Alex Antic (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As the AFL season kicks off, I want to speak about a matter which brings me great sadness and strikes at the heart of what it means to be Australian, which is that our national game has been captured, twisted and diminished by the very forces of progressive ideology that are eroding so much of our shared culture. Australian Football was once the purest expression of our national character: tribal loyalty, mateship, egalitarianism, no-frills toughness and communal ritual. It was a game that united battlers from the bush to the burbs, where men could be men and where courage was celebrated and imperfection embraced in its glorious chaos. The AFL is meant to be a custodian of this national inheritance, not an app developer forever pushing updates to a product that isn't broken.

Yet what do we see? We see a game obsessed with the permanent present, constantly fiddling, disrupting and redesigning under the guise of 'relevance' and 'flow'. New rules, endless tweaks to other rules, whispers of grand final changes—all sold as progress but really just representing managerial spasms that sand down the rough grain of the game in pursuit of artificial smoothness. And why? Because the AFL has drunk deeply from the well of left-wing cultural politics. It really should be called the WFL, the woke football league. Pride rounds, Indigenous rounds, rightly done in parts but layered down with moral grandstanding and breast cancer awareness—all weaponised into a relentless calendar of identity politics.

It's not organic evolution. It's top-down imposition by those who treat our game like a restless product to be optimised for northern markets or social media metrics. They dilute September's stakes with wildcard rounds that push us towards participation trophies, eroding the very meritocracy and the high stakes that make the final sacred. The AFL has absorbed the progressive disease—novelty over continuity, disruption over stewardship, division over unity.

The game has become less like a living tradition and more like a bureaucracy chasing the next virtue signal. In so doing, it disappoints millions of ordinary Australians who just want to barrack for their team. They want to share a beer and feel part of something timeless, not be preached at every week. The game doesn't need disruptors. It needs guardians and it needs us to call out this lurch towards prioritising ideology over the inheritance of our great game. Australian Football was at its best 30 years ago, before it turned into a political statement for inner-city elites.