All Together Now director turns blind eye to racism

For those of you who may be unaware, Football Federation Australia in partnership with All Together Now is having an erase racism round in the A-league this week. A little research will tell you that this is the only organisation in Australia solely dedicated to erasing racism. Quite hypocritical considering the FFA has a racist policy in the National Club Identity Policy.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing in all of this is not that a racist organisation is pretending to be against racism, but rather that a director of All Together Now, Sam Chadwick who is also the General Manager of Hyundai A-league Operations and General Manager of FFA Cup turned a blind eye to the racism unfolding right before his eyes.

Many of you will know that shortly after the announcement of the NCIP in June last year, FFA and Melbourne Knights went head to head over a legitimate sponsor for the FFA Cup featuring the word ‘CROATIA’. Whilst I won’t make too much further comment on the matter as it is still in the hands of the Human Rights Commission, I will state that Sam Chadwick as the General Manager of the FFA Cup was included in all of the correspondence relating to the matter, and did absolutely nothing to protect a clear victim of racism. Not only did he not do anything to protect but he didn’t even have the decency to take the call of a concerned Melbourne Knights official. 
He turned a blind eye when FFA demanded clarification as to why the word ‘CROATIA’ appeared as large as it did.
He turned a blind eye when FFA constantly referred to sections of the NCIP which were not applicable to the matter.
He even turned a blind eye when the FFA changed the rules at the last minute despite all requests being met, as it was the only way to deny the word ‘CROATIA’ being displayed.

Is this the kind of person that should be sitting on the board of an organisation whose purpose is to erase racism? How someone can remain a director of Australia’s only organisation solely dedicated to erasing racism is completely beyond me, and should be completely beyond anybody who is reading this. Whilst stepping down and a public apology won’t fix the problem, it would definitely be a great start.