CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
In case you haven’t been following the only women’s sport story to make NewsCorp headlines since that Newcastle NRLW player made distasteful comments about the Queen dying, Gina Rinehart’s mining company Hancock Prospecting has pulled their $15 million sponsorship of Netball Australia.
This comes after the players made the executive decision to support their Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander team mates in boycotting the Hancock Prospecting logo on their jersey, in protest against the multibillionaire mining family’s unaddressed legacy of extremely racist and genocidal commentary.
However, this kind of loyalty and mateship – in the face of powerful people spending millions of dollars to buy public favour – has been severely punished.
After taking offence at these woke athletes demanding she distance herself from her father’s infamous comments about the need to ‘dope water to sterilise Aboriginal people’ – Gina Rinehart has scrapped the sponsorship, in a major blow to the sport’s financial future.
The deal appeared to be the only lifeline offered to Netball Australia (NA) – who had suffered losses of more than $7 million in two pandemic-impacted years.
With Gina Rinehart funding the vast majority of Australia’s international sporting teams and Olympians as a way to avoid paying tax, sporting bodies like Netball Australia had become solely dependent on the fossil fuel blood money to continue their operations in a country that prefers to use their tax dollars to pay for clay pigeon shooting clubs in marginal seats.
With nothing left but their dignity and loyalty to each other, Australia’s netballers are staring down the barrel of collapse.
Luckily, there are some billionaires in Australia who aren’t necessarily that focused on destroying the planet and
This is bad news for Gina Rinehart, whose decision to pull her sponsorship was aimed at crippling the dissident athletes who dare question her corporation’s checkered legacy that all of our politicians and media shills prefer to actively ignore.
To get this issue resolved, and drag the headlines back to news about Lismore flooding and the ongoing ecological damage caused by the 2019 climate fires – tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes has today sighed and handed over his ING splurge card details to Netball Australia.
“Can I get a receipt. If it’s not too much trouble” said the Atlassian founder.
“Cheers girls. Go go get em”
