Go Hard Girls podcast Other Side of the Pitch is nothing but an obsequious celebration of a man in women’s soccer in the Philippines. And ‘our’ ABC is behind it.
Go Hard Girls is a Filipino outfit that distributes grants to would-be women sports journos so they can make podcasts about Filipina athletes. How is the ABC involved? Well, the money for the grants comes from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, but trickles through other projects and initiatives and programs and partnerships. (Tracking it down is like getting a masterclass in donation laundering.)
One of the steps in the process is the ‘initiative’ of Women in News & Sports (WINS), which is supposed to be a ‘training and mentoring program that provides women in (sports) media across in the Pacific and Asia with the tools to carve out a career in the male-dominated world of sports journalism’. And WINS is run by ABC International Development, whose remit is supposed to be to support, connect, and empower people in the Asia-Pacific region to have a voice on the issues that affect them, and ‘enable media organisations in the region to connect with Australia and Australian values’.
And spreading gender-identity ideology is such an Australian value. So empowering.