Trans-Tasman faultlines
Culturally and temperamentally, Rugby Australia chair Hamish McLennan is so far removed from rugby administrators in New Zealand that he might as well comes from Mars.
A product of elite Shore school on Sydney’s affluent North Shore, the 56-year-old currently chairs two multibillion-dollar companies listed on the Australian Securities Exchange.
That background, as well as the hand grenades he occasionally lobs in New Zealand’s direction, give him a pantomime villain quality that has frustrated everyone from former NZ Rugby chairman Brent Impey, to Highlanders chief executive Roger Clark and any former All Black with a microphone.
McLennan will take delight in that, as it shows the former marketing and advertisement executive has not lost his ability to get a message across in one sentence, or even a few words.
All he needed to say was ‘‘all bets are off’’ with NZ Rugby to generate more than a week of media coverage for rugby in Australia. Why is he doing it?
McLennan has a singular focus on getting the best financial return for Rugby Australia. That’s it – that’s the game.
So, when he says that ‘‘all bets are off’’ with NZ Rugby in relation to Super Rugby Pacific from 2024 onwards, that really means ‘‘well, all bets could be on again if the money is right’’.
He doesn’t really care about the collateral damage – he wants a bigger slice of NZ Rugby’s pie, because he has to fund five clubs in Australia with a broadcast deal that decreased – at least the cash element – when Rugby Australia moved broadcasters from Foxtel to Nine/ Stan.
But he has also identified where the big faultlines are in New Zealand rugby.
He knows – or at least is heavily betting – that there is no way that NZ Rugby is going to walk about from Super Rugby: it needs it as a vehicle to fund its five clubs.
Ask yourself what would happen if the countries went their separate ways. Australia would get a domestic rugby competition, which it has been crying out for, and New Zealand would get two domestic rugby competitions, which it clearly doesn’t want or need.
Hell will freeze over before NZ Rugby unwinds the five Super
Rugby clubs in favour of a return to the NPC days.
It’s not going to happen, and McLennan knows it.
OK, so he’s clever, but it’s cynical and appalling, isn’t it?
Quite possibly, but consider the following quotes about McLennan from a Sydney Morning Herald profile in 2020.
‘‘Hamish smiles upwards and s...s downwards,’’ one [Rupert] Murdoch loyalist previously close to McLennan says. ‘‘He’s a user. He can be quite manipulative.’’
And from Peter Tonagh, the former boss of pay TV giant Foxtel. ‘‘Anyone who pursues a goal as relentlessly and passionately as Hamish is going to create both fans and foes. I’m in the fan category.’’
Those quotes seem to capture both sides of the coin with McLennan, who has a British and Irish Lions tour coming to Australia in 2025 and Rugby World Cups in 2027 and 2029.
He can be charming, erudite and interesting, but there is clearly a huge drive to win that means some people get run over along the way.
For a NZ Rugby that has had a rocky year or two, he’s an adversary it could do without.