Thank you Malcolm, Matt and Sue and Jack and Matilda and Harry Price. Thank you very much for the introduction Malcolm. You have at 9.20 in the morning all the swagger of a chief political correspondent from a Sydney based newspaper after last night's victory in what they call the greatest game of all. Others don't describe it in quite such lyrical terms.
I'm really very delighted to be associated with this launch and it's all being done in a very bipartisan fashion. I understand that the Member for Brand Kim Beazley is presiding over the launch in Western Australia. But fittingly this book is about the tribal passion of Australian football, it's about the passion of the author Matt Price for the Fremantle Dockers, it is about a team that entered the AFL for the first time in 1995 and a team that battled for many years, but I understand it is now lying fifth in the AFL competition and conspicuously ahead of other teams that I hear regularly about from quite a number of my Victorian Cabinet colleagues.
It takes a tragic to know a tragic, and I am something of a tragic of another game, our national game, and Matt is plainly a tragic of AFL and he is particularly affectionate towards the Fremantle Dockers. He does capture the tribal spirit in his book. One phrase, and I quote, "for all their uselessness and dearth of success, this frustrating football team had got under my skin", unquote. Now that's the cry from the heart of many a fan of a struggling football club, whether it's Australian Rules or rugby union or rugby league or soccer, and it does capture the essence of how literally millions of Australians feel every weekend wherever they may be around Australia.
I have had the great pleasure of attending one of the local derbies at Subiaco Oval. I did it last year. And there was a victory for the Dockers. It was a wonderful clash, and appropriately I attended it at the same weekend as I attended the annual conference of the Western Australian Liberal Party, and that's an organisation that knows something about local derbies as well. And I felt as though I was just transitioning from the political playing field to the football playing field. But this is a story that I know will resonate not only with people who follow Australian Rules, but also people who follow sport, and isn't that a very large number of us all around Australia? You can say all sorts of things about affections for football in this country. I think the one thing that has happened in the last 20 odd years is that we have become rather more national in our outlook. When I was a young fellow back in the late 40s and early 50s, if you lived in Sydney you sort of did grow up following either rugby league or rugby union, except for a very small number of people with nary an interest in or contact with Australian Rules. I think that has changed, and the fact that you can fill the Colonial Stadium in Melbourne with 55,000 people for a rugby union match against England, you can do the same thing in Subiaco Oval with a match against Ireland, I think it drives home the fact that this great national passion we have for sport is becoming a little bit more national in the other sense of the word.
But Matt is a very entertaining writer. Like any serving politician in this building, some of his conclusions are ordinary, some of his conclusions are inspired. But above all, he writes well and there is something on the back, or near the back rather, no it's on the front actually, of this book written by Les Carlyon who I think has written about the finest book I've read in many years about a seminal event in the history of our country, and that is the book on Gallipoli, and he had this to say - "Matt Price writes with grace and economy and never looks to be trying too hard. He knows how to set up a punchline and how to walk away from it quickly. He also has a sense of fun, and certainly we'd all agree with this having read his writing, a sense of mischief." That is what Les says and I think it's right. I read the piece that Matt wrote in the Good Weekend I think it was, or was it the Australian Magazine, it matters not, but you know what I mean, last weekend about his relationship with Mick Malthouse and I thought it was a very nice piece. I thought it said it all.
I commend this book to you. It's his first. He writes from somebody who loves Australian Rules football and has a great passion for the Fremantle Dockers, and good on him because he represents very much the spirit of the Australian sporting follower and I'm delighted to launch his book. And I didn't notice him until just now, but can I acknowledge the Leader of the Opposition of course, who is more intimately versed in the mores of Australian Rules football than I, by dint of his growing up in Melbourne. But it's great to be here. I wish the book well and good on you Matt. It's a monumental task to write a book and I hope it sells well. It deserves to.