Sport is our nation’s great unifier. It’s the government’s job to protect it

Save articles for later

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.

What if the Matildas’ World Cup run had taken place on Foxtel, or Optus Sport, or Amazon? As sport, its merit would remain unchanged but as culture, it would have become something else entirely.

Word would have spread, news outlets would have swooned, subscriptions would have spiked, but the fervour would have been dulled. Sure, pubs and live sites would have picked up some of the slack, but there never could have been the sense we all had that everyone was watching. Together.

The Women’s World Cup would have had a hugely different community feel if it hadn’t been available on free-to-air TV.Credit: Getty

This is the best reason we have anti-siphoning laws in this country. They were introduced in the ’90s at the onset of pay-television to ensure sporting events of national significance remained on free-to-air television, accessible to all. Thus, the Olympics, the AFL and NRL finals series, the Ashes, and the Australian Open tennis (among other things) are preserved for free public consumption. That was a simple enough equation when pay-TV was the only real competitor. But now we’re in a world swamped by streaming, the equation has become ever more complicated.

That’s why the Albanese government this week proposed new legislation to update this regime. Among the headlines is that it wanted to add more sports to the anti-siphoning list, especially women’s and para sports. In the weeds is a proposal to force TV manufacturers to give prominence to free-to-air streaming apps (7+, 9Now, 10Play, iview) over the subscription competitors. And to the fore is a clear clashing of interests: of the free-to-air broadcasters, of subscription services and tech companies, of the sporting bodies selling their rights, and of consumers. And as you’d expect, everyone argues their case by pretending they’re really acting in someone else’s interests.

Here, for example, is Foxtel’s line: “The regime is already anti-competitive and clearly favours free-to-air broadcasters above Australians and above the needs of sporting bodies whose ability to invest in grassroots will be limited.” It’s not that this argument is spurious, so much as overstated. Foxtel is broadly correct that more bidders for TV rights means bigger deals, which means more money going into the coffers of sporting bodies, which they can then spend at grassroots level. And this may well turn out to be decisively true for some smaller sports, such as para sports, which are unlikely to become AFL-style behemoths through free-to-air exposure. But this argument has its limits.

A year-and-a-week ago, Australia played England in a one-day international cricket match at the MCG in front of 10,406 people. That’s roughly 90,000 empty seats greeting the national team as it played its oldest rival in one of our nation’s most popular sports. There are several reasons for that debacle: too many pointless cricket series are now played, making the sport a festival of dead rubbers played by constantly rotating and occasionally anonymous players.

Even that, I should note, is a product of the pursuit of endless TV money. But it’s also clear that something has been lost by Cricket Australia’s decision to put our national team’s white-ball games behind Foxtel’s paywall. It got more cash up front, but at the cost of our team becoming a ghost. Its games, even at home, often passing without us realising.

Here, Australian cricket walked a small way down the disastrous path English cricket pioneered in 2005. After the glorious Ashes series of that year, it cashed in, selling its broadcast rights to Sky. Then English cricket promptly all but disappeared from cultural view. The audience plummeted, and so did the sport at grassroots level. In 2008, there were about 428,000 English cricketers. Only eight years later, there were 278,000. England’s 2005 Ashes heroes got an open-top bus parade. Within a decade, a generation of English kids didn’t even know their own country’s star players. By 2017, English cricket decided to return some games to the BBC to avoid becoming, in its chief executive’s memorable phrase, “the richest, most irrelevant sport in [that] country”.

If we believe sport is valuable as a cultural asset – and not merely a commercial one – it’s a government’s job to prevent that sort of thing. And I do believe that. Because in a world that is becoming ever more culturally fractured – where everything from TV to film, music and even news is splintered and experienced in subcultures – sport is perhaps the last enduring place we have left where we gather as a public. The magic of the Matildas wasn’t that it was a consumer experience, or even a sporting one. It was that it was a unifying, civil one. That is a matter of public interest.

True, that interest may coincide at certain points with someone’s commercial interest. In the case of anti-siphoning, that’s often free-to-air broadcasters. Foxtel isn’t wrong to identify that. But I do think they’re stretching things to say these broadcasters are being favoured “above Australians”. Those Australians who can afford to pay for Foxtel’s coverage (which is often excellent), and who would like to get more for their subscription fees, perhaps. But for Australians at large, as Australians? That’s a difficult argument to make.

But that only increases the need for the government to avoid the perception it is simply doing free-to-air’s bidding. The interests of free-to-air broadcasters and the public may have significant overlap, but they are not forever and always the same. Those interests only converge to the extent sporting coverage remains free and mass. So, it makes sense for the Albanese government to update anti-siphoning laws to allow sport to be provided free of charge on the networks’ free streaming apps. But just as clearly, the government should not extend these anti-siphoning privileges to the networks’ subscription services.

If the updated legislation is to be something other than a special interest regime, it surely cannot allow free-to-air networks first access to buy the rights to sports, only to broadcast those sports behind a paywall. This is a live danger in a world where Stan, owned by Nine (also the owner of this masthead), has an extensive sports portal that includes tennis and rugby union, or where Paramount+, attached to Network 10, hosts the A-Leagues. That’s proof of concept. It’s a direction of travel. The test will be for the government to prove it will not become a loophole.

The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.

Most Viewed in Politics

From our partners

Source: Read Full Article