Fire: A Column by Len Johnson

By Len Johnson.

In a landmark case, the US Supreme Court once ruled that the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting ‘fire!’ in a crowded theatre and causing a panic.

This example needs updating. Judging by the reaction to the release this week of the report by David Crawford into sport funding, perhaps the test should now be a man falsely shouting “your funding is under threat” to Australia’s peak sporting bodies. Crawford certainly generated panic, though his defence undoubtedly would be that there really is a fire.

Now Mr Crawford, in my brief exposure to him, is as dry as chalk dust. He produced the report which led to the successful restructuring of the Australian Football League (AFL) and the creation of an independent AFL Commission. Back in my days at The Age newspaper, I was one of the journalists covering that story and I don’t recall too many wisecracks as David Crawford outlined his recommendations.

But looking at the AFL, you’d have to say Crawford got it pretty right. And looking at another of the inquiries he headed up over the years, you’d have to admit he got the review into the structure, governance and management of soccer in Australia pretty right, too.

There’s a lot that is fundamentally right about this latest Crawford report, too. We do need to address the state of sport in schools, the participation rates by all Australians in sport, the provision and upkeep of community sporting facilities.

It’s just that we don’t need to do that by directing money away from the elite end of sport. For a start, taking all the money spent on the elites and redirecting it into community sports would be mere symbolism. As massive as the amounts spent on chasing Olympic gold medals sometimes sound, and as wacky as some of the efforts to identify and pursue possible medals undoubtedly are (Cool Runnings, anyone?), they would not go far if redirected into setting up and implementing meaningful nationwide community programs.

And please don’t tell me that more money should go to the popular sports _ the major football codes, netball, cricket _ because people actually watch and play them. These sports are well and truly capable of looking after themselves without taxpayer money. Any further funding in that direction would be some sort of sporting middle-class welfare.

Not to mention counter-productive. The sports Crawford cited as “central to the national ethos” _ cricket and football, gold, tennis, netball, surfing and surf lifesaving _ are for the most part also central to less attractive sides of the national ethos, including higher rates of alcohol and tobacco consumption, gender and ethnic imbalances, inappropriate attitudes to women, etc, etc.

So in my understanding of his recommendations, I think Crawford is way off-line here. As he is in underrating the passion Australians feel towards the Olympics and, by extension, Olympics sports. In speaking to the report, Crawford was unwise to single out archery as a target, not because all Australians value archery, but because it was a blatant case of playing the man, not the ball.

There is wastage in Australian funding of sport. At times the Olympic movement does get its priorities wrong in the headlong pursuit of medals. We do right to ponder the value of medals in the most obscure events against other goals. But the overall Olympic appeal remains stubbornly popular. Australians do care about Olympic participation and Olympic success and are devastated when it doesn’t happen (remember Montreal?).

Crawford should have understood this, and to the extent that he and his panel did not, the report is flawed and, ultimately, undermined. AOC boss John Coates was right to be agitated, even “pissed off”. At the risk of evoking one too many legal aphorisms, let’s paraphrase one of Australian High Court judge and reforming politician Lionel Murphy’s here and say that Mr Coates in entitled to be an agitator with regards to this one.