For Northern Hemisphere readers, Australian football (AFL) has its own rules – there is no ‘offside’ rule – and the Final draws a crowd of 100,000. Monash University is ranked by THE at 58th worldwide and has nearly 60,000 students, plus more at overseas campuses.

Today’s AFL Grand Final between Brisbane Lions and Geelong has fans at peak excitement. But for other groups, their real excitement is how many top footballers they can draft to spout alarm about global warming.

As background, The UN chief Antonio Guterres warns about what he calls climate carnage, “The era of global warming has ended, the era of global boiling has arrived”, insisting “we are now in a battle for our lives” because “humanity has opened the gates of Hell!” With Hell’s gates a-yawning, which team wins today seems almost a secondary issue.

A lot of footy fans are cheesed off with footy being politicised. When Monash academics surveyed nearly 600 fans, these views popped up in the “comments” box:

♦ “Sporting clubs/organisations should stick to sport not be pushing inane social dogmas! Sick of it…”

♦ “Please explain what makes an AFL/AFLW player a “Climate Change” expert??????”

♦ “AFL clubs should get on with the business of playing footy and only speak on issues such as drugs and domestic violence and the like.”

♦ “I would actively withdraw my financial membership if a club started spouting about climate change.”

♦ “AFL and its players should stick to what they get paid to do; play football and butt out of political agendas like climate change!!!”

If there’s any real problem, it’s that footie people’s climate spiel has to jostle for air-time with messaging about Marngrook matches on Naarm’s unceded lands[1], respect for LGBTQIAs, Snoop Dogg attention-grabbing and “free free Palestine!”

The climate crazies are targeting footie and other big sports because the players and execs carry credibility, and because they’d like to co-opt the fan base of millions to pressure politicians to net zero. Almost everyone loves sport and the net zero-ists hope to deflect some of this love to their pernicious cause.

The footie and climate-propaganda nexus is located between Monash University’s Climate Change Communications Research Hub and Frontrunners, a green lobby with close ties to the Labor-subsidised Environmental Defenders Office — of Santos/Tiwi Islands infamy — the Engie global renewables giant and green politicians.

I’ll start with the Monash Hub, which hosts more than 100 career climate bedwetters. On climate, the Hub makes every other League of Eight campus, even uber-green Melbourne University, seem like wimps. Its openly declared strategy is to piggyback (or parasite) its climate spruiking onto already popular sports, “rather than to think that the message is powerful enough to gain attention by itself.” It seeks out those hosts by “extensive research into the ‘attention economy’ of national media ecosystems.”

The Hub’s biggest sports effort was its survey for the “FrontRunners” lobbyists on “AFL fans’ perception of climate change and of AFL action on climate change.”

The questions are loaded with anti-emissions virtue signalling. The Hub says,

Relatively large proportions of those surveyed remained undecided or neutral for many of the questions. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but suggests that clubs & players’ capacity as environmental spokespeople hasn’t fully been considered by fans and might require priming.

The Hub surveyed 567 un-primed fans and found most want more club and AFL climate action. We also learn that there’s a hard core of 10% of fans “who don’t believe in climate change and do not support AFL action on climate change.”  According to the Hub,

Only 15% want “AFL clubs to butt out of climate spruiking: This suggests clubs provide an important place to begin climate communication initiatives.”

Dopey survey questions included, “Do you think climate change is happening?” Since it’s been happening here for the past 4.5 billion years, I also doubt it has stopped. In the event, 70% agreed climate change was happening, which the Hub somehow viewed as “accepting the scientific consensus”. A quarter of fans sampled had no idea, and 7% thought it was all utter nonsense.

Another inane question was whether climate change will impact how AFL and local-club footy “is played professionally”. Half the fans said yes and a quarter said no.

Fans were asked if Australian sport “had already felt the impacts of climate change, such as extreme heat, flooding, heavy storms, drought?” The Hub ensured it got a “yes” answer (83%) because, against IPCC evidence, it had defined climate change as bad weather.  

Question: “How worried are you about climate change?” Three quarters were a bit or a lot worried, and one quarter couldn’t care less. And so the survey went on – “How much do you think climate change will harm you personally?” (80%  –  some hurting or a lot). “How much do you think climate change will harm future generations?” (90% fearful, 10% don’t give a stuff).

Asked if AFL players should deliver opinions on “social and environmental issues”, 43% said yes and a quarter said no. On players spouting climate, only 40% approved versus 27% disapproving.

Would fans pay “a slight increase” in member fees to finance AFL climate action? More than half agreed, but none knew what was meant by “slight” (20% were not fee-paying members anyway).The Hub has always taken the cake for weirdness – see here. I kid you not, this Hub — or better, “hubbub” — has been hosting

♦ Inspirational climate poetry about Bat Piles by its three-year resident poetess Ms Amanda Anastasi. As the Hub explains,

“a range of poetry that captures the science, politics, impacts and ways of imagining climate change futures. The poems here include one line poems that anticipate a world changed by climate, as well as longer poems in which climate is infused with everyday life in confronting ways.”

 ♦ Tracts from top climate scientists about their nightmares, set to violin and percussion music and garnished with Styrofoam jetsam and pressed plants. Try sampling “heatwaves expert” Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick of UNSW and the musical montage:

“My Dear Friend, no one around us is taking us seriously, her [the planet’s] symptoms worsen by the day … they are appearing sooner and with more ferocity than I thought they would. She is crying out in pain, crying out for help … I feel so lost. Some days I feel like I need to scream at the top of my lungs. “JUST DO SOMETHING!!!”, but I am running out of energy…. I’ll continue fighting for her. Because if we don’t, who will?”

♦ climate-oriented science-fiction agitprop

♦ software turning cyclone tracks into easy-listening soundscapes (isn’t science impressive!)

Right now the Hub and contiguously-green Casey City Council are creating climate lessons for high-schoolers, called Empowering Youth for Climate Action. The cost to Casey ratepayers is at least $18,000. The draft lessons are supposed to be online for public inspection, but the Hub has emailed me that they’re not, at least not yet. The Hub’s blurb goes,

Young people need opportunities to engage in climate action and educators require the skills to facilitate this engagement inside and outside of STEM subjects.[2] This pilot project aims to equip high school students with the knowledge and practical tools to address climate change in their homes, schools and communities. [I’m not sure how anyone “addresses” climate change, the usual dopey verb is “tackle”]. Over 12 months [to March 2026], this project brings together teachers and students from schools in the City of Casey alongside local scientists to co-design hands-on climate and energy lesson plans aligned with the Victorian Curriculum.”

When the teenagers, teachers and “local scientists” (heaven knows who they are and what their qualifications might be) have nutted out their brainwash blueprints, organisers will trial draft lessons in classrooms as “action-research” projects. I don’t know whether they’ll deliver their climate texts in poetry or prose, perhaps with music added.The Hub is run by Director Libby Lester, like me a former hack at The Age, but unlike me internationally famous for her studies of the legacy media’s promoting of Net Zero. Until last year she ran the Institute for Social Change at Tasmania University, a campus-rated global top for “Climate Action”. This is an awesome career result, climate alarmism being such a competitive academic specialty.

I took a squiz at Libby Lester’s research output[3] and its quantity is impressive. However, Libby seems to be working with gritted teeth on her sport news analyses, unhappy that popular matches could “generate adverse ecological impacts”. It’s fair to say she’s not big fan of motor sport, for example. Her paper Formula One and the insanity of car-based transportation says,

Formula 1 is among the most environmentally destructive practices today, not least as a sign of the legitimacy of an unsustainable car culture.

Do any Hub academics own cars?

It also indexes the power of a lapsed, amateur hegemonic masculinity and its technocratic equivalent today. The greenwashing done by and for the industry must be systematically unmasked and criticized.

Now try Libby’s,”Environmental protest and tap-dancing with the media in the information age.” I never did any tap-dancing at The Age, with or without environmental protesters burning the floor Riverdance-style. But don’t mock journos’ tap-dancing, it’s lauded by a certain Manuel Castells, whom Libby calls the “pre-eminent theorist of the information age and the network society … His explanation of this dance and its choreography, however, is overly general, ignoring its specific features and workings in terms of representation.”When not tap-dancing with media reptiles, radical environmentalists enjoy sitting in trees. Specifically, Professor Lester has chronicled the 449-day tree-sit of Ms Miranda Gibson “living on a small platform 60 metres above the ground in an ancient gum tree” near Tasmania’s Tyenna Forest hamlet of Maydena.

At the time (2011-13), Miranda was a high school teacher specializing in society, environment, and English studies. She equipped her perch in the “Observer Tree” with a solar powered laptop for live-streaming to fellow-activists, a rain-proof canopy and a bucket (don’t ask!).

Pro-loggers ran their own demos at ground level. To escape a bushfire (perhaps someone lit it), Miranda eventually shimmied down. Proud but disappointed, she segued to road-blockading. See the movie about her here. Could it be she is now sitting in another tree on a forest-topped Queensland mountain to protest clear-felling to make room for and access to wind turbines? Probably not.

Am I drifting from sport? Not so. Libby’s research output includes “Envisioning a green modernity? The future of cricket in an age of climate crisis”. I am not making anything up, by the way. The study reads,

“This [academic] article responds to the recent call made in Sport in Society for scholarship that examines the social and political tensions of the age through cricket. Cricket is shown to be an international sport that emphasises the material, political and symbolic realities of the global climate crisis … a constellation of sporting, political, media and environmental actors are working to establish and communicate a new normative consensus about the game’s role in averting the worst impacts of climate change…

The urgency of these efforts is underpinned by the sport’s particular susceptibility to extreme heat, drought, rain and flooding, now and into the future.”It did occur to me that Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis enjoy cricket although it gets more hot and muggy over there than at the MCG.

Another of her papers looks at sports reporters’ role in communicating

“political, social, and cultural issues, including race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, politics, commercialism, nationalism, and citizenship… an urgent next step is to imagine what a post-carbon media sports cultural complex looks like, and to assess how media sport might contribute to a fundamental transformation in the resource and energy foundations of global society.”

A Hub strategy is to put out plausible-looking “reports”, see here, on cricket, tennis and cycling for gullible and leftist media, especially the ABC. The scare stuff is also welcomed by non-gullible media such as the Communist Party-run Xinhua Net digital agency.[4] (The more the West cripples itself with renewables, the better China likes it).

The reports, for clients like the Australian Conservation Foundation, have the same cookie-cutter format, e.g 

“Cricket Australia has the opportunity to not only reduce its overall climate impact and mitigate the impacts of extreme heat on its players, but to mobilise its huge national audience on the importance of collective climate action from every sector of the community.”

The reports argue heat is getting so dire that January contests need to be switched to November or March. The Hub warns top organisations to ditch fossil-fuel sponsors like Santos and Alinta Energy, and they advocate boycotts of banks and insurers which dare to do business with coal, oil and gas projects. Authors stress to sports directors the dire risks of getting sued over climate inaction, failure to notify clients about (imaginary) climate risks and players’ and fans’ heatstrokes. A common thread is urging top bodies to sign on to sport/climate protocols put out by UN bureaucrats.[5]

I hate to be mercenary but no-one in the climate-panic business ever seems short of a quid. For example, the Hub helped a little mob called Footy for Climate to get going, started by AFL ex-Melbourne players Tom Campbell and Jasper Pittard in 2021 under the mistaken impression that the Black Summer bushfires were climate-caused, as if bushfires are quite new to Australia. [6]Collingwood-based, the charity’s been run since last October by CEO Alexi Lynch, who seems the sole employee. (Its latest official filings mention one full-time-equivalent who runs eight volunteers). Lynch has been managing “climate action” outfits for 20-plus years.[7]

Meanwhile manmade CO2 emissions have soared from 28 gigatonnes in 2005 to the current 40 gigatonnes, and with no sign of slowing let alone any arc bending towards net zero 2050. For Lynch, it must be like endlessly backing the bottom-ranked AFL teams.The charity’s sole employee (full-time equivalent) has been paid, in total, $330,000 for the three years to July 2024. During those years the charity acquired donations ($524,031) and grants ($300,000) from mystery parties totalling $824,000. At July 2024 it was sitting on $298,000 at the bank. It’s good to be green, but my email query asking who’s been donating and granting six-figure sums has received as yet no response. The ACNC likes (but does not enforce) such disclosures and I hope the name(s) will emerge soon.[8][9] Footy for Climate makes one interesting admission:

“Since 2020, the AFL have provided financial relief to 595 clubs impacted by a natural disaster. Rising energy costs are adding to the challenge, making it harder for volunteer-run clubs to keep their doors open.”

It continues that “clean energy technology” will slash energy bills, but this seems to contradict anyone’s and everyone’s energy bills these days.Time now to look at the Hub’s ugly brother FrontRunners — yet another sports-focused pusher of climate peril that is said to be “striking at the heart of the games we love”.

It was founded in 2020 by Emma and David Pocock (independent ACT Senator) and governmental lobbyist Lachlan Crombie. FrontRunners is strongly linked with the Labor-subsidised and now notorious Environment Defenders Office (EDO). Just last July David Morris took over as CEO from Emma, who remains on the board. Morris had spent 13 years at EDO including five years as its Australia-Pasifik CEO. FrontRunners collaborated with EDO to put out last year a Sports, climate change and legal liability report purporting to detail climate risk for sport organisations.

EDO and the Munkara v Santos case (2023–2024) involved Tiwi Islanders, represented by EDO, challenging Santos’ $6 billion Barossa gas pipeline over alleged risks to underwater cultural heritage, including angering a rainbow serpent and annoying the “Crocodile Man” who dwells out to sea. As Andrew Bolt put it, “They also claimed the pipeline would disturb graves and sacred sites of Aborigines who lived there more than 20,000 years ago, when the seas were 120m lower and the sea bed there was land.”

Justice Natalie Charlesworth, throwing the case out, accused EDO of “subtle coaching” of witnesses, distortion of evidence (via a manipulated map), and fabrication of oral traditions. EDO was later ordered to pay Santos $9 million in costs. WA Premier, Roger Cook labeled the case “environmental lawfare” and ex-Labor minister Joel Fitzgibbon urged ending of government subsidies for environmental activism against projects.

Meanwhile FrontRunners, with its heavyweight advisory team, does lobbying, media and campaign training, and crisis management. It specialises in encouraging legal opposition (“high-impact litigation”) against energy projects and emitters. As climate extremists, FrontRunners demanded that federal Labor cut 2035 emissions at least 75% below 2005 l;evels as “the minimum scientific floor required to do our fair share globally. It sends a powerful signal, and would cement Australia as a global leader.” Labor’s new target is 62-70%.

The charity runs on just four part-timers — equivalent to two or three full-time staff. Its accounts show a remarkable $1.1 million unspecified donations in the four years to 2024, with wages payout of nearly $900,000. After losses last year, net equity was down to $50,000.

FrontRunners’ team is of impeccable leftist pedigree.

♦ Emma Pocock helped launch Footy for Climate and has supported climate-fearful Australian cricket captain Pat Cummins and his Cricket for Climate Foundation. She co-managed partner David’s Senate campaign.

♦ Co-founder Lachlan Crombie is CEO of climate-political consultancy PremierNational. FrontRunner, without self-consciousness about climate emissions,says, “Lachlan has travelled the world to attend major sporting events, including the 2011 and 2019 Rugby World Cups, and the 2018 Football World Cup.”

♦ Deputy CEO Eloise Wittkowsky previously worked for a decade to 2018 as electorate officer for Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young.

♦ Strategic Adviser Martin Rice is Head of Research at Tim Flannery’s Climate Council.

♦ Another Strategic Adviser is journo Dylan Quinnell, media manager for Engie ANZ, and formerly with Flannery’s Climate Council on its Media Centre. In Australia Engie(formerly Simply Energy) claims to power 400,000 homes and serve about 12% of the energy market.

♦ Strategic adviser and ex-netballer Amy Steel is Engie Impact’s leader in WA of climate risk and decarbonisation.

♦ Media director Tim Fisher is an ABC alumnus and deputy chair of Psychology for a Safe Climate, whose uber- loopy activities and ideas I chronicled four years ago. He is also the longest-serving board member of the Emerging Writers Festival.

♦ Operations Manager David Brice, according to FrontRunners, “took a brief hiatus from [previous] work to design and build a tiny house, where he now lives with his wife and two active, young boys as they explore what it looks like to live more simply and sustainably.”

Maybe Prime Minister Albanese could provide his immigrant millions with tiny houses to take the pressure off local buyers.

Frontrunners’ acknowledgement of Aboriginal custodians not only maintains the “80,000-plus” years of residence furphy, but expands the claim beyond land and water to “the stars in the sky, since time immemorial.” If astronauts ever travel four million light years to Proxima Centauri, let’s hope they’ve done their paperwork concerning our local traditional owners.

Meanwhile, let’s enjoy the Grand Final. 

Tony Thomas’s latest book, Anthem of the Unwoke, is available from Connor Court.

[1] “Aussie rules football – the game we love, and the game that has given us so much – comes from Marngrook, a First Nations game.”

[2] Science, technology, engineering and maths

[3] The cited papers are typically co-authored

[4] “Xinhua Net plays a central role in China’s state media ecosystem, promoting official narratives while providing broad news access.”

[5] In 2019 Tennis Australia signed on to the “UNSports for Climate Action Framework” pushing anti-emissions.

[6] In its first major analysis in 2012,the IPCC said decades more study would be needed before any linkage between warming and extreme weather could be detected, and warming might turn out to reduce extreme weather rather than increase it.

[7] He managed ICLEI Oceania’s Cities for Climate Protection campaign, engaging over 230 councils representing 84% of Australia’s population. From 2009 to 2024, he led strategic projects on energy efficiency and climate action at Ironbark Sustainability.

[8] Footy for Climate also goes overboard on respecting unceded sovereignty, claiming that Aborigines “have looked after this land for over 80,000 years.” The best scientific estimate (Appendix One) is actually 30,000 years less, around 50,000 years.

[9] The Guardian (12/5/22) said the AFL has no official involvement in Footy for Climate but “fully supports player-led initiatives in raising further awareness and encouraging action on climate change”.