Mark Levy, in an impassioned tirade about the unfolding Sydney Swans scandal, said that “when five players have not been interviewed, and have not been charged, I find it a bit rich for some people to be saying ‘this is it, draw a line in the sand, [the Sydney Swans have] got to take a stand’.”

I have been a Sydney Swans fan for my entire life. Through family ties, I have been closely affiliated with the club and know many of the players personally. Yesterday, the Swans had a historical double header with the women’s and men’s teams, with the women’s team doubling their attendance record.

“On the weekend, we saw fans cheer on the AFLW team at the SCG only to walk out before the men’s game” said Levy. “My question is why?”

I made the decision to walk out when the men took the field, many of whom I have known personally since I was in my early teens. Here is why.

The Sydney Swans have prided themselves on their Bloods culture – often hyperbolised as a “no dickhead policy”. One of the most prominent pillars of this is accountability.

This is precisely why the Swans need to be equipped to genuinely interrogate the culture within their club. The club needs to ask whether its standards, expectations and systems were strong enough to identify and challenge behaviour that falls short of them. The behaviour that has been alleged rarely happens in a vacuum, rather often within echo chambers of enabling, silence, and blindness.

Given the allegations of sexual assault – which remain the subject of a Victoria Police investigation – it would be remiss of the Swans to treat this alleged incident as an outlier without examining the broader circumstances in which it occurred. If the club is serious about accountability and genuine reparation, it should urgently examine the possibility that the alleged assault is representative of broader cultural or systemic issues that need to be addressed.

This shouldn’t begin and end with Victoria police’s investigation into what allegedly happened at the Pullman Hotel. The Swans need to look much closer to home – at locker-room talk, boys’ club culture, and whether anything has been allowed to grow behind closed doors; exactly the things that Bloods culture has so strongly poised itself against.

The AFL has often gotten these things wrong too. Wayne Carey remains in the AFL Hall of Fame, despite pleading guilty to indecent assault in 1996 and being involved in an alleged domestic dispute in Florida in 2007 where he allegedly smashed a glass on his then-girlfriend’s face.

Domestic violence rates increase during major male sporting events and finals, and AFL is no exception. Last year, Our Watch reported that on AFL grand final day, Victoria Police prepare for a 20% increase in violence against women. Yet the AFL is riddled with alcohol and gambling ads, things that research shows to intensify the frequency and severity of abuse against women. Research has also found that every single AFL club is sponsored by an alcohol company this year. To borrow Levy’s vocabulary, it feels pretty “rich” to condemn violence against women whilst getting money from some of its biggest aggravators.

The response from sport commentary has been littered with groundbreaking analysis of what this alleged incident means for the season. When the news broke, Kane Cornes asked “how would Dane Rampe, Jake Lloyd [who have both lost four Grand Finals] or Papley whose lost three have been feeling?” and proclaimed that “this is what makes me so angry”. I would hope that Rampe, Lloyd, Papley along with the rest of the playing group would measure their frustrations about September against a far more sobering concern for the alleged incident and the welfare of the alleged victims.

This instinct has been evident across the broader response from AFL commentary. Fox Footy commentator Garry Lyon said that whilst he does not want to “understate or downplay the seriousness of” the alleged incident, he made clear that his role was to focus on “the ramifications from a football point of view” emphasising that this is “an unmitigated disaster for the Sydney Swans and for the game”.

As a pillar of Australian culture, the AFL plays a vital role in shaping the national consciousness. When conversations begin with gutless condolences for alleged victims and a hollow condemnation of violence against women, then pivot almost immediately to an extensive discussion of how the season will be impacted, that shapes how people prioritise these stories. When women are articulated in the media as collateral damage, we are treated as collateral damage.

I was speaking to a colleague about this alleged incident, and their response was that teams should have a rule against inviting women back to their hotel rooms because “they could falsely accuse a player of sexual assault”. Although confronting, that response is incredibly instructive. Instead of questioning how sexual violence is allowed to occur, or what institutions can do to prevent it, the paramount concern is how to protect men from false accusations. That is precisely the cultural reflex the AFL should be interrogating and preventing.

So to answer your question Mr Levy, and any others who questioned those who left before the men’s game on Sunday, we are fucking exhausted. Exhausted that it takes such a scandal for the AFL to even hint at taking sexual violence seriously. Exhausted that gender-based violence is only worthy of sustained attention when it impacts the fortunes of a football club. Exhausted that the suffering of women so often must be debated, packaged, and made palatable to be taken seriously.

When I walked out of the stadium, it was not because I believe that every player on that field had done something wrong. It was because I love this club enough to demand better from it. I feel not only compelled, but morally obliged, to demand that they take a stand.

Sydney Swans coach Dean Cox and captain Callum Mills fronted the media to apologise for this situation, and Mills said it “put the mirror up to all men in society and all men in the club” and that “we need to do better”. This is a serious step in the right direction, but time will tell if those words represent genuine introspection or semantics deployed to quell the media storm.

Bloods culture, as it was once understood, is now hanging on by a thread. Whether it can be sewn back together will depend on far more than how deftly the club commands the narrative. It will depend on whether it truly holds up the mirror and reckons with what it sees.

In May 2026 the Democratic Republic of Congo confirmed an Ebola outbreak from the Bundibugyo strain. As of last week, 4665 cases have been confirmed, including 2184 deaths. It has now been declared the deadliest Ebola outbreak in the DRC’s history.

There are multiple factors that play into this. Ebola is itself a formidable opponent, and this particular strain doesn’t have a vaccine. Meanwhile, serious conflict between rebel groups in the DRC’s Ituri province has hampered response mechanisms. But the issues stem far beyond this and into the precariously funded machinery built to fight outbreaks. The DRC’s disease response, like many African nations, is largely contingent on who decides to be in the room – international organisations, ministry officials, partners, reassembled fresh for each new outbreak. This means it is almost entirely contingent on ad hoc funding. And such funding is rapidly retreating, with a 70% decrease in foreign aid since 2021.

The withdrawal of US aid is key. In the 2018-2020 outbreak, USAID contributed $324 million to the response, and the US CDC provided a further $37 million. USAID was then officially closed in July 2025 by DOGE. Director of the Center for Global Health Policy and Politics at Georgetown University, Matthew Kavanagh, spoke on this current outbreak, claiming “Ebola can be stopped, and if we don’t mobilize the dollars and the public health efforts, then we are simply choosing not to stop the outbreak”.

This sits within the Trump administration’s broader withdrawal from the international community. In January 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in his gallant defence for Trump’s halt of billions in foreign aid, bluntly declared that “the US Government is not a charity”. This broader freeze forced mass termination and the cessation of disease prevention efforts across partner organisations. Intended as proud nationalist sentiment, Rubio’s claim is a revealing admission; US aid was often not deployed out of generosity, but rather as a tool to implement their own international interests.

To see US foreign aid as mere charity would be a serious misinterpretation of US foreign policy. Put plainly, aid functions like diplomatic bribes laundered through development language so that it looks legitimate to those who would balk at calling it is what it is; as Hans J. Morgenthau put it, “a price paid for political services rendered or to be rendered”. USAID itself is rooted in Cold War strategic competition over postcolonial and developing nations, as president Harry S. Truman outlined in his 1949 inaugural address the aim for “a bold new program for making these benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas”. It was then formalised under the Kennedy administration in 1961, and has taken different shapes throughout history, yet maintained its underlying structure; an instrument of US interest dressed in the language of global development.

Rubio’s admission has been crystalised through the State Department’s ‘America First Foreign Assistance’ doctrine – a policy document that doesn’t so much reveal the self-interest as stop bothering to disguise it. It makes the quiet part official, not that it needed saying – the US was never spending charity money to begin with.

US funding for outbreak response in the DRC was never rooted in pure virtue. Pandemic containment, regional stability and soft power all serve their interests. Yet this is exactly the self-interested that Trump has abandoned, which is a stranger and more damning thing to abandon than charity would have ever been. It could be plausibly argued that his current policies don’t even clear the bar of enlightened self-interest that he so boldly set.

But let’s set US interests aside. Vertical, outbreak-specific funding often leaves receiving countries with no general capacity to catch the next pathogen. In November 2025, the Africa CDC published the African Health Security and Sovereignty (AHSS) agenda, with an aim to make African countries less reliant on foreign aid for outbreak response through a partnership-based, funded transition.

It would be tempting to read the US’s retreat as an accelerant for exactly that goal. But the AHSS describes a negotiated, “blended” financing, not a cliff edge. Gutting disease-response funding overnight doesn’t help the DRC build its own capacity. Instead, in the middle of its deadliest outbreak on record, it removes the country’s safety net before the alternative exists.

Ebola is tearing through Congolese communities with no sign of slowing down. Meanwhile, from the comfort of its ivory tower, the US watches an outbreak it has the tools to stop. More than anything, this is a fitting emblem for Trump’s serious foreign policy miscalculations; trading decades of US soft power for the sake of saving pennies, at a coast measured now in the US’s legitimacy as the global hegemon, but more importantly, thousands of Congolese lives.