Shoot Farken can exclusively reveal that Football Federation Australia (FFA) has approached the Federal Government, namely the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, in a desperate bid to finally rid the A-League of the dreaded flare lighting element.
Yesterday afternoon, FFA CEO David Gallop paid an urgent visit to Canberra to meet with the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, Peter Dutton. He came with a proposal – Stop The Flares!
With Australia’s reputation being dragged through the mud by detaining children in offshore facilities, Gallop offered Minister Dutton a swap. A culprit caught with a flare at A-League games will now be shipped to Nauru to serve out their banning order, taking the place of a child currently in detention, who in return will be released and repatriated to Australia.
Not only will this act as a severe deterrent, it will also appease the bleeding hearts of #letthemstay campaign. A flare at an A-League game will now represent the light of freedom for a traumatised child.
Gallop pointed out to Minister Dutton the exorbitant cost to Australian tax-payers of detaining these children. Having signed contracts with private contractors to operate offshore detention facilities, he could understand the Minister’s predicament in needing to keep them full. He also reminded Dutton that the Western Sydney Wanderers were established with Federal Government money. It was money well spent and it was only appropriate that the fiery troublemakers were punished through the public purse as well.
Minister Dutton was very receptive to Gallop’s Stop The Flares! proposal. Here was a potential propaganda coup for the government, but he did have a few misgivings.
He asked Gallop what would happen if an innocent party was sent away to be detained offshore.
Gallop assuaged Dutton’s concern by stating an appeals system was in the process of being implemented to deal with this situation and then assured him that the FFA will take much less time processing an appeal than what it currently takes for his Ministry to process Asylum Seeker applications. A smirk appeared on Dutton’s face. It grew even bigger when Gallop also intimated that unlike the innocent children Dutton locked up, the miscreants he wanted to lock up were guilty of sabotaging the FFA’s attempts to promote the A-League as a mainstream Australian commercial sporting product.
Minister Dutton then reminded Gallop of the current budget emergency. He didn’t want these free children to be LEANERS. He didn’t want shock jocks on his case because he had suddenly gone soft.
David Gallop suggested this could be easily solved by placing the child (and mother if necessary) in the care of the family of the exiled troublemaker. He had already been in touch with some of his friends in the TV industry and they thought it had the making of a fish out of water, here comes the asylum seekers, reality television ratings hit. It was a sure money spinner and certain to have many more people watching than the average A-League game. Gallop offered to split the rights, half going to bolster the FFA’s own not so substantial TV deal and the other half going to fund the government’s budget emergency, something that would please Treasurer Scott Morrison and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
They shook hands. David Gallop left to return to FFA HQ in Sydney confident he had come up with a sure-fire win-win for two beleaguered entities, the A-League and Department for Immigration and Border Protection.
Feature photo of children at Nauru Detention Centre courtesy of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre.
