FOOTBALL & WAR / SPORT & POLITICS
Comment / analysis by Sasha Uzunov, Alternate Comms Editor
The Australian Football League (AFL) is more than just the governing body of Australian Rules Football in Australia. It is one of the most influential and powerful sporting/cultural institutions, which plays a role in shaping public political opinion. But its bizarre “anti colonial” policy might be unintentionally hurting its powerful benefactors and patron’s political agendas such as the AUKUS military alliance of Australia (AUS), United Kingdom (UK – Britain) and the United States of America (US).
When in June 2024 controversial Construction Forestry & Maritime Employees Union (CFMEU), Victorian state branch took on an AFL official over a non-football related matter, the Australian Federal government was quick to react and come to the AFL’s rescue. That’s how much political pull or clout the AFL has in Australia. AFL has had long standing ties to the business community/corporate sector both here in Australia and abroad.
It is something the US State Department is also aware of and has harnessed to its strategic advantage. The AFL has become a clever propaganda platform to promote US nationalism and the US military industrial complex via the game Australian Rules Football. They are odd bedfellows.
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“I have watched [Australian] Prime Ministers and senior ministers make their way through the room to [then AFL boss] Gillon McLachlan. Prime Ministers know how the public love the game; they understand the level of influence the game has in Australia.”
– Jake Parkinson, Football Administrator
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The AFL, without going into enormous historical detail already covered elsewhere, was founded in 1896 as the Victorian Football League (VFL) by British people in the then British Colony of Victoria in Australia. The founding fathers of the organisation were either British born or Australian born Britishers or pro British Irish, most if not all staunchly monarchist. AFL’s heroes and apostles such as Charles Brownlow and others from the late 19th century and early 20th century identified as British. But the AFL cannot remove them as heroes because it would leave the game without a history, so their ethnic identity or heritage has been altered with hilarious euphemisms such as leading sports identity etc.
The VFL played a key role in mobilising Australians to fight for Britain in two world wars (1914-18; and 1939-45).
The VFL became the AFL in 1990. Suffice to say, the VFL/AFL remained staunchly pro British monarchy well into the 1970s before it began corporatising and Americanising as a consequence.
To throw the average punter off the scent, the AFL began erasing its British heritage, rewriting history and presenting itself as a champion of indigenous Australians (Aborigines) who had been dispossessed by British colonial settlement of Australia which began in 1788.
On the surface, such a policy would be seen as praiseworthy, reaching out to the marginalised indigenous peoples of Australia. In principle there is nothing wrong in scrutinising British colonialism or for that matter any form of colonialism, whether it be American or Tsarist Russian or Ancient Rome and so forth.
But the AFL’s selective “anti colonialism” only targets British colonialism but hypocritically avoids American colonialism such as the atrocious treatment of Native American Indians and African Americans as slaves. The AFL looks upon the US NFL, the peak body of American Football (Grid Iron) as a role model despite the NFL being repeatedly condemned as racist by native Americans.
The AFL has an indigenous round named after prominent Indigenous leader Sir Doug Nichols, who was also a famous former footballer. But in the same breath the AFL promotes the US military industrial complex and glorifies as role models figures such David Petraeus, ex US Army General and the disgraced director Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) forced to resign from his position over a scandal involving the divulging of official secrets to his mistress, who was writing his biography.
Ironically, the CIA began spying on indigenous Australians in Australia in the 1950s, including Nichols, for fear they might link up with African-American civil rights movement in the US. One such leader indigenous Australian leader, William Onus, was banned by the US in the 1950s.
Now, this anti colonial strategy, more clever US corporate spin used to disguise, distract from the AFL promoting US nationalism, is now counter-productive in light of the Russia-Ukraine war, which began in 2022, and the advent of the AUKUS alliance in September 2021.
AFL’s anti colonialism was very handy to the US State Department but it is now more blowback or boomerang effect for the US.
The UK – Britain – is now needed by the US for its support of Ukraine in the war with Russia; UK is needed in the US’s building up of hostilities – through the AUKUS alliance -against China in the pacific region
If the AFL is repeatedly telling he Australian people how bad Britain is, then it stands to reason why some will begin to question why is Australia in an alliance with a country, Britain, it supposedly “hates?”
If you were to walk into a pub (public bar) anywhere in Australia and randomly survey the drinkers and ask them who Ukraine President Volodimir Zelensky or Russian President Vladimir Putin were? Many would probably to know, because of apathy. But if you asked the same drinkers who the AFL was, 100% would know.
So you can see how influential the AFL is in shaping the political agenda in Australia. It is why political elites both in Australia and the US have tapped into it.