Colin Carter is a good man. He was one of the founders of the Australian arm of the world-renowned Boston Consulting Group. He’s co-authored a book about corporate boards published by the Harvard Business School. He’s been a director of some big companies, like Wesfarmers (owner of, among other businesses, Kmart, Bunnings, Target and Officeworks), Origin Energy and Seek (which pioneered on-line job advertising in Australia).
More importantly, for this series of articles, he was (in the second half of the 1980s) one of the designers of the AFL; he was on the board of the Geelong Football Club for 15 years, including 10 as president; and he was an AFL commissioner for 15 years (from 1993 to 2008).
So Colin Carter knows business, and he knows football.
So when he says, as he did in his report to the AFL Commission, which was finalised in July but only publicly released in the second week of August, that the case for Tasmania to have its own team in the AFL is “strong”, and when he recommends, as he did, that “Tasmania should be represented by a team in the AFL/AFLW national competitions”, he knows of what he speaks.
Colin Carter’s report, for the most part, echoes the things which Tasmanians have been saying for decades. He explicitly recognises, as we’ve been saying for decades, that “our so-called [his words] national competition now includes teams from all states, except Tasmania”. He reminds his readers that Tasmania has produced as many Legends in the AFL Hall of Fame as South Australia and Western Australia combined.
More importantly, perhaps, the Carter Report endorses the business case for a Tasmanian team which has been put forth several times over the past two decades, most recently by the task force led by former Virgin Australia CEO Brett Godfrey.
“The economics say ‘Yes’ ” is one of the headlines in Colin Carter’s report. Despite some reservations which he has about potential revenues from sponsorship and memberships, he concludes that “the numbers still work”.
Coming from someone with as impeccable a background in both business and football as Colin Carter has, and from someone who isn’t a Tasmanian – and therefore can’t be accused of bias – this should be the final word on this subject.
It should be seen – by the AFL executive, by the AFL Commission, by the other club presidents, and by all the other doubters – as being no less definitive or unequivocal than the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report has been about the outlook for the world’s climate.
Carter is probably right when he says that a Tasmanian AFL club would likely be in “the middle of the bottom third” of AFL clubs in terms of profitability. But what’s important is his explicit rejection of the idea that this is a reason for continuing to exclude Tasmania from the national competition.
As he says, “a football competition is not just an ‘economic’ industry. It is also a ‘social compact’ in which large and small revenue teams co-exist for very long times”. He points out that in other long-standing sporting competitions in other countries – such as the English Premier League and its equivalents in Germany, Italy and Spain, and in US Major League Baseball – there are enormous differences in revenues between the biggest and smallest clubs.
“There is no such thing,” Carter writes, “as a professional sporting competition where every competitor is strong – much as there is no competitive industry where every competitor is strong.” But, he goes on, “Unlike in the commercial world, the smaller sporting teams survive, and the larger clubs accept that this is so.”
Carter puts is this way, “The question with Tasmania is not whether its team can thrive without some additional support but rather whether that support is within an affordable range” for what he calls the “football industry”. His conclusion is that “the financial support required for a Tasmanian team … is affordable and can be funded” (emphasis added).
In the wake of the Carter Report, the “onus of proof” should really now be on those who still stand in the way of the AFL becoming the “truly national” competition that it has been pretending for 30 years to be.
That still leaves the issues of what the pathway to a Tasmanian team should look like, how a Tasmanian team might be formed, and how long it should take to get there. But they are subjects for another article.
Saul Eslake came to Tasmania with his parents as an eight-year old. He went to primary school in Smithton, and high school and university in Hobart (graduating with a First Class Honours degree in Economics from UTas). Like so many in that era, he went to the mainland for work, initially at the Treasury in Canberra, before spending almost 32 years in Melbourne, working as (among other things) chief economist of the ANZ Bank for 14 years and chief economist (Australia & New Zealand) for Bank of America Merrill Lynch for 3½ years. In 2015 he came home to establish his own business, Corinna Economic Advisory. Saul Eslake is a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at UTas, and a non-executive director of the Macquarie Point Development Corporation.
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