The Lance Collard case became an ugly mess. It’s time to change the tribunal system

In the early ’90s a Hawks rookie, who will remain anonymous, would come to understand the standards of his football club as he navigated his way through the gym at Glenferrie Oval.

Having completed a set, the young tyro cleared his throat and gobbed one onto the gym floor. This was the rookie’s first mistake as one of the Hawks’ favourite sons, Gary Ayres, grabbed him by the scruff of his training jumper, pinned him up against the wall and in direct terms explained that if he defiled the Hawthorn Football Club again he would be shown the door. The rookie had been schooled in two ways: in the values and standards of the club, and where the line was.

This issue of club values, and how they vary across the AFL ecosystem, was revisited a few days ago by former Western Bulldogs captain Bob Murphy and commentator Corbin Middlemas on the ABC. They were discussing homophobia and the tribulations of young Saint Lance Collard. Collard was found by an independent disciplinary tribunal to have breached the AFL’s “conduct unbecoming” rule by using a homophobic slur towards a VFL opponent; he was accused of saying “f—-t” but was adamant the word he used was “maggot”. The Saints are considering an appeal.

Murphy stated that one of his great regrets was not addressing the entire club he captained on using derogatory language such as racism and homophobia. Middlemas, who came out in 2018, focused on the responsibility of players to pull up their teammates on such language.

“This starts and ends with the playing group, doesn’t it, if players don’t call out their teammates when they say it? This language is not being used in Andrew Dillon’s office, AFL House, the offices of footy clubs. The only people that can police this is the players themselves.”

I led a three-year national research project from 2010 using social network surveys and interviews with many AFL coaches and players about their understandings of racism, sexism, homophobia etc to determine how effective the education relating to the AFL’s Peek Rule on vilification had been.

In one of these interviews a senior, respected player unpacked the paradox of the elite football world he worked in. He explained that songs played in the gym had often led him to question the Peek Rule as the younger players would blast out the latest gangsta rap, in which the use of racial and sexual pejoratives was considered cool. He did not.

“I can’t use those terms out on the field playing or down the street. So where is the line when I go to the gym and that music is blasting out of the speakers given we are in the gym all the time?”

It’s a critical point, as the line can be ambiguous and every club’s values are different. If, say, a club’s senior players use homophobic language regularly and casually, this can have a ripple effect across the ecosystem.

The Collard case has dragged out and become an ugly mess. The young Saint, a Noongar/Yamatiji man, received a nine-week suspension, having copped six in 2024 for a homophobic slur. So St Kilda’s legal counsel Michael Borsky KC had his work cut out for him. This was made lumpier given Collard had signed a statutory declaration saying he had not used the word in question, but the charge was upheld anyway.

This outcome alone presents a long-held historical trope in which the Indigenous subject is rendered vox nullius or voiceless.

It is made even more galling given Bailey Smith and Patrick Dangerfield’s 2025 Mad Monday “Brokeback Mountain” pose on Instagram, which, beyond an apology from Geelong, was treated in a “nothing to see here” kind of way.

Further, Borsky stated that Collard’s transition into the game was rocky as he did not have a positive male role model in his family due to “domestic violence and incarceration”. The stinking reality here is in the statistics, Closing the Gap reports and the stories of Chris Yarran, Tarryn Thomas, Syd Stack, Marlion Pickett et al. This is not to mitigate what Collard allegedly said (or did not say) or absolve him from it, but to contextualise it.

At the heart of the Collard case is a contested intersection of identity, Indigenous culture, class, LGBTQI+ rights, coterie groups, community, power and powerlessness. But intersectionality, which accepts that a person’s privilege or oppression is determined by these competing tensions, is not a concept embraced by everyone in the AFL hierarchy.

What is clear is the level of suffering and pain felt by many in this calamity. The reason the education of a player is undertaken when they enter the elite and professional AFL is to provide them with knowledge that will make them a better person. If Collard, or Izak Rankine or Jeremy Finlayson, or Suns player Wil Powell could have their time again they would not utter these words given the damage to their personal brands and to the LGBTQI+ community.

Perhaps it is time for the AFL tribunal system to become more restorative rather than seemingly being hellbent on punitive action, in the handling of both the Collard case and the Zak Butters allegation of umpire abuse, which he also denied.

This needs to be done with education as the first principle, a reconsidered and tailored program that allows one to actually understand the consequences of words through the redemptive power of education rather than the old-school method Gary Ayres used, of knowing where the line is.

Sean Gorman is an author, historian and researcher on Indigenous culture who previously worked for the AFL.

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