A Sri Lankan-born politician in Australia has spent taxpayers’ money on an ill-fated mission to set up an overseas AFL tournament.
Labor MP Jude Perera travelled to Sri Lanka last year to try and set up an exhibition match marking “70 years of friendship” between the island nation and Australia, according to the Herald Sun.
Mr Perera, a government backbencher who represents Cranbourne, spent several days meeting with Sri Lankan politicians and business figures but told the Sunday Herald Sun his left-field idea “didn’t get much support”.
Mr Perera’s unusual trip comes amid widespread public anger about the misuse of entitlements by federal politicians. Australian Football League (AFL) spokesman Patrick Keane said the league was “not aware of the details” regarding the trip.
Mr Keane said Essendon had looked at expanding into India, but he could not comment on whether the AFL supported Mr Perera’s trip.
In an eight-page report justifying the trip, Mr Perera said the relationship between the countries could be “taken to a new height” if AFL became popular in Sri Lanka.
He pitched an exhibition match series involving Australian teams, or for retired AFL players to coach local students for three months to prepare them for their own tournament.
“At the end of the day, they won’t go ahead with it, because it was reduced to a one-man show,” Mr Perera said.
“They didn’t have the money ... It was really hard meeting with ministers. They say, ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’, but they don’t take any initiative.
“It was just too much for me to singlehandedly handle. I didn’t get much support over there.”
Mr Perera had tried to engage the AFL’s assistance but said the league was more interested in promoting the game in India.
He said in his report he met with Australia’s high commissioner in Sri Lanka who was “interested” but “noncommittal” on his proposal.
It is unclear how much the trip cost because MPs are not required to reveal how much they spend overseas.
In his report, Mr Perera said: “Australian rules football, officially known as Australian football, also called football, footy, or Aussie rules (and in some regions marketed as AFL after the Australian Football League, the most popular and only fully professional Australian football league in the country) is a sport played between two teams.”
He also reeled off several outdated statistics to make his case to push the AFL in Sri Lanka, saying the game was played by 35,000 people in 32 countries outside of Australia in 2008.
“If the game takes off in Sri Lanka, footy will become a great bonding medium between Australians and Sri Lankans, and a lot of other benefits will follow in a short period of time,” Mr Perera wrote to justify his ultimately ill-fated mission.
Source: Herald Sun
-Agencies
