Australian blinkers

March 27, 2002 by neil manthorp

Neil Man­thorp — 27/03/2002

Aus­trali­a’s deci­sion not to tour Zim­bab­we is a polit­i­cal and moral one. To use the issue of play­er safe­ty as a rea­son is a smoke­screen designed to hide the fact that politi­cians are once again in charge of sport.

There is a com­pelling argu­ment to sup­port the Aus­tralian gov­ern­men­t’s deci­sion not to be seen as con­don­ing a pres­i­dent and a gov­ern­ment that were obvi­ous­ly re-elect­ed in dubi­ous cir­cum­stances. The ‘free’ world needs to show sol­i­dar­i­ty in it’s appre­ci­a­tion of democracy.

How­ev­er, there is a sick­en­ing amount of hypocrisy sur­round­ing the issue this time. Zim­bab­we has been kicked out of the Com­mon­wealth for a year but did that stop South African golfers, ten­nis play­ers and many oth­er sports­men from tour­ing the world earn­ing a good liv­ing while we were banned?

One of the most per­ti­nent rea­sons for Aus­trali­a’s deci­sion is far sim­pler, far more straightforward.

Aus­tralian crick­eters refused to trav­el to Sri Lan­ka dur­ing the 1996 World Cup because they deemed it to be unsafe. Nev­er mind the fact that South Africa, for exam­ple, and India, Pak­istan, Zim­bab­we etc etc found no prob­lem with the idea of play­ing in Colombo.

The prob­lem for Aus­tralians is their geo­graph­i­cal loca­tion. Being so iso­lat­ed from the rest of the world breeds a nation­al pride bor­der­ing on xeno­pho­bic jin­go­ism. But it also breeds insu­lar­i­ty, inse­cu­ri­ty, para­noia and a des­per­ate lack of edu­ca­tion con­cern­ing the rest of the world’s affairs.

Aus­tralia is a coun­try in which you are not allowed to cross the street until the lit­tle green man starts flash­ing and beep­ing on the traf­fic light.

Aus­tralia is a coun­try where you are not allowed to drink a beer on a beach and where you can­not play with a beach ball in a crick­et ground.

Lit­tle won­der the reac­tion is to go home when con­front­ed with some­thing new, dif­fer­ent or con­fus­ing. So what should they have done?

How about thor­ough­ly inves­ti­gate the secu­ri­ty sit­u­a­tion and then explore the pos­si­bil­i­ty of issu­ing a pre-tour state­ment in which the play­ers, the ACB and the gov­ern­ment made it clear that Aus­trali­a’s crick­eters were not mak­ing a polit­i­cal state­ment by play­ing in Zim­bab­we and they were nei­ther con­demn­ing nor con­don­ing Robert Mugabe’s gov­ern­ment. In the inter­ests of sport in gen­er­al, and crick­et in par­tic­u­lar, the game would continue.

That’s what South Africa would have done. But, unfor­tu­nate­ly, that was prob­a­bly nev­er an the Aus­tralians con­sid­ered giv­en that at least half the squad admit­ted they would refuse point-blank to tour even if their Board said they should.

Aus­tralia is a beau­ti­ful coun­try with many of the finest peo­ple I have met, but it is a long way from the rest of the world, in many ways.