Even the most casual observers would have noticed the now rampant mission creep moving progressively – and I do mean progressively – through our once august, now merely tedious-corporate, sporting bodies. First it was Essendon, egged on by the amoral Victorian Premier, sacking a Christian and then bagging the core beliefs of (real) Christians. Then we had Netball Australia’s bedwetters lamenting comments made by the late father of the woman now sponsoring NA, and probably keeping it afloat, about Aborigines. Comments made about half a century ago. The kerfuffle was especially a thing because the netball team has an Indigenous player on the roster.
Finally, there was Australia’s cricket captain, who has apparently taken it upon himself not only to decide who gets to sponsor cricket Australia, but also to lecture the world on his ill-conceived, ignorant prejudices against fossil fuels. The targeted culprit in this case is Alinta Energy.
What is it with obscenely rich, jetsetting, entitled, woke millennials not just lecturing others with their clueless views on a range of issues, but actually using their heft to blackmail their employers into bending to their ideologies? Patrick Cummins, apparently a “known climate activist”, is proving to be the Mike Cannon-Brookes of sport. Cannon-Brookes, a Big Tech player, does it by buying companies he doesn’t like then determining to pulp them. Cummins does it by blacklisting companies he doesn’t like from being sponsors.
The irrepressible Sam Newman weighed in on Sky News:
‘Patronising and pompous’: Former AFL player slams woke athletes’ ‘arrogance’.
Sports stars become climate warriors. Indeed, they do. They should do it on their own time, and on their own dime.
Retired AFL player Sam Newman says the “price of being virtuous is hypocrisy”, following objections from some Diamonds netball players to a $15 million sponsorship from Hancock Prospecting.
Australian cricket captain Pat Cummins has also expressed concern about a partnership with Alinta Energy.
“I’m sure they use one of their products on a daily basis, so it’s just fraught with danger, all this nonsense,” Mr Newman told Sky News host Chris Kenny.
“The world we live in is being run by patronising and pompous, arrogant people who have no idea really what they’re on about, and make the rest of the people who enjoy life as it is … make it a nightmare.”
Newman also stated:
… it was unreasonable and unrealistic for the mining company and energy provider to be rubbed out of sporting deals as the athletes fly around the world competing.
“If you think fossil fuels are going to disappear in the very near future then you’re mistaken because that’s the end of the civilised world as we know it no matter what you think of climate and no matter what you think of global warming.
Again, indeed.
Yes, both things (patronising and pompous) are true. But there is something far more insidious in play. Not only was Cummins cagey (at best) about his own involvement in this scrap. But, far more importantly, we are witnessing policy normally made by democratically elected politicians being outsourced to corporates who we as voters cannot control or kick out, and now corporates ceding control of policy to their employees.
(We shouldn’t forget that Cummins is only there (as captain) because the excellent Tim Paine, who almost single-handedly saved the reputation of Australian cricket after we were caught cheating in South Africa, was found to have sent a few lewd text messages to a female work colleague some years ago. None of anyone’s business. The NSW Treasurer (sadly) still has a job despite being caught out for the same “crime”).
Cummins has the reputation of a clean-skin. Fair enough. He doesn’t carry on with the normal antics of aggro-fast bowlers. He doesn’t sledge. He appears to be honest, though who knows how many of those in South Africa actually knew about the cheating? That, we will never know.
But, like so many of his colleagues, Cummins is a spoilt rich kid who has been made massively wealthy through corporate sponsorship of his sport, by TV rights deals and, of course, by the Asian betting syndicates who managed to con cricket bureaucracies across the globe into creating endless, pointless cricket matches accompanied by loud music, dancing girls, coloured clothing and continual advertising for … betting! There are now T 20 world cups on an annual basis, so it would seem, and T 20 competitions in every cricket playing country around the globe, whose teams (sorry, franchises) didn’t exist a decade ago and whose results are meaningless and forgotten by the time the next pointless white ball exercise comes around.
Absent betting syndicates, ridiculously generous sponsors and venal cricket corporates, these players are not buying Bronte mansions worth around ten million dollars. As Domain reported in 2021:
None of this [the Covid property boom of 2021] has stopped Test cricketer Pat Cummins from buying into the Bronte market, with sources pinning the purchase of historic Victorian manor Figtree House on the fast bowler for about $9.5 million.
It’s a handsome upgrade for Cummins and his fiancee Becky Boston from the Clovelly apartment he purchased as a first-home buyer in 2013 for $1.36 million.
Nice work if you can get it. No wonder Pat and his peers eschew local and state cricket – Cummins never now plays for his home state of New South Wales in real (Sheffield Shield) cricket – in pursuit of top dollar at the endless “white ball” charades. Perhaps, like the Pope, Cricket Australia believes that traditionalism is a crime against the church.
Back to climate change, and useful idiocy.
Cummins may genuinely imagine that climate change is real, man-made, dangerous, linked to extreme weather events and susceptible of human control. If he does, he might be considered by those who know a little more about climate science than he does to be an idiot. More politely, a low information pundit with a megaphone. Just like most of the rest of his entitled, under-educated generation. But more importantly, having the Cummins of the world doing the heavy lifting for the renewable energy scamming class makes him and his fellow warriors very useful idiots indeed. He is an influencer. God help us all, he might end up in parliament one day, like the bloviating wokester from Canberra (David Pocock) who used to play rugby. Canberra. Where climate policy used to be made.
The father of cricketers, and himself an inveterate cheat, WG Grace, once remarked, as he replaced a bail, having been bowled first ball, “they came here to see me bat, not you bowl”. Well, we came here to see our cricketers shut up and play cricket. Even, occasionally, perhaps turn out for their clubs and their States. And keep it all real and grounded. Professional cricketers, like small children, should be seen and not heard.
Paul Collits
20 October 2022
50 years ago they would have been having a lemonade stand out the front to fund their trips away as in those days it was a privilege to play sport representing your state or country.
Now it is spoilt brat territory with so many standing aside from their sport to "educate" the masses on their various pet subjects. It is sport and just entertainment, not a do or die necessity.
You do not insult Gina and get away with it and get to live again (funded)! Ah biting the hands that feed them. Such self importance.
When this system crashes there are going to be a lot of people running around wringing hands and stomping feet. I can hardly wait.
There was once a popular song called "The Age of Aquarius". Ah, those were the days, my friend, we thought they would never end.
Now that we live in the Age of Insanity surely there is some enterprising songwriter who can pen an anthem for these memorable times.