Ball tampering politicians should back off

The great Australian ball tampering affair of 2018 has followed a familiar pattern. Having quickly moved past incredulity — it’s surprising that things can still surprise us at all in the age of Trump —social media egged on politicians to indulge in two of Australia’s favourite pastimes: virtue signalling and the wild backlash.

And our politicians dove into the controversy as quickly as they could. The Prime Minister said “this cheating is a disgrace” observing that the scandal was a “shocking affront to Australia.” One Nation proposed a Senate urgency motion to “understand why some politicians and professional sportsmen feel the need to cheat.” Bill Shorten also felt the need to make sure people knew he was opposed to cheating.

This over-the-top commentary was only slightly less punishing than those trying to hijack the issue to talk about how Australia should really be ashamed about various other things.

As we have now moved on to the stage of the backlash against the backlash, we can ask not whether the actions of Smith, Warner and Bancroft were right — no-one has seriously argued they were — but why politicians felt they just had to join in the backlash?

It’s hardly the first time politicians have used sport to virtue signal. After all, surely it’s fair to say that the cheating scandal is the blackest day in sport since the Gillard government gravely announced the last “blackest day in Australian sport.”

So why do politicians in particular feel compelled to comment repeatedly on one of the few scandals in the last 12 months that had nothing to do with them?

After all Turnbull could have breathed a sigh of relief that the media briefly moved away from its obsessive counting down to 30 lost Newspolls in a row. Shorten could have quietly continued working on reversing the controversial bits of his terrible dividend imputation policy.

One possible answer is that the government has an interest in protecting the enormous sums of money it provides to fund sport. It spends more than $250 million each year on bodies like the Australian Sports Commission — and close to another $20 million goes to the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority.

The states also provide many millions of dollars. For example, in addition to spending billions of taxpayers’ dollars on new stadiums, late last year the NSW government allocated $50 million to NSW NRL clubs to fund their centres of excellence.

It’s tempting to observe that scandals like these should make us revaluate whether spending taxpayer funds on professional athletes earning millions of dollars is appropriate.

Of course, if we opened that Pandora’s Box we’d also have to look at support for the arts, especially those patronised by millionaires. And Australian businesses patronised by no-one, because they produce goods people won’t buy. And supposed non-government organisations whose funding comes from government and whose seemingly sole purpose is to lobby the government for more spending.

Probably best to keep shovelling out the cash under the table.

Unfortunately the simple answer here is insufficient. Many politicians believe, and have been encouraged to believe, that the definition of governing is to act in loco parentis for the country. We often disparagingly refer to this as the ‘nanny state’ but it’s much closer to parenting than babysitting.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Turnbull and Shorten and others feel compelled to comment on these matters because they view their job as providing parental guidance for the country. Add to that the sense of needing to right a wrong done to their ‘children’ and they are lining up for a microphone.

One might ask why politicians imagine they are qualified for this job. But, at a more basic level, why do we think we need this?

As a country, we are becoming too sceptical of those who want to be self-reliant and too quick to intervene to save people from themselves. The point is not that we should cut funding to this activity or that. We actually need to change the mindset of voters, who are fixated on looking to flawed politicians — and sports stars and celebrities — for moral guidance.

On the contrary, our interactions with government should be like Bancroft’s actions with the sandpaper: brief, with a clear purpose, and quickly discarded if things go really wrong.

Simon Cowan is Research Manager at the Centre for Independent Studies.