NRL18.2: PNG Rising
After many false starts that have served only to undermine the enormity of what's proposed, PNG is for reals this time.
One of the more widely read things I wrote this year had a title with a pretty clear thesis:
I still stand by what I wrote then. This isn’t a good idea. That also doesn’t, and never did, matter. So it’s really happening. No more done deals, faits acomplis, LOCKED IN.
We’re going to Papua New Guinea.
And not so much “we”, as I am not personally ever going to PNG if I can help it, as the NRL and more specifically, a few unlucky souls whose job it will be to bring this about.
Here’s a summary of what’s going on:
What we know
New team
Entry in 2028 competition
Based in Port Moresby in purpose-built facility - no Pasifika, no Cairns, all PNG
Australian government funded for 10 years
What’s good about this
Having a PNG-based team will actually be pretty cool. Games at Suncorp and C-Bus are going to be wild.
The NRL and its clubs seem to have dodged any financial responsibility for this and will only suffer some reputational blowback if it doesn’t pan out. Peter V’Landys has more than enough personal capital to deal with that.
What’s bad about this
A large headline of Australian taxpayer funding ($600 million) is being spent in an opaque and obscure way to achieve ends that are not clear. Some of that money may be distributed across the Pacific (half?), some of that money may be going directly to NRL clubs to approve the PNG club’s licence ($60m?), some is being spent on the ground in PNG ($150m for the bid?) over varing timeframes. To achieve what exactly? Keep
our biggest trading partnerthe Reds off the streets of Port Moresby?1Port Moresby is a very dangerous place to live, by the data and anecdata. Even the shills at the News admit that. The behind the scenes operation will ask a lot of a handful of people and their families. Their success will be measured in player and staff churn. I’d be surprised if many last more than two years. See also: FIFO’s impact on families.
Not clear if having a team get belted by 40 points every week will be great for national pride. Conversely, if the mooted 40% tax break goes through and builds a competent team of mercenaries, not clear how the PNG banking system will cope with the eventual repatriation of funds to Australia.2
The oncoming ball gargling is going to be painful to even glance at without safety goggles. Treat this like plutonium. Thankfully, the imminence of Christmas will take some of the edge off.
What we don’t know
Who is going to play for this team.
Team name, colours and other miscellania that cranks will obsess over for the next couple of media cycles. The cranks will eventually be upset by the decisions made and then get used to them over a couple of years (c.f. the Dolphins).
What the broadcasters think (if that’s still relevant) or what broadcast arrangements will be like from Port Moresby. It seems extremely unlikely this will generate much in the way of new revenue, given the paucity of potential new viewers in Australia and the lack of wealth in Papua New Guinea.
Whether this is team 18 or team 19.
What the fans think, which is plainly not relevant. This is somewhat ironic for a notional democracy.
What you might notice from this summary is that it’s not all that different to what I wrote back in June, the first time around this was supposedly a DONE DEAL. This is rather suggestive that the powers that be have used that six months to do jack all. News even had time to dust off their Onion-esque “actually it'll be fine, don’t worry about it” piece. I salute Australian management's commitment to the tradition of taking forever to make basic strategic decisions and then foisting implementation onto others in a now compressed timeframe.
Thank you for reading The Maroon Observer
Politics of power
For an overtly political act, it would pay to consider the scenario in which the announcement has been made. For what it’s worth, here is my view.
Despite having one eye on Papua New Guinea news headlines for the last six months, I find the politics of their parliament difficult to parse. This year has seen a census, votes of no confidence, petrol and foreign currency crises, run of the mill violence and the independence of Bougainville inches closer. PNG’s GDP per capita is still less than $5,000. I was tempted to throw the current PNG PM, James Marape, into the 20s Strongman category of leader (“a term of art”) but I’m not entirely convinced that’s right, even if there seems to be an absence of ideology and a focus on big announcements with an appropriately attendant lack of implementation. Irrespective, Marape can chalk this up as a pretty big win for his administration, provided no one looks too closely or thinks too hard about what else this money might have done.
In Australia, we have been stuck in stasis for what feels like a decade or more now. It’s possible that we’ve spent so much time on the pandemic and various natural disasters that there simply hasn’t been any time or will to take a good look at ourselves and make sweeping cultural change. Between this, and the social media ban for under 16s, Albanese seems intent that this is the time to push policy that might appeal to the mythical middle Australia that also serves as bizarre petri dish social experiments. It's hard to imagine this being a sufficient vote winner next year after inflation slaughtered innumerable political careers throughout 2024.
Speaking of, you would have heard Donald Trump was re-elected. While Australia’s current Pacific strategy feels like it was cooked up by a mush-brained Biden trying to play out Cold War II, recasting the USSR as China, as a point of national unity, as an economic driver and providing a disaffected American empire with a sense of purpose, Trump has shown a preference for a more direct confrontation in trade, slapping tariffs on everything and further immiserating everyone, presumably because it makes him feel like a big boy when people clap. My gut feel is that Trump is so senescent himself and that this part of the Pacific is so far below his notice, that his impact will be precisely zero and the wheels will turn with or without a driver.
I am given to understand Xi Jinping is still trying to work out what a rabbitoh is. I think it's going to be a while before China registers this in any meaningful way. A junior bureaucrat in Beijing is currently crossing out 巴布亚新几内亚 and quietly inserting 所罗门群岛 on a few “infrastructure” plans.
The Great Rejection of October
So many unnecessarily dramatic headlines:
Western Bears expansion bid formally rejected by Peter V’landys and ARL Commission
‘Your bid is in the bin’: How Western Bears’ plans went south
‘Must have strong business case’: Western Bears bid officially torpedoed
‘Blindsided’: Inside bombshell Bears call... and what comes next in NRL expansion race
Expansion plans in tatters as NRL knocks back all bids with Jets' hopes of comeback grounded
Rejected. In the bin. Torpedoed. Bombshell. Tatters. Evocative stuff.
Most of the reporting focussed on the Bears’ bid being rejected but I am given to understand all the bids were rejected, it’s just that PNG was downplayed a lot. It won’t take a lot of effort to work out why that was.
The reporting as to why the bids were rejected, especially in WA’s case, was extremely muddled. Fox reported that the NRL expected a “$20 million licence fee for the first two years” - what does that mean? From Andrew Webster:
Redcliffe weren’t required to pay a licence fee because their licensed club guaranteed long-term financial viability.
The NRL insisted the WA bid pay a fee – about $15 million to $20 million – because they were in a rugby league outpost and their financial position wasn’t as strong as that of the Dolphins.
It makes no sense that a licence fee would be a guarantee of long-term financial viability. In American pro leagues, expansion teams pay a licence fee to the existing owners to reflect the dilution of their share of the centralised league revenue and because by granting a licence, the expansion team has gone from nothing to having an asset worth billions in a manner of moments.
A bank guarantee is usually held until some sort of transaction is completed. In construction, the client might hold a builder’s bank guarantee as a means of protecting themselves should the builder go broke mid-project and as a means of demonstrating that that won’t happen. In cycling, where teams are much less stable than in the NFL or MLB or NHL, teams are required to have bank guarantees to prove they can pay their riders’ salaries for the season. If the team fails, the UCI pays the riders out of the guarantee. Thus the bank guarantee serves to hedge a clear and obvious commercial risk in both examples. So what would be the terms of a hypothetical bank guarantee for a NRL team? What risk is being hedged? What skin in this game do the existing clubs have?
You’ll note that these two financial instruments have clearly different purposes. A bank guarantee is evidence of viability. A licence fee is payment to the incumbents. A licence fee does not demonstrate financial viability and, if anything, undermines it. Why would a bid that can demonstrate viability not be required to pay a licence fee? Those are exactly the bids that you want paying a licence fee. The rugby league outpost needs to conserve its funding to build the outpost and you reap the benefits down the line with a bigger fanbase. That’s the first principle of expansion.
Putting aside the notion that the NRL clubs in no way deserve any kind of licencing fee due to their incumbency being an accident of history, their inability to steer the game forward, their complete lack of accountability to anyone and overall mediocrity, and that this pathetic cover for their craven greed is so perfectly representative of precisely that ineptitude, what do you think the odds are that the NRL made it clear that a financial contribution was a requirement of this round expansion and what the purpose of that financial contribution would be? I’d mark it close to zero.
It would have been simple to highlight, even behind closed doors, that Fox paid for the Dolphins’ entry to get more Broncos games behind the paywall and V’Landys wanted the Dolphins DONE to prove he was an action man, so no, there was no licence fee then, but that neither Fox nor Nine seem interested in doing that for NRL18, so you’ll need to find a big sack full of cash. Instead, V’Landys and co have used this SENSATIONAL REJECTION as leverage in their negotiations that they insist be played out in the media.
This is actually meant to convey something like due diligence or competence. Following this extremely dubious tender process would get you fired from any government position but it’s apparently good enough for the National Rugby League.
And then, barely six weeks later: The WA premier and $500m came to Sydney. The Perth Bears dream is alive and well. Oh man, no way, I can’t believe it! We're so back.
It remains to be seen how committed the WA government is to the idea of a NRL team that will almost certainly involve the Bears but no one seems to like Peter Cumins (or his business partners), so Roger Cook will need to decide what he’s willing to stake, if anything.
Notes
Colleen Edwards: PNG gun Morea ends tough year with shot at the Cowboys
Lol, it took five hours: $600m PNG expansion deal could be terminated amid ‘China clause’ revelations. There are no details about what the clause actually is. The PNG bid is already EMBATTLED amid DOUBTS and potential TERMINATION.
There are several New Zealand bids and I infer that they are all aiming to be NRL20. Without government support and tapped out broadcasters, someone needs to stump some money up. Nonetheless, the Kiwis seem to be undeterred by the Great Rejection and committed to posting through it. This is a 2030 and beyond problem and by then a few may have fallen by the wayside or been absorbed into a single bid, e.g. New Zealand club led by Sir Graham Lowe makes $360m bid to join NRL competition and Southern Orcas look to untapped international regions to bolster their chances of NRL entry (we’ve sold rugby league to Hawaii and the Carribean and by gum, it put them on the map).
I’m not going to insult your intelligence by linking to comments from the Warriors’ Cameron George that NZ2 would be bad for
themthe NRL.Saibai Islanders 'risking their lives' as illegal PNG fishers breach Australian border security. I had no idea the distance between Australia and PNG was quite that narrow.
I am choosing to ignore that Pauline Hanson also advanced this line of argument.
This is absolutely not a joke.