Industrial convolution

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This was published 4 years ago

Opinion

Industrial convolution

In a Four Corners report on Chinese infiltration of Australia universities last Monday, reporter Sean Rubinsztein-Dunlop called the sector an “industry”. It jarred, not because it was wrong, but because it was so obviously right. It’s just that we don’t like to think of our places of higher learning in that mechanical way.

Industry, says an online dictionary, is “economic activity concerned with the processing of raw materials and manufacture of goods in factories”.

Industrial convolution.

Industrial convolution.Credit: Jim Pavlidis

On those terms, because we exalt sport, it’s also hard to think of it as an industry. Yet looking around the landscape this week, it’s hard to see it in any other light.

The 7.30 Report’s expose on Thursday night of the slaughter of former racehorses, tripping on the heels of cruelty-to-animal criminal charges against disgraced trainer Darren Weir, is the most acute case in point.

Especially at this time of year, racing people like to present their sport as a noble pursuit, and the horses as high-bred demi-human allies.

Yet this appreciation of their sentience lasts only as long as they can run fast or breed profitably. Beforehand, they are raw materials, later most are waste material (remembering that beyond the scope of the 7.30 Report story on retired racehorses are the untold thousands who don’t even make it as far as a trial). “Processing of raw materials and manufacture of goods in factories.” Not to mince words, it’s a meat market.

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In Alan Atwood’s affecting portrait of Chautauqua, the racehorse that wouldn’t start, in last week’s Good Weekend, trainer Wayne Hawkes speaks tenderly about the horse, but admits he doesn’t even know where he is now. Til end of usefulness us do part ...

Meantime, one of a blizzard of emails from bookmakers lands to say that there are 19 million reasons to watch the races on Saturday. In other words, come and barrack for money. There are many good-hearted racing people who don’t like to think of themselves as operatives in an industry, but they are.

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So are football folk. Footy is a peculiar industry in that it operates in such a way that it would collapse without volunteers. Years ago, a club executive said to me that if non-paid footy labour ever was unionised, footy would go broke overnight.

But it is an industry, “economic activity concerned with the processing of raw materials and manufacture of goods”, as this week again demonstrated. Trade week reveals footy as a meat market, different from racing only in that processed footballers don’t literally become dog food.

For one thing, like any industry, it depends on the movement of goods. Lengthening trade week and drawing out the last day has served only to create a longer stretch when nothing happens. This makes everyone jittery the way a stalled economy does.

Toby Greene on grand final day.

Toby Greene on grand final day.Credit: Getty Images

More to the point, as racing humanises horses for its own purpose, football dehumanises footballers. Fans are even less empathetic than clubs. Joe Daniher’s request to move to Sydney for lifestyle’s sake is regarded as odd: components are not meant to think like that. They're not meant to think. Whatever misgivings players have about trade week, players don’t complain because the system gives them little other agency in their working lives.

Take Toby Greene. He is a brilliant footballer. He can also be aggravating. On grand final night, his name was vilified in the coarsest way up and down Swan Street. Yet with only a slightly different fall of picks and names in 2011, he would have been playing for Richmond that day instead of GWS. Right sausage, wrong factory. Dog. That’s the industry.

In the US, the sports industry’s priorities are transparent. Recently, Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey expressed solidarity with the Hong Kong protesters. It was scarcely a position, just a seven-word tweet, but it coincided with, and stalled, a concerted NBA push into China.

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Superstar LeBron James rebuked Morey. “I believe he wasn’t educated on the situation at hand,” he said. “So many people could have been harmed not only financially, physically, emotionally, spiritually.” James often has spoken out for the less privileged previously, but this time he had shoes to sell by the million. As much as he is a capo of sport, he is a captain of industry.

Here, evidently, was an insight into the free speech debate: it is free until it costs business.

But of this you can be certain, that the NBA-China project will go on. All that raw material for processing, all that manufacture of goods … all that factory.  The AFL can't take its eyes off the place.

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