Doug PollardThe Tsunami of Sport
August 12th 2008 01:34
Get your kit on!
If anyone wonders why I bother to involve myself with the RJM Trust, the tsunami of Olympics coverage provides the perfect answer.
Australia is a country where everything else takes a back seat to sport. Politics, health, war, education, business, finance – all get swept off the front pages and relegated to the ‘also’ bits of news bulletins the minute some footballer pees on a restaurant window.
If you want to get the publics attention, get involved in sport. If you want to change the publics mind, get into sport. If you want to find the last bastions of all kinds of prejudice – the ones that dare not speak their name in public – look in the club rooms of any sporting organization.
There, it’s still OK for a coach wanting to fire up his team to accuse them of being a bunch of poofs, of playing like fairies. OK to tell them to stick it up the opposition. It’s still OK for cricketers and footballers of all codes to ‘sledge’ their opponents on the field with homosexual innuendoes.
They used to do it with race. They used to call one another ‘half-breeds’ and worse if they wanted to put someone off their game. That’s not acceptable any more – but calling them a ‘pansy’ still is. That’s got to end.
That’s where the RJM Trust comes in. Football/netball clubs are the heart of most small Victorian towns – and small town Australia is still a very unsafe place to be gay.
Literally hundreds of same-sex attracted kids try to kill themselves in rural Australia every year, and many succeed, because there is nowhere – not at home, at school, not at church, not on the street – where they feel safe and accepted, as in depth research by La Trobe University (“Writing themselves in again”) makes plain. And the place where they feel the least safe is sporting events and venues.
I’m working with founder Rob Mitchell to turn local footy and netball clubs from centres of ignorance and prejudice into safe havens for people of all sexualities and genders. That’s why we’ve been working with bisexual Ken Campagnolo in his fight with the Bonnie Doon Football Club, and transsexual Tess Emery with her problems at Northern Saints.
And it’s why we’re working with the Victorian Country Football League and the Victorian AFL to launch diversity procedures, policies and training into every VCFL club. And why Rob has taken a seat on the Victorian Sports ministry committee working on the sporting clubs governance manual.
The Olympics may have swamped everything else for now, but the work has to go on, even if it’s temporarily invisible. The Olympics have allowed Jeff Kennett to slide out of responsibility for his remarks that appeared to say that a bisexual trainer among junior footballers presents the same risk profile as a paedophile priest among choirboys.
He still hasn’t given any satisfactory response on that one, but state politicians have shown interest in taking up the issue.
Sue Pennicuik of the Greens is more than happy to raise the matter in State Parliament, and there are some in the Liberal and Labor parties who are equally as unhappy with Mr Kennett.
It’s not all downside: the Olympics also allows me to have some time out here in Queensland. But don’t think I’ve gone away for long. I will be back!
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