As a young player coming up in New Zealand, I expected that it didn’t matter who you played for.
If you were good enough, someone useful would be taking notice, and you could make it from any team, any province, any club.
In New Zealand the progression is club, province, upwards. There’s equal opportunity for selection into other programs.
Not true in Australia.
Australian rugby is locked into classes: haves and have nots. It’s where you went to school and who you know.
Don’t worry - it exists in NZ. But not to nearly the same extent.
I’ve been in Australia since 1987. I’m not a “back home” type of person; I don’t spend hours thinking about being back in NZ or reminiscing the things I miss.
When Kiwis come here, why would we expect things would be the same as back in NZ?
It’s a different country. Australia’s heritage and history, while similar, is very different from New Zealand’s.
Particularly when it comes to rugby.
Game day in New Zealand you can arrive at first grade or premier footy to play or to watch, there’ll be people in mud-covered gumboots, beanie and a swani [bushman gear]. No one looks twice.
You can be straight from the cowshed, maimai [hunting hide], fishing, the office, it doesn’t matter. You are an accepted part of game day furniture.
In Oz you dress up to a T. In the bush it’s moleskins, Country Road shirts, buckles, RM Williams boots (which alone cost more than the Kiwi dude’s total outfit) and Akubra cowboy hat.
GPS rugby is great stuff. But with very few public schools west of Parramatta playing rugby, the game can appear elitist.
In the city it’s dress pants, shirt and tie, all branded with significant reference to a school and/or club.
You need to look the part.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with that - they look awesome!
The downside is the attitude of elitism it fosters in the game in Australia.
In Kiwi Land, and it’s like cricket here, or Australian rules in the southern states, rugby is everybody’s game.
Here rugby is perceived as the game of the upper class.
The perception of rugby in Australia is that it's a game for the upper class, says Tony Abel. These supporters of Newport Breakers might argue.
Aussie rules and rugby league have become games of the everyman and everywoman.
Pasifika people can come to places like Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide, usually because they have family there.
And of course when they come they want to play rugby and for their kids to play rugby. And they expect to have the same opportunities in rugby as blokes in NSW or Queensland. The same as they would have had they been in NZ.
It hasn’t happened that way. I wonder how much talent has disappeared because of the prejudices in the game here?
There are people that say Australia should forge its own path, play its own style of rugby.
True to an extent. But if you’re looking for solutions to building the game in Australia, to expanding its footprint, why wouldn’t you look to the near neighbours, the most successful footy-playing nation in the world, for solutions?
All Blacks come from all spectrums of New Zealand society. Australia, not so much.
Again – they’re different countries, with different cultures, history. There is entrenched league and Australian rules culture in Australia. And there is entrenched prejudice, both against rugby and within the game.
But there’s a lot more than unites Australia and New Zealand than divides.
And rugby in Australia can learn from the egalitarianism inherent in Kiwi footy, and benefit from that by simple dint of the game not excluding anybody, whether it’s by perception or bias or where you went to school, or whatever.
Rugby in Australia should be the game for everybody.
How we achieve that is a whole other column.
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