By MICHAEL SLOVANOS
THE Australian Football League has been taken over by an LGBTQ political mafia called Pride in Sport.
Complicit in this is the AFL’s corporate administrators and the companies like Westpac that bankroll the league as sponsors.
The AFL administrators have made it clear that they are hellbent on making sure players don’t express heterosexual bias and upset the “fragile and highly sensitive” Pride in Sport “they/them/he/her” mob that is now virtually running the AFL through player sanctions and enforced LGBTQ “education”.
At the top of this pile of corporate cut-outs is the former chairman of Qantas Richard James Barr Goyder AO, a member of the West Australian business aristocracy who is the current chairman of the AFL Commission, the AFL’s governing body.
Before Qantas, Goyder was, naturally, CEO and managing director of Wesfarmers from 2005 to 2017. He chaired Qantas until 2024.
Goyder’s obedient underling is AFL CEO Andrew Dillon, a privileged Melbourne Catholic boy who attended the Jesuits’ Xavier College in Kew and went on to Corrs Chambers Westgarth to become a commercial solicitor. In 1997, he was appointed in-house legal counsel at Village Roadshow.
Goyder and Dillion are both steeped in woke, global corporate culture, which may be why they appear to think they have a divine mission to enforce woke corporate “values” – aka diversity, equity, inclusivity – on the AFL and its supporters – yes, even the footy crowds.
And then there is the Pride in Sport corporate team with offices in Melbourne and Sydney, that has developed a “comprehensive roadmap” to “guide” (read coerce) organisations to “develop and implement their inclusion strategies”.
According to Google AI, the AFL hooked up with Pride in Sport in 2014, acting as “an advising sport” in the development of Pride in Sport’s initial “inclusion framework”, which has now been developed into “an index to benchmark LGBTQ+ inclusion and drive cultural change across the sport”. Oh how businesslike it all is.
Contracted players are by default supposed to be practitioners of DEI ideology. To use a mere “anti-gay slur” against another player is a crime that attracts punishment that is a modernized version of the old Red Guard struggle sessions, in which dissidents are tried by tribunal, publicly humiliated in the media and denied access to the playing field.
So in effect, the AFL and the LGBTQI+ activists at Pride in Sport are running a type of “cultural revolution” in sport. Some within the AFL are well aware of this totalitarian baloney and probably deeply despise it.
Former players such as Jason Akermanis wrote in a 2006 Herald Sun article that gay and bisexual players should keep their sexual orientation secret, which is one reason that his career at the Brisbane Lions ended. He doubled down on this stance in 2023 – and so he should have.
In April this year the AFL appeals board’s reduced the suspension of St Kilda forward Lance Collard for allegedly using “a homophobic slur”. This upset Dillon – or was it his LGBTQ controllers at Pride in Sport?
“We observe that football is a hard game. It is highly competitive, particularly at its higher levels. It is commonplace that players can employ language from time to time which is racist, sexist or homophobic whilst on the field,” the appeals board wrote.
Dillon responded by issuing an extraordinary statement criticising the decision. The appeals board is made up of KCs William Houghton and Georgina Coghlan, and former player Stephen Jurica. How dare qualified legal people exercise a bit of lenience towards a homophobe!
The appeals board upheld the earlier Tribunal finding against Collard but reduced the sanction imposed to a four-week suspension instead of nine. This was a shorter punishment than one for an earlier anti-gay “offence” and this outraged Dillon and the wider gay lobby including the self-proclaimed “bisexual” and former AFL player Mitch Brown.
Brown wrote in The Guardian that this finding was “dangerous”. “It goes against every piece of work the AFL has undergone in its attempts to eliminate these harmful behaviours from the game, and every statement made that the league has a zero-tolerance policy.”
Cairns News has asked the AFL and Pride in Sport who asked them to undertake this cultural revolution to “eliminate harmful behaviours from the game”.
Dillon went on the offensive, saying “stronger action was not only warranted, it was necessary” and took issue with the appeal board’s reasoning that appeared to suggest homophobic language was acceptable “from time to time”.
“Let’s be clear: homophobia has no place in Australian football. Not at any level. Not under any circumstances,” Dillon said. Really Mr Dillon. What law says no-one must dislike, criticize or insult a person who claims to be homosexual, lesbian or transgender?
So what was Collard’s “crime”? He denied calling a Frankston VFL player a “f….ing faggot”, but the sanctions board was not convinced.
Collard was also banned for six matches when he pleaded guilty to using the same words in 2024. This time he claimed he said “come here maggot”. St Kilda Football Club decided to appeal the seven-week “sentence”.
So-called LGBTQ+ players need to understand that not every red-blooded young heterosexual man is endeared to their lifestyle. They need to grow a pair and show some guts in the heat of competitive sport and not go running to the ref complaining that “someone used hurty words against me!”
What next? Will the AFL be suspending players for expressing doubts about climate science? And how long before AFL teams must include a set percentage of LGBTQ+ players?
The AFL has already bent over backwards trying to please the gay lobby by running so-called “Pride Rounds” in which players wear LGBTQ “pride flag” colours. Spectators are expected to join in these “celebrations of pride” in the same way that Anzac Day Service attendees are expected to endure ideologically-directed welcome to country addresses.
“Pride, respect, love and inclusion are the themes clubs are celebrating during AFLW Pride Round this year,” the AFLW website declares. “For the first time, Pride Round will span two weeks in rounds nine and 10, with all teams having the opportunity to wear their Pride guernseys for a home game.”
Let’s see how the AFL women “appreciate” transgender men players who will inevitably be pushed into their league by Pride in Sport. Hannah Mouncey became the first tranny to play in the VFLW – for the Darebin Falcons in 2018 – after being blocked from the 2017 AFLW draft.
What happened to LGBTQ+ rights that year? Was the AFL a little worried that the public might no appreciate such a move, given the worldwide pushback against trannies playing in women’s sports?
In May 2024, Gold Coast defender Wil Powell was suspended for five games for directing a “homophobic slur” towards a Brisbane opponent. Powell did what all deeply penitent players do and apologised and said he would “take full responsibility for what I said”.
Port Adelaide’s Jeremy Finlayson, a NSW country boy from Culcairn, was suspended for three games in April that year, and after describing his words as “unacceptable” he too was required to complete “Pride in Sport” training for his “homophobic verbal abuse” of an Essendon player.
North Melbourne coach Alastair Clarkson was fined $20,000 and received a suspended two-game ban for his pre-season tirade towards St Kilda’s Jimmy Webster and Dougal Howard. Clarkson apologised for the “inappropriate” language he used and was also required to complete Pride in Sport training.
Collard will also take part in this “training”, at his own cost. Pride in Sport invites people to get a quote for taking part in one of their “education” courses.
We would be curious to know what this “education” costs and what those railroaded into it actually think about it. It appears that Pride in Sport is a straight-out LGBTQ+ political propaganda outfit that grifts off the salaries of these punished AFL players and the AFL’s corporate sponsors.
The PIS vision statement says: “Our vision is that all people with diverse sexualities and genders are included in sport as
their authentic selves” while its mission is “to support organisations at all levels in the sport and recreation sector to
create safe and inclusive environments for people with diverse sexualities and genders.”
Essentially what this means is that Pride in Sport is pushing a political agenda of the New Left, which emerged as the sexual revolution in the mid-60s before morphing into gay rights and now the LGBTQA+ movement, whose basic goal is to overthrow societal norms in regard to sex and gender.
This movement is also using publicly-funded legal actions under anti-discrimination and anti-vilification laws to silence people who maintain a traditional view of sex, gender and marriage and dare criticise the LGBTQ+ movement.
