Mornings with Mark Duffield - FULL SHOW (29.07.2026)

**Mark Duffield** (0:00)
Hello everybody, welcome to the SENWA radio studio. We're out here at Optus Stadium. It is a Wednesday morning in Perth. It's currently 10.8 degrees outside. We're building to a top of 20 degrees on a mostly sunny day in Perth. And we're here thanks to Beaumont Homes, award-winning design built to be loved forever, made in WA for WA. This is Mornings with Mark Duffield on SENWA. I want to make a special mention of this right off the top, because we make fun of the Commonwealth Games a bit. I sometimes refer to it as the school sports. And I reckon our swimmers could turn up straight off holiday and still dominate the pool. But we should celebrate what are significant Australian performances by world standards. And to that end, the overnight medals to Lockie Kennedy and Tory Lewis were stunning by any measure. So Kennedy's 9.85 in the men's 100, which won in the silver medal, that is an Australian record by a long way. And it would have placed him fifth in the final at the Paris Olympics. Now, it's a big, big deal for any Australian sprinter to make any final at any Olympic Games. So to run a time that would place you fifth at the last summer Olympics in the final is a massive effort. Now, Lewis' 10.99 seconds in the women's final, the first Australian woman to go under 11 seconds, is also an Australian record and would have placed her sixth in Paris.
As I said, making an Olympic final in those blue ribbon sprint events is a massive effort and well done to them. And when you factor in that, you've got the emergence of Gout Gout, and he will be a couple of years away yet, I would imagine, even though everyone's got a rush on him. And don't rule out Western Australia's Leah O'Brien as well, who ran really well at the national championships, which were in Perth earlier last year.
She's on the comeback from an injury, but she is a very exciting sprint prospect as well. So these are very exciting times for Australian athletics. Let's move back on to footy. And this week, we did see the AFL confirm its state of origin fixtures for the next three seasons. So Western Australia hosts South Australia at Optus Stadium in February 2027 South Australia will host Victoria in 2028 at Adelaide Oval, and then WA will host Victoria again here at Optus in 2029
Now, I don't want to knock the AFL too much about this, but I would make this observation. If this is supposed to be a competition, we are taking three years to get to a point where we can declare a champion state. Now Rugby League manages to play three games every year and gets an annual champion between New South Wales and Queensland.
And if it is not a competition, then all we are really doing is staging a series of exhibition games and asking players to put their bodies and their club's premiership aspirations on the line as they do it, for matches that have little or no meaning at all. Now, the best thing to come out of the state of origin game in February this year was the funding it generated for the Junior Talent Development Pathways project in Western Australia. And there was also the chance for West Australians who have never had the opportunity to represent their state at origin level to do just that. But that novelty will wear off sooner rather than later, unless we give players something meaningful to play for. And I get the feeling that one of the many problems with the AFL, and not just this current administration, but a series of administrations which stretch back basically beyond the turn of the century, is that it runs itself strictly as a business, rather than a keeper of its code, and it views not only the tier above it, which would be state of origin, but also the tier below it, its state league competitions, as potential competitors, rather than things that complement the football ecosystem. And it allows these things to exist, but not necessarily to thrive. So if they aren't set up to thrive, they can starve and die, because they were not structured to do anything else. And history says, when it comes to state of origin, the AFL will be prepared to let it die. And it might claim that it's inevitable evolution. It might claim that it's unsustainable, but really, it may have died of financial neglect.
So state of origin, I believe, can and will work if it's set up to work, and it will inevitably fail if it's set up to fail. And I put it to you this morning that the way it is being set up at the moment is doomed to eventually fail. So once all the players who were mad keen to play this year have participated in a couple of these glorified exhibition games, they will have ticked that off their bucket list, their interest will wane, and the interest of spectators will wane as soon as they sense the players aren't fair dinkum and the concept will die.