ABC’s Tony Armstrong has gone viral after weighing in on the allegations of the mistreatment of Indigenous Players by the Hawthorn Football Club.
AFL’s Hawthorn Football Club has been rocked this week with historic allegations made against the club. The allegations are that some senior staff abused their power and unethically interfered with the personal lives of Indigenous players.
Most salaciously, there’s an allegation that a senior member of staff advised an Indigenous player to tell his partner to get an abortion – all for the sake of his career, aka football.
In response, The AFL has announced it will appoint an external four-person independent panel to investigate these allegations.
Armstrong weighed in on the News Breakfast at ABC and said: “The allegations themselves are very concerning, and there’s going to be a lot more to play out with this over the next, who knows how long.
“I just want to send my love to all First Nations people who are out there reading this, anyone who’s affected by this but especially First Nations people, because it has been a tough little period.
“If we put this into a bigger context, we have had basically 10 days of wall-to-wall coverage of the Queen, and I know the Queen means so much to so many people, (but) to first Nations people she was the ultimate symbol of colonisation, and we all know what came with colonisation to First Nations people.
“Earlier on this week, I think we had the banning of spit hoods that were disproportionately used on First Nations people.