I first met Bob Hawke in the non-members’ bar of Parliament House in the winter of 1989. The prime minister wanted to discuss my footy tipping record. The season was almost over and I was eight games clear in the press gallery competition. Barrie Cassidy, the PM’s senior press secretary, had told his boss that this was an extraordinary feat. With that lead, I would probably win any footy tipping competition in the country.



“What’s your secret?” Hawke asked.

I mumbled something about how I was a recent arrival from Melbourne and I guessed that gave me a little more insight. But then I confessed. I’d been tipping against my own team.

My colleagues assumed I didn’t care for Richmond. If I were a loyal supporter, I should have picked the Tigers every week, no matter whom they played. I could then shrug when they lost or, if they caused an upset, I’d be entitled to say, ‘I told you so.’ I explained to them that, as an economics correspondent, I had to be rational. Why start each round one tip behind the rest of the pack? My first winter in Canberra coincided with Richmond’s second wooden spoon of the 1980s. After the beginner’s luck of the first season, my form deteriorated, in direct proportion to the years I was away from Melbourne.

I took over the administration of the competition in the early 1990s and let the power go to my head. The competition was open to politicians, their staffers and to the public service. The system I inherited had a flat $60 fee for all tipsters. It funded a weekly jackpot for those who picked every winner and end-of-season prizes for the top three. At close of business on Friday night I would lock up the handwritten tips that had been deposited in the box on my desk. On Monday morning, I manually marked off each set of tips and added them to the ladder.

My predecessor, Lindsay Olney, would write a pithy weekly report on the round of tipping and pin it up on a board in the News Limited bureau. A copy was faxed to a privileged few, including the offices of the prime minister, opposition leader and treasurer. Lindsay’s reports were invariably hilarious. Mine were not in his league.

These reports were the platform for some of the silliest things I wrote in my time in the press gallery. I was young and could not resist the temptation to rib the politicians who had tipped poorly. They loved the notoriety.

Bob Hawke didn’t like football so much as he liked a punt. Photograph: Getty Images

After the 1993 election I decided to introduce a poll tax, as a collective punishment for the GST debate. Journalists and staffers would still pay $60 to join the competition but politicians would be charged $70. They couldn’t say no, and I kept sneaking up the fee, until it reached $90. My successor decided I had been too cruel and restored parity between journo and pollie at the old rate of $60. I’m not sure that the poll tax was worth the trouble anyway, because it inflated the payouts for politicians. The Labor minister Simon Crean was the first to win the competition on my watch. Later the Liberal treasurer Peter Costello finished on top. Both men were good sports and reinvested their winnings in an end-of-season office party for all tipsters.

I had arrived in the press gallery in the spring of 1988, just after democracy had located to the new Parliament House on the hill, where politician and journalist were physically separated for the first time. I hadn’t experienced the boarding-house familiarity of the old house but it was easy to detect its echo in the boozy corridor parties that ministers threw to baptise their suites in the new house.

The informality should not be mistaken for complicity. Back then the press gallery was allowed to be a brutal inquisitor and politicians felt an obligation to explain themselves. Newspapers still directed the rhythm and direction of public debate. The printed word fed morning radio, politicians competed throughout the day for a place on the television news bulletins, and everyone went to bed knowing that the newspaper reporter had the final word, because what we filed that evening would set the agenda the following morning.

I returned home to Melbourne at the end of 1999. Print was still in command but political power had shifted to Sydney, and the culture had coarsened.

The game is so firmly entrenched in the culture that no one will judge you for your zealotry

Hawke’s government sat at the crossroads between two ways of looking at Australia, between the broadmindedness of the south and the polarisation of the north, between an age when leaders promoted multiculturalism and one where leaders encouraged race debates.

Hawke’s was the last truly Victorian government of Australia, which means it was the last to be preoccupied with football. His ministers and advisers were among the most zealous supporters that politics has seen. John Button, the industry minister, wrote how he once dropped the name of Gary Ablett (the father, not the son) in a conversation with Margaret Thatcher. “In Geelong, I told Gary Ablett about Margaret Thatcher. I gained the impression that neither had heard of the other.” He and his good friend Michael Duffy, the communications minister and later attorney general, would distract one another in cabinet meetings by drawing up their all-time best Geelong and Essendon sides and arguing over who would win their hypothetical grand final.

It was ever thus with Victorian politicians. Football would divert the course of a discussion. There was no filter because football is the one passion Victorians don’t repress. Every other part of one’s private self: the school you went to, the work you do, the places you’ve travelled to, the books and records you collect, the rent you pay or the capital you’ve gained on your property, it all carries an implied transactional cost if you reveal it in the wrong context. It’s safer to wait to be asked about those things, and then you can choose which truth to conceal. With football, that’s not necessary because the game is so firmly entrenched in the culture that no one will judge you for your zealotry.

The parliamentary prize for gratuitous tribalism belongs to the Country party minister Peter Nixon. He put Richmond’s 1967 premiership into the Hansard record with an amusing game of word association in question time. He was answering a question without notice from his colleague Donald Jessop, the member for the rural South Australian electorate of Grey.

Jessop asked:

Is the minister for the interior aware that recently two honourable members have been attacked by marauding magpies in the vicinity of Parliament House? As backbench members of the parliament are not afforded the protection of commonwealth cars, will he issue safety helmets to those members who require them?

Nixon replied:

As a supporter of the Richmond Football Club, which won this year’s Melbourne premiership, I have frequently been attacked by a certain Magpie supporter who sits in a corner of this chamber. However, in view of the request, I will confer with the minister for works [Senator John Gorton] to see whether his department can design some suitable form of protection for honourable members from this pest.

Robert Menzies, too, could not hide his love for the game. Earlier hat same year the former prime minister dropped football into his final lecture as scholar-in-residence at the University of Virginia. “The 72-year-old statesman, giving his last lecture here, turned from international problems and Australian constitutional law to give an illustrated discourse on football,” the Associated Press reported.

He screened for the 200 present a 55-minute film of the last half of last season’s VFL championship final in which St Kilda downed Collingwood by one point. The movie showed football, Aussie-style, to be an exciting, non-stop, rough-and-tumble exercise in organised mayhem that made the American college game pale by comparison.



I am torn between admiring his cheek and shaking my head at his provincialism. But I don’t doubt his sincerity. After a serious stroke Menzies suffered late in 1971, Carlton installed a ramp behind the northern-end goals at Princes Park so he could watch his beloved Blues from the passenger seat of his Bentley.

Malcolm Fraser was heir to the Menzies throne at Carlton. He was a prominent visitor to the dressing rooms, offering encouragement before big games and delivering an awkward prime ministerial backslap afterwards. Before Carlton’s grand final against Collingwood in 1981, he told the players that if they won, he would host them and their partners at the Lodge. When they dispatched the Magpies by 20 points – Collingwood’s eighth grand final defeat since 1958 – he was as good as his word. He repeated the invitation before Carlton’s 1982 grand final against Richmond, and again the Blues won.

Carlton had a ramp built at Princes Park so Robert Menzies could watch his beloved Blues from his Bentley after he had a stroke. Photograph: News Ltd/Newspix

They were wild parties. For my ABC documentary Making Australia Great I asked Fraser if he wanted to recall the incident of players souveniring the Lodge’s cutlery. It was a long bow, I guess, but I had in mind an extended scene on Australia’s rorting culture in the 1970s. The trade unions had been on a decade-long industrial disputes bender. The top end of town cheated on their tax. And here were the stars of the dominant VFL club stealing the prime ministerial silver.

Fraser offered that there were “a couple of other stories” but I let it go. We were too far off the topic of stagflation. Fraser was not a man’s man, or even a Melburnian, yet he always felt at home at Carlton. It was the one place where this polarising prime minister could be himself, because football had been happily mixing with politicians for more than 100 years. He didn’t go as far as the Geelong-following politicians who elbowed their way to the front of the premiership celebrations in 1925, but he didn’t need to. His presence would be noted by the newspaper photographers and television cameras.

Rugby league was more wary of politicians, as Fraser himself discovered when he visited the Western Suburbs leagues club at Ashfield in 1978. “He was invited there by the president of our club, Bill Carson, who owned a big trucking business,” says Roy Masters, the Magpies coach at the time. “Bill was a card-carrying Liberal. Menzies was his hero. He encouraged me to get the players to come along to welcome Malcolm to our club. Not one turned up.”

These days federal parliament is rugby league territory, even though Canberra is actually a rugby union town. I have it on reliable authority that when one particular Senate committee was in session during State of Origin games, the committee chairman asked that he and his colleagues be given regular updates of the score. You won’t find those interruptions to the hearing in the Hansard because they were left off the public record. A Victorian would never be so coy about fanaticism.

I had assumed from my first meeting with Hawke that he was a footy tragic. But I realised later that his interest was not the football but the tipping. He loved a punt. This is not to suggest that he didn’t obsess about sports. He was a handy cricketer, and told the nation to take a day off when we won the America’s Cup. But his most senior advisers, who played and watched sport with Hawke, tell me that football wasn’t a passion of his. He might have been number-one ticket holder for the old South Melbourne, but he didn’t follow the club that closely. That is, he wasn’t Victorian in the way many of his ministers and advisers were. Which made him more like Paul Keating – a supporter of political convenience – than either man might concede.

The expectation that the prime minister must barrack for a football club carried Keating, then treasurer, to Victoria Park on the eve of the 1990 federal election. By Keating’s reckoning, Hawke still intended to honour his promise to hand over the leadership in the next term. So he was willing to accept the indignity of offering himself as a convert to footy in the year that the VFL became the Australian Football League.

Keating did not pretend to understand the game but he could relate to its tribalism. Collingwood was the club he wanted to barrack for, he said, because they were his people: working class and anti-establishment. “I’ve found a show that sees everything in black and white, which is a one-eyed outfit, which is an underdog outfit and it just hates losing. I thought, ‘That’s the club for me because I just bloody well hate losing, I hate it.’”

• This is an edited extract from The Football Solution: How Richmond’s premiership can save Australia (Penguin Random House). George Megalogenis will launch his book at an event with Waleed Aly and Christos Tsiolkas at the Melbourne Athenaeum on Tuesday 7 August