The AFL needs to do far more to eliminate the scourge of racism from the fields, the stadiums and the playing rooms. More than a quarter of a century after the AFL introduced what was a ground-breaking policy to outlaw racial and religious vilification, it seems little has genuinely changed.
Joel Wilkinson, a Nigerian-born Gold Coast player, took his complaints about racism in the AFL to the Human Rights Commission.Credit:Getty Images
As AFL champion player Eddie Betts told The Age’s Jack Latimore recently, he suffers racial abuse every week: “The sad thing is that I’m used to it … We, as Aboriginal people, are used to it. And we keep fighting, but it’s hard.”
After that interview, Betts and Latimore fielded a stream of racist insults and commentary. Betts believes Australia is regressing, not advancing against racism.
You only have to dip lightly into the torrent of slurs pitched against Indigenous people on social media to know he may well be correct.
The duty to call out racism, to cancel it, to obliterate even the thoughts of it from the minds of the ignorant, falls to all of us. That duty never ends. It must strengthen and pass through generations.
Yet racism still festers on playing fields. Essendon champion Michael Long endured it. So did St Kilda’s Nicky Winmar, Gilbert McAdam and Robbie Muir, and Collingwood’s Leon Davis and Nathan Lovett-Murray.
And the Krakouer brothers, Jim and Phil, and Jim’s son Andrew. More recently so have Michael O’Loughlin, Paddy Ryder, Aliir Aliir, Kysaiah Pickett – the list goes on.
Sydney Swans champion and Brownlow Medal winner Adam Goodes was constantly booed and humiliated with racial epithets for years, especially after he was Australian of the Year in 2014.
Joel Wilkinson, a Nigeria-born Gold Coast player, took his complaints about racism in the AFL to the Human Rights Commission but abandoned the process because he believed the league wanted to corner him into silence.
The AFL’s vilification policy was introduced in 1995, after Michael Long broke the wall of silence around racism and reported a Collingwood opponent, Damian Monkhorst. Both players later received death threats.
This year, a review by Professor Larissa Behrendt and Professor Lindon Coombes found the Collingwood Football Club had a “distinct and egregious” history of racism. That review followed complaints by Brazil-born former player Heritier Lumumba.
Yet here we are again. This time it’s Adelaide Crows’ Taylor Walker, who has been struck out for six weeks and fined for vilifying the Indigenous SANFL player Robbie Young. Once again, it is the person abused who is asked to “lean in” and “help” the person who insulted him and his people. That’s inside-out.
Once again, football commentators, such as former Collingwood president Eddie McGuire, claim they understand it all, that they grasp the issue of racism and the hurt it causes. Yet they pick arguments about how awful it must have been for Walker, the abuser, to be required to apologise when he was feeling down.
That is petty in the extreme. To emphasise the apparent hurt of the abuser – upset because he has been outed for his racist comments – serves to diminish and marginalise the devastating and unending hurt that is caused by racist insults.
Racism destroys people. It nullifies them, deliberately cuts them down for no reason other than the colour of the skin or their cultural background.
North Melbourne Football Club’s chief executive, Ben Amarfio, is one leader who, like many other Australians, is clearly bewildered by the distinction made between the AFL’s treatment of Walker, for example, and fans who spew racism on social media or from the stands.
Members are banned, even referred to police. Yet Walker, who has played his entire career under the AFL’s racial and religious vilification policy, is put in the corner for six weeks, fined $20,000 and asked to do better.
Perhaps racism ought to be a sackable offence in the AFL, as it would be in most properly-managed workplaces. After all, if the AFL’s own policy says it “will no longer tolerate” vilification, then do as it says.
Gay Alcorn sends an exclusive newsletter to subscribers each week. Sign up to receive her Note from the Editor.
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