Winmar conviction creates Cook conundrum
The Cook Government has known for more than a year that this moment might come.
When former AFL star Nicky Winmar was charged with an alleged assault last May, a political risk emerged alongside the criminal case.
Winmar is no ordinary sports wonder; He is the only person to be honored with a permanent statue at Optus Stadium, a State Government-supported monument commemorating his decisive stand against racism in Australian football. It was announced by the then prime minister, Mark McGowan.
Now that Winmar has been convicted of assault on a woman, the government can no longer evade this question.
Is the statue still standing?
Whatever his answer is, it will have political consequences.
If the government leaves the statue in place, critics will ask why Western Australia’s leading gym continues to honor a man found guilty of assaulting a woman.
Ministers regularly speak out about respect for women and the importance of tackling domestic and family violence. These statements will inevitably be measured by the verdict they make on Winmar.
But removing the statue poses an equally difficult political challenge.
Winmar remains one of Australia’s most prominent Indigenous sporting figures. His stand against racism in 1993 changed Australian football and became part of the country’s wider story about race and reconciliation.
Imagine for a minute that Winmar was the second statue to be torn down in Western Australia due to individual misbehavior. The first involved Captain James Stirling, who led the Pinjarra Massacre of 1834, for which Governor Chris Dawson recently apologized.
Statues of John Septimus Roe (a member of the massacre party who did not fire a shot, as well as the general surveyor charged with breaking up lands stolen from Indigenous peoples) still stand, as does the Explorer’s Monument in Fremantle, commemorating Maitland Brown (who led a punitive raid in which up to 40 Indigenous people were killed as retribution for the murders of three explorers).
This is where the Cook Government finds itself stuck.
This is a government that has already discovered how politically volatile Indigenous issues can become. The Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act remains one of the defining political failures of his time in government, leaving ministers understandably wary of decisions that intersect with Indigenous recognition and symbolism.
Under these circumstances, removing one of the city’s most important indigenous statues could be politically risky.
Leaving it untouched may be no less valid, and they will no doubt wait for the appeal period to expire before making the call.
Meanwhile, the AFL is no less stuck. The country’s most high-profile sports body commissioned the statue and likely still has a hand in its appearance in the stadium. Given the multitude of problems she has with men’s bad behavior, her stance on this issue deserves scrutiny.
