Chris Judd's public commentary is not unlike his shooting for goal: sparingly exercised, performed without affectation, and pretty effective at hitting the target. In a column that appeared in last Wednesday's issue of The Age he excelled himself.
If you missed it, Judd questioned the tone and quality of debate around the AFL's Illicit Drug Testing Policy and questioned the need for it to be tightened as has endlessly been suggested. In doing so, in a skilful and understated way, he exposed much of the hypocrisy associated with the policy.
Among the points Judd made were that the AFL's first priority on drug testing must be the prevention of performance enhancing agents. Its core business, he said, was "running a fair competition, entertaining for fans".
He went on to ask the embarrassing question of an organisation that insists that testing for illicit drugs is about the health of those in its system: what about all the other employees in the industry? Isn't their health as important as that of the elite-end players?
He inquired as to why, if this is about player wellbeing, there isn't a limit imposed on the amount players are allowed to gamble. And to sharpen the point he observed that, unlike the gambling industry, the illicit drug industry doesn't make a financial contribution to football.
The incisive thinking and considered way these thoughts were presented should have the game's power-brokers eyeing Judd as the first player to head straight from the field of play to the AFL Commission table. Not only would he bring fresh insight, straight from the coalface, but this would be a way of keeping a clearly talented person involved in the football industry.
It's easy to imagine, though, that Judd's column might have the opposite effect. A bloke who doesn't deal in spin? Hrumph … that will never do.
Not that Judd was in total attack mode. He was simply raising points and asking questions that have scarcely been articulated by the current playing group. He acknowledged along the way the AFL's success in tackling some significant social issues. He mentioned racism, football's greatest success story, and might have thrown in breast cancer, the engagement and promotion of women, and — although no really hard yards have yet been done — the truly testing issue of homophobia in men's sport.
Whether the illicit drugs policy can be bracketed with these is debatable. For as far as the game's commitment to broader social contribution is concerned, it's hard to see that it actually achieves anything. That is unless you believe that players are doing the community a service by volunteering to be randomly tested: leading the way to a less private society. Beyond that, footballers agreeing to have themselves subjected to random testing is hardly going to impact on the social habits of anyone.
If anything, albeit as an unintended and media driven consequence, the policy gives a negative impression of the relationship between footballers and illicit drugs. Because every year since it was established there has, at some stage, been a storm of discussion feeding the impression the elite football competition is hiding a drug epidemic.
Yet, as Judd points out, current data shows illicit drug use among AFL players as being less than half the rate for the rest of the community within the same demographic. But still we have the annual alarmism: "volcanic behaviour" was the catch-cry a couple of years ago, and now we're being told things are worse again.
Which makes for an interesting juxtaposition with another column in The Age during the week. In response to a recent Australian Crime Commission report, Associate Professor John Fitzgerald, a drug and alcohol expert at Melbourne University's School of Social and Political Sciences, contributed an opinion piece making it clear the report doesn't indicate the problem of ice is getting worse. Fitzgerald wrote that "amphetamine use is stable and use across the population has actually gone down since 1998".
As Chris Judd points out, before football reacts to public discussion - much of it uninformed - and makes its policy more onerous, the industry needs clearer knowledge of how big an issue illicit drug use really is for it.
Meanwhile, Judd's first principles assessment - that the AFL's core business begins with running a fair competition - is relevant to another story from the past week. For it emerged a proposal is afoot to test teenage players for illicit drugs before they actually enter the AFL system. This, according to Caroline Wilson's report, would involve "patrolling football's elite talent pathways through state leagues, representative teams and the TAC Competition".
Yet as far as the core business issue of performance-enhancing-drug testing is concerned, the AFL takes no responsibility for the various state leagues and pays for a grand total of 20 tests a year of AFL/AIS Academy players from the Under 18s.
In other words, as the game's central administration considers entering the private world of those not yet in its system, it is paying scant attention to a fundamental aspect of running a fair competition. The relative priorities being given to these two quite separate issues need a serious rethink.
