If sport and politics don’t mix, then this column’s going to be even more pointless than usual, but please bear with me. Let’s talk about a bit of sport/politics mixing and see where it’s got us.

Remember when Paul Keating was Collingwood’s number one ticket holder for a while there? That was pretty special and not at all amusing, since Keating is not generally plausible as the type of man who’d drink beer, let alone be the slightest bit interested in any kind of sport.

When you add his haughty disdain for everything that isn’t Europe, and his bare tolerance of Sydney and contempt for the rest of the country, well what were we supposed to think? If he’d picked Fitzroy or St Kilda, he might’ve got a bit of a wry smile from the battlers, but by picking the most arrogant and most hated club in the country, he managed to turn most of Victoria against him.

I’ve touched in a past column on our Quixotic/Idiotic bid for the World Cup. With all the other woes fast approaching this great brown land, I would’ve thought we had better things to spend $60 million on. However, there are a lot of party hacks who need cushy jobs, business high-flyers who need a bit more of a suck on the corporate welfare tit and politicians who desperately need to stand next to successful sportsmen. So off we go, setting up committees who can spend the next three years spending our money on fact-finding missions and buying stuffed koalas for FIFA executives.

The fact that our time zones will kill TV ratings in the rest of the world, and it takes a full day in a plane to get here, and half a day if you’re lucky to get from one city to another hasn’t entered the spin-ridden head of our Dear Leader. And our political clout within FIFA stands us somewhere between New Zealand and the tea lady.

So, a bunch of suits will fly business class for the already-decided announcement, then give lots of speeches about what a strong bid it was, Australia’s a world player, world-class bid, world-class stadia etc, all the while looking and sounding like the ant who climbed up the back leg of a cow and promised to be gentle.

Melbourne Grand Prix. Sheesh, that stinks. Again, it costs us shedloads of money, but there are a lot of influential corporate parasites behind it, and for some reason Brumby and before him Bracks are too scared to stand up to the malevolent dwarf who runs the show. No GP at night? The fuck you say, I give it two years before every Labrador in Albert Park is scaling trees or howling in the bathroom in terror at dinnertime. Extremely valid reasons will be put forward for this capitulation, including, no doubt, the usual hysterical attendance figures.

I hate the idea of a GP at night for a number of reasons, the main ones being the cost and the pointlessness, and the tens of thousands of pissed bogans trying to find their way home via every front yard and letterbox in Albert Park and St Kilda. Besides, a night GP would mean losing the single best thing about the whole deal, which is when that jet fighter does flyovers and pulls the aeronautic equivalent of burnouts.

In any sport/politics rant, it’s impossible to ignore John Howard. Steve Waugh, Mark Taylor and Ricky Ponting have all said that the hardest job about captaining the Australian XI was trying to do it with a Prime Minister stuck to their legs. And he actually doesn’t know anything about the game, modern or ancient. All he knows about is Don bloody Bradman and the stinking Invincibles, and how to get into the Members’ stand at every ground in the Western world. The greatest thing he ever did for cricket was when he bowled a grubber at a charity match, but at least his reaction to the embarrassment was better than his I-just-ate-a-lemon-sandwich-and-washed-it-down-with-battery-acid faced presentation of the Rugby World Cup to the English in 2003.

And so we get to the Olympics. China is hosting, had you noticed? Apparently this was a hugely far-sighted decision, meaning that China was being welcomed into the world community, and being presented with the opportunity to show us how wonderful they really are, and perhaps in some way their government and society would become more open through the influence and presence of so many journalists and other assorted foreigners.

Or perhaps it’s a good opportunity for the Chinese government to round up all its dissenters, democracy advocates and other malcontents, and to use security and imaginary terrorism threats as an acceptable reason to incarcerate and/or execute the lot of them. And of course we’ll all lap it up, looking at the lovely clean cities and well-behaved citizens and that guy over there in the volunteer uniform, why’s he frog-marching that teenager towards the police van, and I’m sure that journalist over there is voluntarily being dragged into the cells for a one-on-one press conference? I hate sportspeople making political statements, but I must admit that I’m hoping against hope that a few of them will wear Free Tibet badges, or say something about oppression and human rights in between thanking their mums and their sponsors.

I’m also kind of hoping that the same corrupt evil bastards who built those schools out of cardboard and toothpicks in the earthquake zone didn’t have anything to do with building the Olympic stadium or athletes’ village. No, really, I am.

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