As an Australian of Indian origin, any match between Australia and India touches the heartstrings I have for both great nations. Although I don’t follow cricket regularly, it adds to the spectacle to see the stadium alive with colours and fans chanting their national anthems and cheering on their respective sides.
The Indian community is one of the fastest growing ethnic communities in Australia, and cricket will dominate most of their minds today. Michael Clarke and David Warner have sent out tweets requesting support from Australians, and for “all Australian cricket lovers to paint the SCG gold on Thursday. We need your support. #goldout". It has been reported that this hashtag has caught the attention of more Indian than Australian twitter users and that 70 per cent of tickets at the sold-out 42,000-capacity Sydney Cricket Ground have been bought by Indian fans. Many more will watch the match on TV or at bars and restaurants.
This spectator sport of two sides battling out to win is akin to game of politics in Australia. Federal politics in particular has become a lot about ‘game-playing’ and personalities rather than ‘policies’. As each side of politics protects their party stumps and bats their policies, attention tends to be given to the way Julie Bishop rolls her eyes while Joe Hockey spoke, rather than to the substance and content of what he said. It seems more important to depict Peta Credlin as a domineering female Chief of Staff of Tony Abbott, rather than assess her actual ability as a Chief of Staff.
Tess Shannon and Libby Blainey have created a board game called ‘Question Time!’ It is based on federal politics and has been described as a game in which players work their way around the House of Representatives, starting at the backbenches, landing on different seats, including Stuff-Ups and Scandals and Party Room (e.g., ''Blood on the floor. The party room has just sacked the prime minister. Go forward two seats'').
However, in New South Wales, there is a shift towards focussing on policies, rather than considering the colour of Mike Baird’s or Luke Foley’s tie. Both the captains of the two teams were not the leaders of their respective sides at the last elections. As the crowd casts their vote on which side they want to win the match on Saturday, alot is hinging on how well Mike Baird is selling his bid to privatise electricity and coal seam gas mining. Luke Foley is mixing sports into the political arena as it has been reported that he enlisted NRL star power South Sydney Rabbitohs' Greg Inglis, Sydney Roosters' Anthony Minichiello and Wests Tigers' Aaron Woods to launch one of his party's latest election commitments - a $55 million promise for 10 new community rugby league "centres of excellence" in Maroubra.
Is politics more about ‘playing the game’ than policies? Can any politician ‘win’ without playing games? In India, the landslide win by Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party at the national level and more recently, by Kejriwal & the Aam Admi Party in Delhi, appears to represent a shift towards the impoverished. The symbol of the AAP is a broom, which signifies sweeping away bad elements like corruption. When Modi visited Australia recently, he received a rockstar reception at the All Phones Arena, similar to the atmosphere that a cricket match creates. Modi has been hailed as a success story for the common person because he started off as a ‘chai walla’ (roadside tea vendor) and went on to become the Prime Minister of the world’s largest democracy. However, no political party represents a ‘win’ for India until problems such as corruption and mistreatment of women are adequately addressed.
Whichever side ‘wins’ the cricket match on Thursday and the NSW election on Saturday, it’s win-win if they play the game to the best of their ability. In the case of politics, the ‘party policy’ stumps should represent the good of Australia as a whole. That would be a ‘game’ which deserves a standing ovation.
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