The cricket tragic

Mr Howard’s affection for cricket does not seem to include much of an emphasis on giving working Australians time to participate in the game. For many Australians the Howard Government’s industrial relations legislation will lead to employment insecurity and the need for multiple low-paid jobs; a society in which many of us will not so much have a home and work balance as just an endless anxious struggle on the edge.

If you cannot rely on reasonable working hours or fair pay and conditions, then what does that do to your ability to have time to spend at home with your family, let alone to get down to the park and put the pads on?

We have before us the looming spectre of an Americanised industrial relations system, of which the death of some suburban cricket teams, killed by the Howard Government’s ideological obsession with industrial relations, might just be collateral casualties. The great game of baseball, we can perhaps console ourselves, takes less time.

The great cricket writers have long asserted that the game has the capacity to transcend sport. In the context of the new industrial relations environment, cricket stands as a convenient metaphor for the full spectrum of sporting, artistic and volunteer activities; for social relationships; for community, friends and family. If you cannot exercise reasonable control over your own time, the fabric of your own personal life and engagement with society must fray.

It has sometimes been suggested that England’s decline as a cricketing power in the late 1980s and 1990s was directly associated with the attacks on public assets and institutions under Margaret Thatcher. “No such thing as society” it seemed, would include the communal activity of cricket. It may be that in Australia we will face something similar, with the arrival of a society in which the question of whether or not a youngster plays cricket depends on what his or her mum and dad might do for a crust.

Perhaps, one day, as a retired Mr Howard settles back in his dotage to relax under the spell of the ABC cricket commentary (and who knows, perhaps interspersed with commercial advertising introduced under his government) and if Australia is not doing well, the former prime minister might think of the missing players; the youngsters that never had the chance to give the game a proper go, all because of the industrial laws brought in way back in 2006. Perhaps then the cricket tragic might see through the ideological blinkers and understand the damage his government has done.