No winners in the Hawthorn racism scandal, but one clear villain

There appear to be no winners in the Hawthorn racism scandal, with the AFL announcing on Tuesday that there were no adverse findings against the three accused former staff members, Alastair Clarkson, Chris Fagan and Jason Burt. The First Nations complainants who were part of the process also agreed that no further investigation should occur. 

There are likely to be subsequent actions, including Hawthorn being investigated for its botched handling of the initial investigation and claims lodged with the Australian Human Rights Commission (a process that would likely take years to resolve), but from the AFL’s perspective, the issue seems finalised.

Clarkson, Fagan and Burt were accused of the most grievous allegations, including the forced separation of families and compelling a pregnancy termination. The AFL’s investigation essentially exonerates them, but they will forever be tainted by the allegations.

Clarkson, former Hawthorn senior coach and the most high-profile accused, recently took indefinite leave from his coaching role at North Melbourne, citing a need to focus on his physical and emotional well-being. The First Nations players have received no financial compensation, though it’s too early to say whether they may receive something informally or through legal action. Nonetheless, they were forced to endure emotional hurt, pain and anguish, and would no doubt be questioning whether it was all worth it.

In a further bizarre twist, Burt last night claimed that two of the primary complainants, referred to as “Zac” and “Kylie”, were not Indigenous.

There was a very clear villain in this story though, and it wasn’t the Hawthorn coaches and certainly not the players. Rather, it was the media, led by (but far from exclusively) the ABC, which rushed to pronounce guilt. Making matters worse, Phil Egan — the author of the original damning report (which was intended originally as a welfare check and morphed into an “external review”) — was arrested in February for fraud offences relating to allegations of illegally obtaining funds from the Murray Valley Aboriginal Cooperative. Egan denies the claims.

The media pile-on was spurred by the ABC’s award-winning journalist Russell Jackson. Jackson’s article on September 21 last year broke the allegations that Clarkson, Fagan and Burt had allegedly “bullied and removed First Nations players from their homes and relocated them elsewhere” and “demand[ed] that one player should instruct his partner to terminate a pregnancy”.

Neither Egan nor Jackson spoke with the accused — though the ABC clarified that Jackson offered the accused an opportunity to respond before publication. Burt yesterday claimed that the Egan report “presented a selection of unproven and unreliable grievances and allegations which were not checked with me or many other Indigenous and non-Indigenous players”.

Despite the investigative and largely preliminary nature of the Egan report, the media — with only fig leaves of doubt — rushed to convict the coaches. Mark Robinson, New Corp’s chief football writer, wrote:

This story will sweep the globe, just as the Essendon supplement saga did. But this is much worse. That was about needles. This is about killing an unborn child, as the player described it. If true, the legacies of high-profile people will be destroyed forever. 

Nine’s Caroline Wilson claimed:

The review, which both the club and key investigator Phil Egan believed would unearth a series of incidents that would lead to a Do Better-style term of reference going forward, has instead shaken the foundations of the game. The findings also blindsided the AFL, which has been privately critical of the review’s parameters and its alleged scatter-gun approach. And yet, say those who have known of the trauma largely buried by the families and who have supported them for some years, only the unusual mixture of blunt but sensitive questioning undertaken by Egan and his team could have led to this.

Crikey’s writers, characteristically, went even further, ignoring notions of evidence, presumption of innocence and natural justice. Bernard Keane accused the Hawthorn coaches of modern slavery, claiming:

What the ABC’s Russell Jackson has revealed in his stunning, sickening report on the treatment of Indigenous players at Hawthorn — including players being coerced and manipulated into severing contact with family and partners and in one case demanding a pregnancy be terminated — is akin to modern slavery, and incorporates elements of it.

Notwithstanding that Egan’s report never sought the views of the accused, Keane needed no further convincing, demanding “punishment for these outrages, exemplary punishment that sends a signal to perpetrators that they will be held to account”.

Crikey’s legal correspondent (and lawyer for its parent company Private Media) Michael Bradley stated:

When secrecy and due process have become part of the architecture of suppression of the ugly truth, then a different approach is warranted. The truth is ugly. Our reckoning with it is overdue. If an institution like the AFL is serious about breaking with its own history of racism, then what happened this past week with Hawthorn, in full public glare, is exactly what’s required.

No presumption of innocence either for Michael, who must have missed the class at law school — instead the allegations were an “ugly truth”. Bradley is acting for one of the complainants in the matter who chose to not be involved in the AFL investigation.

There’s a good reason the legal system has a high bar to prove guilt. Investigators get it wrong. Lawyers get it wrong. Judges get it wrong. The Innocence Project has helped release 243 wrongly incarcerated people in the US (the majority of wrongful convictions were of course for minority groups, in particular Black people).

This entire debacle, which has no winners and plenty of victims, has proven that the way to resolve the historical wrongs suffered by our First Nations peoples isn’t to propagate a different injustice onto others.

Correction: This article originally stated that Phil Egan had been charged with fraud offences. This was incorrect. He was arrested but was not charged. The article has been updated to reflect this.