Dr Don Duffy

Wouldn’t have been the metaphor that I would have reached for at first instance in the circumstances, but hey - to each their own!

I’ll tell you what I do know is that both Roffey and Pert have been sadly not up to scratch in their public utterances. If a fair dinkum review (not just run by them) were to be conducted and found that “behind the scenes” they were great, I would assess the quality of the outcome of the report accordingly. To paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, if circumstances change I may need to change my view. What do you do?

Not sure how do answer that, wayne. A former president did preside over our slide into mediocrity (actually, I craved rising to mediocrity during the decades that followed 1965!). “Slash and burn” isn’t on my wishlist, and while the Peter Jackson did lead us out of the wilderness, he was not allowed to savour the fruits of his work and continue his good work. I think you have put a false paradigm there.

What I can say, Hdm, is that I will continue to support our club, as I have since I can remember as a 5yo. Boards and senior management come and go, and we have to hold them to account as we do the FD and the players who represent our beloved team. Your opening proposition is a little difficult to answer as a hypothetical as I would be surprised if a proper review didn’t recommend personnel change.

You’ll be surprised to know that my polestar in matters-MFC is Dr Don Duffy. Dr Don presided over our decline from the most dominant team in the history of the code (10 flags in 25 years) to the wilderness wanderers we became for decades. When others became innovative and proactive we became complacent and irrelevant. I don’t want that to happen again. I want a proper review of our operations. If you’re not getting better, you’re going backwards. We could certainly get better, on recent evidence.

So Pert was a good footballer. Big deal. Brian Cook was a modest player, playing a few games for us in the 70s, but has been a great CEO at 3 clubs. I want someone of Cook’s calibre as our CEO so we can let Pert have more time in his pool room to polish his trophies and decorations. Ability to kick the pigskin around is irrelevant as to quality of leadership at senior executive level. We’re talking about a bloke whose conduct during the AGM was very poor, and who famously came out and told us our culture was the best he’d seen in a footy club in 40 years. And where’s our Strategic Plan that was promised to be delivered back in February? These are the publicly visible shortfalls in performance. I’d be thinking about icebergs and wondering about the level of performance on things we don’t have visibility on. As to CEO of two flag teams, the first one would be under Maguire as effective executive president, and the second would be where he Steven Bradbury’d in to be CEO of the House that PJ Built. As a CEO he’s probably a good footballer. By all means maintain your cheerleader allegiance to him, but I’ll be barracking for our club to have the best leadership we can get.

You pride yourself on talking to players/FD staff/officials. In a number of posts your tone about Peter Lawrence has been quite, well nasty really. I assume you haven’t taken the time to talk to or contact Peter Lawrence? I have found him to be an affable person and happy to engage with fellow Demon tragics. It’s not hard to make contact with him, and you might learn something.

Yes, and it’s significant that those three “highly successful” recent eras were overseen by outstanding CEOs and quality boards. It does matter.

Absolutely! After all, the board and senior management of the club is totally not responsible for the actual business of the organisation, they are just there to, well…whatever! When you have the “best football culture I’ve seen in 40 years in football” sprouted by our Best in Show CEO we should all be sleeping soundly!

You have been a reasonable and fair correspondent on these matters, FFD, and I can see why you would say that. Two points I would make here are that he has been active on these matters of better governance for a number of years now (and his efforts have been responsible for meaningful change in that regard, for which we should be grateful), so it’s not as though he’s coming out of the blue; and secondly (and related to that), the board came out with a very poor email within an hour of the handing down of the Federal Court decision, and I can see why he would see the need to provide some correction to that material. Not suggesting that this is your motive FFD, but politicians and those wishing to avoid scrutiny trot out the phrase “Now is not the time to…(insert name of action that’s needed)”, generally when there is a bit of crisis around, which is often exactly the time where a clear-headed and external review is needed.

Paraphrasing US election VP candidate Tim Walz: “Weird post!”

Good to see the board cheer squad out in full force. Disingenuous email from Roffey. Let’s have a look at the balance sheet since the Peter Jackson-built team roared to premiership glory in 2021. Looking first at the Peter Lawrence score, he sought to bring the constitution within cooee of 21st century governance principles. He did at least cause term limits for directors and electronic voting to come into being. In the current matter, he did ask the board to amend the provisions of the election rules that were poor governance. When they refused he commenced proceedings in the Federal Court. Should never had come to this, but they then proceeded to jettison 4 out of 5 of the offending provisions as the case proceeded. So why did they spend hundreds of thousands maintaining a defence against the indefensible? Our money, Ralph. That was after blowing another small fortune in the Supreme Court on a previous matter that had a poor prognosis of success. Again, we got to the same outcome that could have been achieved without the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of our dollars. Turning to the board’s record, apart from the above, we were told that our home base in the MCG precinct is a “non-negotiable”; any questions about progress on this were met with “Can’t talk, commercial in confidence”. After kicking that can down the road at various AGMs we pop up with the “Let’s go to Caulfield” idea. And at the AGM we were told that our next Strategic Plan would be out in February. Crickets on that front as we move to September. This is a board and senior management that only reacts when it gets a metaphorical cattle prod to its body, and then claims proactivity in getting to the result that they are forced into. After spending lots of our money. Yes, All Hail Roffey and Pert. Personally I cheer for the footy love of my life, the Dees, not board members who over the journey have been “here today, gone tomorrow”.

Hmmm…not sure about the subtle message. But yes, certainly would not have gone unnoticed at MFC, given that one of our board members is on the Tabcorp board (Kendall).

Good questions.

This was a poor response from Pert. If you’re so shy about being videoed either don’t go in front of the camera or submit the question in writing. And dressed up in Big Brother-like language of “we’ve consulted with members”. Symptomatic of a board that strangely doesn’t have confidence in itself to win an election with fair and open rules like other clubs, despite recent onfield success in all areas. Kremlin-like behaviour, and spending large sums of OUR money fighting legal cases on election matters that shouldn’t be of any worry to them.