The achingly crap hipster neologism “selfie” has been given the official seal as 2013’s international word of the year. But for footy fans, that title undoubtedly belongs to the rather more staid “governance”.
According to the Oxford Dictionary, which gave selfie official status, governance is a noun that is defined as “the action or manner of governing a state, organization, etc” An example of usage is: “a more responsive system of governance will be required.”
Prior to the now infamous Darkest Day In Australian Sport on February 6, 2013 governance was not a word that we heard often when talking footy. It got wheeled out occasionally in reference to poor clubs asking for money, or even when a rich club made a stupid decision, but even then, it quickly passed into the ether.
To illustrate how the term has grown, BigFooty.com users mentioned “governance” 2391 times from the launch of the site in December 1999 through to February 1, 2013. Since then, there have been 6440 mentions of the word.
Having “governance” is now an absolute requirement for an AFL club. As Essendon learned to their cost, a lack of governance, or having bad governance (it would be useful if the AFL could provide more detail on which is worse) can see a club severely punished.
There’s no doubting that Essendon’s systems of accountability went drastically awry during 2012 when it comes to the running of the football department. The Switowski Report detailed that. And for all chairman Paul Little’s trademark pugnacious spin at the club’s Annual General Meeting, he implicitly acknowledged this: Essendon themselves still do not know exactly what was given to which players.
Little and Essendon may “remain confident” that their players “did not ingest anything harmful to their bodies, did not take anything illegal” and “did not take anything that was ‘performance enhancing’” but they simply can’t be sure. In other words, they just don’t know.
But this whole tawdry saga has demonstrated that governance is lacking at a number of other interested parties. The AFL’s apparent misunderstanding of the terms of the Hird suspension was embarrassing proof of that. It boggles the mind as to how a deed of settlement in such a case could be drawn up that leaves room for argument on an issue as vital as that of whether the person being suspended from their role will be paid or not.
