No playing games with Australia’s reputation

The Commonwealth Games – like its diplomatic counterpart – belongs to a different age.

Daniel Flitton

19 July 20233 min read

Let’s make the obvious point: the athletes could all out-swim, out-run and out-jump me – even out lawn bowl, beach volleyball or clay pigeon shoot me. This decision stinks for them. Celebrating competition is wonderful.

But as a vestige of the British Empire Games? Surely the bigger mystery is why an Australian government ever pledged a penny or a pound for the nostalgia of beating Barbados at badminton. Or why Australia bothers with the Commonwealth as an organisation at all?

To be specific, it is the government in the state Victoria, a name to again conjure the whiff of Empire, that has backed out of hosting the 2026 Commonwealth Games – which, just to confuse matters for foreign observers, has nothing to do with the Commonwealth of Australia.

I happen to live in Melbourne, the biggest city in Victoria, so this news has saturated the local airwaves in a capital letter way that I’m not sure even Putin renewing his nuclear threats to Ukraine could match.

If Australia could suddenly pull the pin on a French submarine contract without too much concern about sovereign risk, saving a few billion by not holding an inflated athletics carnival seems a manageable hurdle.

Cancelling the preparations with three years to go has set rolling a cascade of complaints. Some because these events are doubtless complex and expensive to plan, but mostly with gripes that are supercharged by local politicking, about costs, debt, trustworthiness, and the personality of a particular premier (“God Save Dan”).

But what caught my ear in all this noise was the suggestion that Australia’s global standing has been sullied.

“I say to the prime minister,” warned Anne Ruston, shadow minister for sport, “Australia’s reputation has been damaged today and you should be very worried about the damage this does to Australia’s international reputation.”

Very worried? If Australia could suddenly pull the pin on a French submarine contract without too much concern about sovereign risk, saving a few billion by not holding an inflated athletics carnival seems a manageable hurdle. The Commonwealth government (that’s the one in Canberra) also killed off a Belt-and-Road deal Victoria had signed with China without too much compunction.

In fact, scotching the Commonwealth games might help Australia’s reputation – by not celebrating the nation as a bully, so dominant have we been on the medal tally. For many developing countries, just getting the chance to compete can count. Only the Australian authorities are then afraid that the athletes might abscond on their visa requirements, choosing to stay instead of going home.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese didn’t bother to attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting when it appeared on his calendar last year, and he was right, diplomatically speaking, to skip it. The Commonwealth is an echo of history, a grouping too big to be meaningful and too small to matter.

And he was right, in a sporting sense, with his comments on Tuesday about Australia’s reputational opportunity, as host of the Women’s World Cup, the third-largest sports event in the world, which starts this week. As one revved up Matildas fan put it, “It’s going to be a bit bonkers, but should be really fun”.

About the author

Daniel Flitton

Daniel Flitton is one of Australia’s most experienced foreign affairs journalists and is Managing Editor of the Lowy Institute’s international magazine, The Interpreter.

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Australia