sam Mostyn packing food hampers at the Addison Road Community Centre last May.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

In surveys conducted by Ipsos and the Australian National University last year, a majority of respondents – 54 per cent in each case – favoured switching to an Australian head of state. As Foster is aware, this is much easier said than done. The only way to make a change to the constitution is to put the proposal to a referendum. It must be approved not only by a majority of voters nationally, but by a majority in four of the six states. This is rarely achieved. Since federation in 1901, Australians have voted on 44 proposals for constitutional change and only eight have been approved. When we voted on a republic in 1999, 45 per cent of us said yes and 55 per cent said no. The Australian Capital Territory was the only jurisdiction to record a majority vote in favour.

It seems to Rosanna Barbero that if anyone can rally the nation to the republican cause, it is Foster. In the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, when most sports fixtures were cancelled, he started a campaign, #PlayForLives, to persuade professional athletes to get off the couch and give some of their free time to charities and community groups struggling to meet the
increased demand for their services. “It was the most extraordinary mobilisation of people,” says Barbero. “He’s just a natural-born leader. He inspires people.”

At Addison Road, Foster does everything from soliciting donations and recruiting volunteers to making up food hampers. Sam Mostyn, chair of the federal government’s Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce, has spent many an hour packing boxes of groceries beside him. These days Foster gets around on an electric moped but Mostyn fondly remembers him arriving for duty on the Ducati he used to own. “He’d zoom in on the bike and take the helmet off and there’s this beautiful hair, and he’s so well put-together,” says Mostyn. His sneakers weren’t just white but dazzling, as if fresh from the box. His T-shirt usually had some important slogan on it. Sometimes he was accompanied by his little dog, Coco, a Japanese spitz whose fluffy white hair was as carefully groomed as his own.

Mostyn says Foster is not an attention-seeker. “He walks into a room, he’ll be the guy who’s around the edges, watching, having little conversations. He’ll
always defer to someone else.” His sense of purpose is palpable, though, and his mind is always whirring: “He’ll be on the phone about the republic movement, then he’ll be talking to a minister about a refugee issue.” Writer Mark Mordue, another Addison Road regular, suspects some people are daunted by the energy Foster radiates: “I think sometimes Craig doesn’t realise the almost physical impact of his intensity.”

I know what Mordue means. When Foster is in full flight on topics dear to his heart – refugees, multiculturalism, the desirability of a republic – he can be so earnest and impassioned that you feel like you’re burning a lot of calories just listening to him. For a while, you want to pump your fist in the air in solidarity. Then you start to wonder if it’d do him good to lighten up. I hadn’t given much consideration to the coronation until he fulminated about “the crown and the throne and the pomp and ceremony which are so critical to maintaining the myth of human superiority and special bloodlines”. Now I’m thinking of watching the thing, preferably while drinking prosecco and wearing a tiara from the party aisle at The Reject Shop.

Because of the cheekbones, and his association with the sport once sneeringly known by rugby and AFL fans as wogball, it would be easy to assume Foster is the descendant of immigrants from somewhere exotic. Estonia, say. In reality, he is a product of country Australia, raised in the north-eastern NSW town of Lismore. He says his belief in a fair go for all was instilled in him by his father, Kevin, a woodwork teacher who had grown up on a dairy farm and went to night school to become a motor mechanic so he could better provide for his family. Kevin taught him never to look down on people – or up at them, for that matter. Everyone was equally deserving of respect. “That has just been deeply embedded in my psyche,” says Foster, who also inherited his father’s athleticism.

Foster played 29 games for the Socceroos and still turns out for Waverley Old Boys’ club.Credit: Getty Images

The second of three sporty sons, he took up soccer at the age of four for no better reason than that his older brother played it. By his teens, he was starting to demonstrate the skills needed to turn professional. Though prone to injury (he had his first knee reconstruction at 15), he went on to carve out a career as a versatile midfielder with Australian and English clubs. At 26, he realised his dream of being selected for the Socceroos.

“There were people with more talent than me,” he says, “but I just would never give up.” From 1996 to 2000, he played 29 matches for the national team. On retirement, he transitioned smoothly to commentating with SBS. “He was a natural on TV,” says retired football writer Ray Gatt. “Great insights. Terrific football brain.”

From the beginning, Foster was an outspoken pundit, unafraid to criticise coaches, players and – especially – the sport’s administrators. When he put himself forward as a candidate for the chairmanship of Football Federation Australia in 2018, many thought he was just the person to put a broom through the place. “Tragically, the politics of football in this country conspired to exclude him,” says fellow commentator Simon Hill. “Football in Australia is a series of fiefdoms, and if you don’t belong to one of them, you’ve not got much chance.” Besides, Foster had alienated some of the sport’s most powerful figures. “Craig, because he has strong opinions, is always going to have people who dislike him.”

“Craig, because he has strong opinions, is always going to have people who dislike him.”

Later that year, Foster launched a campaign to free Hakeem al-Araibi, a young soccer player imprisoned in Bangkok after being granted refugee status in Australia. Al-Araibi faced extradition from Thailand to Bahrain, the country of his birth, which he had fled after being wrongly imprisoned and tortured. After three months of lobbying and agitating led by Foster, al-Araibi was released. Lucy Zelic, who was one of Foster’s SBS co-hosts, sees this as the event that changed the course of her colleague’s life. He had long been concerned about refugees and supported groups such as Amnesty International. “But this was the real turning point,” Zelic says. “He saw that he could galvanise people and that he could get a message out.”

Foster became an increasingly forthright critic of Australia’s practice of indefinitely detaining asylum seekers. He knew his stance discomfited the management at SBS, a state-funded broadcaster. “In the end, working for a government agency while advocating against government policy was not just uncomfortable but probably untenable,” he says. The network’s football broadcast rights were expiring anyway, so after 18 years on air, he left. About a year later, in 2020, he joined Stan Sport (owned by Nine, publisher of Good Weekend), where he presents matches in the UEFA Champions League, one of the biggest club football competitions in the world. Some think Foster has a tendency to overcomplicate commentary, making the dissection of a match as esoteric as a lecture in astrophysics. Simon Hill disagrees: “He is able to tactically analyse a game of football better than anyone else in Australia.”

Foster is also an adjunct professor of sport and social responsibility at Torrens University, which has campuses around the country. But most of his time is spent on unpaid work. He studied law with the ambition of becoming a human rights lawyer, but since completing the degree in 2019 he has changed his mind, deciding that, for a while at least, he’ll remain a freelance activist and concentrate on guiding Australia along the path to a republic. Accumulating material wealth is not his priority. “I have everything that anyone could ever want,” he says. “In fact I’ve got way too much. I don’t need everything that I have.”

Foster’s advocacy for Bahraini-Australian soccer player Hakeem al-Araibi helped free him from a Thai jail.Credit: Getty Images

When Foster was growing up in Lismore, a lot of his friends were keen surfers. On weekends, while he played soccer, they headed for the coast and rode waves. On the rare occasions he went with them, he envied them their skill. “I would realise, I’m just not very good at this,” he says. “And that kind of annoyed me. It was the one sport that I really wasn’t able to master.”

A couple of years ago, he set about fixing that. Every day, he took his board to nearby Bondi Beach and practised. His technique improved but he still lacked confidence, particularly when the surf was big. “It can be quite a scary moment when you’re on a board and you see a massive wave coming towards you and you know it’s going to crash on you,” he says. “I would see experienced surfers duck under these waves beautifully but I was getting absolutely pummelled by them.”

Finally he decided the only way to solve the problem was to directly confront it. He waited for a day when the surf was unusually high. Instead of paddling beyond the break, he sat in the crash zone and let the waves do their worst to him. For two hours, he allowed himself to be pounded repeatedly. At one point, a concerned lifesaver came out to see if he needed rescuing. “He said, ‘Mate, are you okay?’ Like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m fine. I’m just trying to work this out.’ ” And he did. By the time he staggered onto the sand, he was so familiar with the sensation of being buried beneath a wall of water that it no longer bothered him. “I never have to be concerned about it again.”

As much as he loves the ocean, soccer remains Foster’s favourite sport. He plays for Waverley Old Boys Football Club, in the over-35s division. “I’m the oldest and slowest by far,” he says. “There’s going to come a time when my knees aren’t going to be able to do it any more, so I enjoy every minute. Every game is precious.” When matches were cancelled during the pandemic, he found something else to do on weekends. He bought an African drum, a djembe, and joined a drumming circle that performed at Bondi each Sunday afternoon. His lack of experience as a percussionist didn’t deter him.

“I went on YouTube and looked at a few videos and I practised a bit at home,” he says. “Then I would go and sit with these brilliant drummers and have the time of my life.

“By the way, there’d be 50 or 60 people dancing. This rhythm, it just makes people want to move.” Once, his wife Lara came to watch. “She was so embarrassed,” Foster tells me cheerfully. “She said, ‘You’re the only person there who has no idea what you’re doing.’ ”

Foster’s wife Lara, who worries about his stress levels and wishes he’d remember to take the bins out.

On the way to Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre to hear Foster speak about the Australian Republic Movement – which he co-chairs with Olympic gold medallist and former Labor senator Nova Peris – I pass an elderly man with a black beret and walking stick. Later I spot the man in the audience, among a lot of other grey-haired people. The youth of the city is missing in action, but Foster – in spiffy black sneakers, his version of evening wear – gives a spirited performance, eliciting warm applause and murmurs of approval from the retirees. He points out that the ARM is putting campaigning on hold until after the referendum later this year on the proposal to enshrine an Indigenous Voice to federal parliament. He fervently hopes that Australians vote yes to the Voice, paving the way for a republic referendum if Anthony Albanese’s Labor government wins a second term.

Foster is optimistic that when Australians are given a second opportunity to cast off the colonial yoke and have their own head of state, they will take it. He says the 1999 referendum failed for a couple of reasons. First, “the prime minister of the day was the biggest monarchist in the country. John Howard did everything he possibly could to undermine it.” Second, supporters of a republic were divided on which model would be best. In the minimalist model that was put to the vote, the governor-general was replaced by a president appointed by Parliament. “By voting against that model, Australians were saying, ‘We want direct participation in that process.’ ” In other words, the model wasn’t republican enough.

In 2021, the ARM commissioned research on the relative popularity of a range of models – from parliamentary appointment to prime ministerial appointment to direct election. Of the 2000 respondents, only 8 per cent were opposed to every model presented. “The research says that 92 per cent of Australians are open to a republic,” says Foster, who is non-committal when I ask if he’s considered going into politics. “At this time, the republic is the best way to make a contribution to the country.”

His former colleague Lucy Zelic reckons he would make an excellent president. “I truly believe he’s a future leader of this country,” she says.

Foster has three kids: Jake, 25, Jemma, 23, and Charli, 16. His wife Lara, who is an interior designer, points out that his line of work has brought the wider world into their household. “When we get our friends together, it looks like a United Nations gathering,” she says. “Some of our closest friends are refugees who have fled unimaginable cruelty.” The impact on the family hasn’t been all positive, though. Foster’s immersion in global affairs can distract him from mundane details on the home front: “He’s terrible around the house. Every Monday I still need to remind him of his one job: to take the bins out. And every Monday he forgets.”

His campaigns on behalf of individuals become all-consuming, Lara adds. “His head is always in another place, so we’ve learnt to navigate around him.” Foster may look to others like he keeps his cool, but she knows that below the surface, the emotional toll on him is considerable. “He becomes so personally attached to everyone he helps, from Hakeem al-Araibi and the Afghan girls he helped get out of Kabul to the countless refugees he’s advocated for.” During the al-Araibi campaign, he was so anxious he lost his appetite. “He survived on coffee and adrenaline,” she says. “I was really worried as I watched his weight plummet. I had his mum, Deanne, calling me every day, checking whether he was eating.”

Worldwide media coverage of Foster’s championing of al-Araibi meant other desperate people deluged him with pleas for assistance. Harrowing accounts of human suffering have poured into his inbox ever since. “I would get 20 or 30 emails a day from asylum seekers and refugees,” he tells me. He knows he can’t help everyone, but the constant arrival of these messages makes it hard to relax. “There’s always a feeling that I need to do more, I need to work harder. I shouldn’t be sitting down watching a movie.” Sport is his salvation. “The only time I can really switch all that off is when I’m in the
moment in a game of football, or catching a wave.”

All 15 of the young women who were huddled in the room in Kabul have made their home in this country. Marwa Moeen, now 22, won a university scholarship and has enrolled to study journalism. She still sounds slightly bemused when she talks about the way Foster came to her rescue. “I had no connection with Australia,” she says. “He helped us with no reason.” She has stayed in close touch with Foster and his family, and knows she can count on his continuing support. “He says, ‘Look, Marwa. I’m always here. Just call me.’ ”

I tell her I’ve heard that she and her friends plan to name their eldest sons after him. Moeen laughs. “Oh my god, I will do that definitely,” she says. “Our next generation must understand what he did for us. The first-born boy is going to be Craig.”

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