Things Bogans Like. Bit of quality reading there, and good to see our national sport, AFL, features prominently on the list.
Me personally, I don't mind a bit of the AFL and have been an avid supporter of the mighty Carlton Blues for many years. Which is easier said than done away from Melbourne, let alone Australia.
Luckily in Singapore (and in Asia in general) we have the Australia Network to help keep us in touch with sporting happenings back home. Or at least we used to. See they used to show a lot of the AFL, NRL (league), and Super 14 (union matches). Unfortunately this year the league disappeared from their coverage, so some guy wrote the CEO of the network a letter, which was responded to as such:
"...in any case in the future, sports programming on the channel should be limited, as much of the Sports [football] historically shown appeal more to the expatriate community rather than the target audience. Consequently, sports programming - be it NRL, rugby or AFL - will be significantly restricted on the channel after August 2011".
OK let me get this straight. A network funded by Australian taxpayers (albeit residents actually paying tax in Australia), showing sporting matches from back home to the expatriate communitity is not the target audience? Who bloody well is this target audience then? Chinese people that want to keep on top of whats happening to those morons down at Summer Bay? Malaysians keen to see how tree-hugging hippy dole-bludgers operate? Or basically anyone other than hard working Australians living overseas, who are happy to see their hard-earned taxes being pissed up the wall yet again but a Labor government that would struggle to organise a chicken raffle, let alone run a country.
RIP football on the Australia Network. And no, I'm not paying for Setanta for the privilege of watching sport once it disappears. Used to deal with those pricks while I was living in London and can honestly say that alongside Ryanair and certain mobile phone operators, they are by far the worst organisation I've ever had the displeasure of dealing with.
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