In case you missed it, it's an election week. One bloke wants to give us a tax break, another wants to make our fuel cheap. Everyone is telling us things are broken and the Independents reckon they can fix it. Oh, and the one time owner of A-League team, Gold Coast United, Clive Palmer, is sending a lot of text messages.
Am I the only one who didn't have Clive slide into their DMs? Something about being overlooked makes me sad. I sense that the Trumpet of Patriots (lol) is negging me as an attempt to attract my affections.
The performative dance of democracy has been at work as suits donned ever more shades of fluoro high-vis all for our pleasure. The deluge of political content had me revisiting the cinematic Dustin Hoffman classic Wag The Dog. If you haven't seen it, it's about a small group of spin doctors who successfully perform election interference. It was something of an early playbook for what would happen twenty years later in the USA.
Why are we talking about this in the Sport newsletter? Because the idea of small entity having oversized impacts (i.e. the tail wagging the dog) has been especially relevant in the sports fold this week.
In the Aussie Rules, we spent the week watching as ex-Power player and now pundit Kane Cornes wound up the AFL industry with scathing assessments of North Melbourne. The Kangaroos took the extraordinary step of banning him from interviewing anyone from the club. Given the 42-year-old has made a career from leveraging publicity (in all forms) into ever growing levels of clout, making him the centre of the story was akin to the Kangaroos writing him a cheque. The pundit was the story almost all week. Tail wags dog.
Rugby Australia decided the man best suited to win them the 2027 home world cup is Les Kiss. There's consensus that the tournament will decide the sport's fate in Australia. In which case, you'd want to get your new coach in the prime position to succeed. Kiss won't actually start until mid 2026, why? Because he's contracted to the Reds who wouldn't release him. RA wouldn't pay to get their hands on him. Queensland determined the Australia coach. Tail wags dog.
The Melbourne Storm is considered among the best run clubs in all of Australian sport. It's been a reputation earned on strong leadership and uncompromising values. To learn that they had decided to cancel a Welcome to Country in response to some neo-Nazis heckling an Indigenous Elder at the Anzac Day dawn service was the kind of revelation that makes the reader squint at the paper. It was only part of the story. Tail wags dog. | 
