There’s a reason prime ministers avoid calling elections too close to grand final weekend. For all the attention on federal politics right now, Australians take their sport much more seriously. Collingwood Football club alone has more members than any political party, nationwide. Although millions of us will vote for the parties on election day, when it comes to signing on the dotted line and stumping up the cash, it’s the Blues versus Collingwood, rather than Labor versus Liberal, that motivates us to become joiners.
It wasn’t always this way. Politics used to be truly a mass movement. There was a time when every thinking adult must have considered picking a team. Nowadays, those of us carrying a membership card are few and far between and getting rarer every year. Membership in both the ALP and Liberal parties peaked mid-last century at about 350,000 members. At today’s population, that would be something like a million members each. In reality, both the major parties have memberships estimated at about 50,000. (The parties no longer publish membership numbers, presumably out of embarrassment.)
Read more in The Age.