Zero Tolerance Is Easy to Say. The AFL Must Now Live It

Craig Drummond has said the things a Commission chair is supposed to say at a moment like this, and he has said them clearly. Whether the competition he oversees can actually live up to them is, as ever, a rather more complicated question.

In the wake of a police investigation into an alleged sexual assault at the Sydney Swans’ Melbourne hotel last month, and the club’s own decision to stand down five players for the remainder of the season over drinking and conduct that fell well short of what is expected, Drummond has declared that AFL players must meet the game’s standards of behaviour or accept there are, in his words, other opportunities outside sport for those who do not. It is a strong statement, and on the substance of it, hard to argue with.

A Serious Matter Handled Seriously, So Far

Let’s be careful here, because this is genuinely a serious matter and deserves to be treated as one rather than mined for hot takes. The police investigation is ongoing, no charges have been laid as far as the public record shows, and nothing in this piece should be read as a finding of guilt against any individual. That is for the proper process to determine, not columnists or, for that matter, Commission chairs speaking from a podium.

What we can discuss with more confidence is the Swans’ own response, which on the face of it appears to have been swift and unambiguous. Standing down five players for the balance of the season is not a token gesture. It costs the club on-field depth heading into a period where every game matters, and it sends a message internally that off-field conduct will have on-field consequences. Whatever you think of how the situation arose in the first place, the Swans deserve some credit for not trying to manage this one quietly.

Drummond’s Language and What It Actually Commits Him To

The phrase zero tolerance gets used a lot in sport and in corporate life generally, and it is worth pausing on what it actually means when a Commission chair invokes it. Zero tolerance, properly understood, is not a slogan for a press conference. It is a commitment to consistency: the same standard applied to the best player at the best club as to the fringe player at the club sitting fifteenth on the ladder. It is a commitment to timeliness, because a sanction handed down eighteen months after an incident, once the news cycle has moved on, sends its own message about priorities. And it is a commitment that survives contact with a finals campaign, which is where these things are usually tested hardest.

I raise this not to suggest Drummond is being insincere. I think he means what he says. But the AFL Commission’s history with matters of player conduct has not always matched its rhetoric, and fans who have watched this competition for any length of time are entitled to a degree of scepticism about whether zero tolerance survives its first real test against a premiership contender.

Governance, Not Just Grandstanding

This is where I’d rather the conversation go, because the moral outrage cycle around incidents like this tends to burn hot and fast and then disappear once the next controversy arrives. The more useful question for the game’s governors is structural: what has actually changed inside AFL clubs, and inside the AFL itself, to reduce the likelihood of these situations occurring in the first place?

• Are player education programs around alcohol, respect and conduct genuinely embedded in club culture, or are they a box-ticking exercise delivered once a year by an external provider?
• Do clubs have clear, enforced protocols around hotel functions, end-of-season trips and the mixing of alcohol with large groups of young, well-paid men, most of whom are still in their early twenties?
• Is there a consistent, transparent framework across all eighteen clubs for how conduct breaches are investigated and sanctioned, or does it still vary depending on how a particular club’s football department wants to handle a particular player?

These are less exciting questions than a press conference soundbite, but they are the ones that actually determine whether behaviour improves over time. Drummond, to his credit, has the background in governance and finance to understand this distinction better than most who have held his role. The Commission would do well to follow through with a genuine, competition-wide review rather than leaving it to individual clubs to manage their own version of a crisis.

The View From Outside the Fishbowl

I barrack for Adelaide, and I’ll say plainly that no club, including mine, should assume this is someone else’s problem to solve. Every club in this competition has, at various points, had a player or a group of players do something that embarrassed the jumper, and every list manager privately knows there is a degree of luck involved in which incidents become public and which do not. That is not an excuse for what has allegedly occurred in Sydney’s case. It is simply a reminder that the culture questions Drummond is raising are competition-wide, not Swans-specific, and clubs that feel a flicker of relief that it wasn’t them this time would do well to check their own house instead.

What Zero Tolerance Should Look Like in Practice

If the AFL genuinely wants zero tolerance to mean something, it needs to be visible in outcomes, not just in language. That means sanctions applied consistently regardless of a player’s on-field value to his club. It means the Tribunal and integrity processes operating with the same rigour whether the club involved is fighting for eighth or sitting on top of the ladder. And it means the Commission being willing to hold clubs accountable for the environments they create around their players, not just the individuals who make poor decisions within those environments.

None of that is easy, and I don’t envy Drummond the job of trying to legislate culture from the top of a very large and commercially complex organisation. Broadcast deals, membership numbers and premiership windows all create pressure to look the other way when it is inconvenient. But that is precisely why the words matter less than what follows them.

A Test the Game Cannot Afford to Fail

The Swans situation, whatever the police investigation ultimately finds, has already done damage to the competition’s standing at a moment when the game is trying to grow its audience and protect its reputation with sponsors, broadcasters and the broader community. Drummond’s instinct to speak firmly about standards is the right one. The harder job, now, is building the systems that make zero tolerance something players and clubs actually experience, rather than something they simply hear about on the news.