“If you’re a parent of a 17-year-old who wants to play footy,” Tom Elliott said on 3AW this week, “there’s a one in eight chance your son will become a drug addict. If you are worried about your innocent son going into an environment where drug use is encouraged, where it’s aided and abetted, where it’s hidden from public view, that’s what will happen.”
Andrew Wilkie’s speech to the federal parliament, which called for the personal intervention of the prime minister, which referred to the footballers as “corporate cannon fodder”, and which punned on “white line fever”, invited that kind of hysteria. “Footy Drugs Rort” was the initial Herald Sun headline. “A protection racket”, Elliott described the AFL. Joel Smith entered Hansard as an “alleged drug trafficker”. Eddie McGuire weighed in with a plan to drug test schoolboy footballers. “Enough is enough,” he said. “They’re going to bring in a punitive code. I think everyone now understands sunlight is the best disinfectant, that you are better off having it out into the open.”
