Jeff Kennett addressed the Hawthorn members for the last time on Tuesday night. It was all very familiar. The stentorian voice. The Tolkienian face. The rambling speech. There were 13 premiership cups in front of him. There were a few hecklers. There was a new president. The Kennett era at Hawthorn was over.
Most of the time, the average punter couldn’t give two hoots about board elections. Board members often seem to emerge from the same LinkedIn account. Most fans of any AFL club just want the board to hire a decent coach, to keep the club solvent, to avoid comparing the Australian of the Year to an ape, and to shove out of the way.
But this was a particularly ugly election campaign. It pitted Liberal against Labor, Liberal against Liberal, teammate against teammate, and legend against legend. At one point, Kennett’s preferred successor Peter Nankivell quoted Michelle Obama – “when they go low, we stay high.” But Kennett wasn’t exactly staking the moral high ground himself. He’s an old school bruiser. He loves a scrap. He loves an election. And he was all too happy to fight dirty.
To outsiders, it was bewildering that “The Family Club” was tearing itself apart, given that the two factions and presidential candidates often seemed to be singing from the same song sheet. The tension point was Kennett. He was forever going the tonk, pressing send and putting his foot in it. “We at the club do not intend to provide a running commentary on this matter,” he said when the racism review story first dropped. For the next two months, he barely stopped talking and writing about it. Most other club presidents would have gone to ground. But there he was, bickering with breakfast TV hosts. This wasn’t a crisis, he claimed. It was a bump along the highway. It would be sorted out by Christmas, he said, sounding like a first world war general. None of this had happened on his watch. Hawthorn wasn’t racist. Case closed. Let’s all move on.
Kennett probably went into the review thinking: “We’ll be right here. We’ll come out of this looking good. We’ll put Collingwood to shame. We can marvel at our own magnificence. We can talk about Silk, and Chance, and all the Aboriginal blokes who had positive experiences.” But they quickly lost control of it. Kennett was on the way out, and way out of his depth. He doubled down, which has always been his way, and which is always a worry.
And then there were his tweets. Twitter brings out the worst in most of us. But some of Kennett’s late-night offerings were ridiculous. They were incomprehensible. They were costly. The Victorian premier was in his head. Kennett and his News Ltd columnists couldn’t lay a glove on him.
Talking of elections.
— Jeff Kennett (@jeff_kennett) November 14, 2022
Grab this James Merino, recently retired Andrews Minister and Andrew Gowers are part of a political push to gain election to the Board of the Hawthorn Football Club, part of a ginger group that seeks diversity on the Board.
But their group have never nor
Every month or so, Kennett would write a letter to his members. “Hi there happy Hawkers,” the last one began. The letters were long, and the tone was breezy and conversational. In his latest one he talked about his bad back – “a result of years of gardening and running from home to Parliament House in the 1990s.” He talked a lot about good governance. In his Herald Sun columns, and on Twitter, good governance was always his focus. The state of Victoria, he would say, was a textbook study in shoddy governance. The Hawthorn Football Club was a well run, prudent club. A lot of that, he said, was due to the systems and structures he had put in place.
And it is true, to a point. Kennett’s achievements at Hawthorn were not insignificant. He secured the Tasmanian government as a major sponsor in 2007. He was good at drumming up publicity. He was one of the few club presidents to really take on the AFL, and to call them out on their bullshit.
But the Hawthorn members grew weary of him. They saw Alastair Clarkson play him like a harp through last year’s coaching handover. They resented the way, as the former head of Beyond Blue, he refused to acknowledge the social devastation caused by pokie machines. They heard him concede, with a chuckle, that his tweets had cost the club millions in vital government funding. They pinned him as the man principally responsible for Cyril Rioli’s departure.
They voted accordingly. On Wednesday morning, Kennett will go back to his daffodils. The task before Andy Gowers, Sam Mitchell and the club as a whole is enormous. They have a ladder to climb, a $130m training facility to build, a racism review to get to the bottom of, and a fractured club to heal.
