“It’s All About Me” Goodes

By Mark Humphrey

Now we have seen it all. The AFL in its endeavours to publicly push the Racial Discrimination Code have created it seems a platform for Indigenous players to self-promote. How else could you explain the disgusting manner in which Adam Goodes conducted himself over the weekend all be it with the backing of the AFL.

Now I’m not suggesting for one minute that Adam or any person for that matter should tolerate the abuse levelled at him last Friday night in the Magpies V Swans match, but it seems like Adam was wholly motivated to stand on this purpose built AFL platform and self-promote.

Here was a mature highly sensitive Indigenous sportsperson who showed no regard what so ever towards the wellbeing of a 13 year old girl. Yes she did yell out a remark to Goodes which was unacceptable, but surely when Goodes turned around and noticed a young girl at the centre of his attention you would have thought that he could have handled it differently. Why not just mention it to the security staff and let the venue operators in conjunction with the AFL handle the situation. How the hell could Goodes possibly know how a 13 year old girl would handle the intense media scrutiny that would be thrust upon her? How would he know how this girl would handle Facebook bullying if that situation arose? How would he know what type of effect this situation may have on the girl in her later years? The answer is that Adam Goodes had no idea on the answers to these questions and I suspect at the time he didn’t care.

Even the next day Goodes conducted a media session speaking about how he was hurting and that he couldn’t even go onto the ground to celebrate the win. What a self-indulging individual he is.  He was called a primate name for crying out load. Our Prime Minister is called another type of primate most days and just goes on with the job. His moment of upset against possibly a lifetime of insecurity by a simple 13 year old girl who made a mistake.  Not cool at all.

This is exactly what I meant by the AFL creating this type of platform for our Indigenous players. It gave Goodes the opportunity to push his own barrow with no regard to the wellbeing of anybody else. It’s a shame that a 30+ year old mature adult can use or even worse, decided to use this platform against a 13 year old girl.

Today on the Triple M breakfast show in Melbourne both Luke Darcy and Mick Molloy said it was ok to call someone a ranga but not Goodes an ape as the ranga term would be used jokingly. Let me say this, Goodes is called one type of primate and all hell breaks out yet the highest ranking leader in the country is called another type of primate and that’s ok. What’s wrong here? How is it that Darcy and co thinks it’s acceptable to call the leader of the country a primate name yet it’s not ok to call Goodes a primate name?

It’s about time that people including Darcy and Molloy realised that no one deserves or is entitled to be discriminated against regardless of race or religion and if they think it’s acceptable to call our leader something then it’s acceptable to call Adam Goodes something.

There should not be rules for one group and another set of rules for Indigenous people but unfortunately Governments and the AFL seem to favour this policy. Why can’t everybody just be treated equally without favourtism?