It's Not Complicated

A short piece on Sam Kerr

What is it with the Kerr family and taxis? Years before Sam redecorated one with vomit, then abusively responded to the driver’s disgust before her partner kicked out the back window, brother Daniel was in a Perth court for redesigning one too – and the face of its driver.

It was 2007. Like his sister, Kerr was heavily pissed when he jumped upon a cab’s roof, ripped its aerial off, and threw it in the face of the driver, cutting it. Kerr was fined, offered a scripted apology, but remained mute about whether his family held some deep and complicated feud with cabbies.

This won’t be a long piece. It shouldn’t be a piece at all. But so tortured are so many writers, so enslaved to witless narratives and upholding their dutiful possession of The Correct Opinions, that very simple things can become suffocatingly complicated.

So let me apply a razor. Sam Kerr was drunk, abusive and obnoxious on that London evening two years ago. She puked in a cab, and took exception to the driver’s disgust and demands for compensation. Met not only with the stench of vomit, but the prospect of taking his car off the road all night and paying for its cleaning, he drove his two recalcitrant passengers to the nearest police station.

In court, Kerr and her partner, Kristie Mewis, said they believed they were being kidnapped and were terrified by the cabbie’s erratic driving. Now, their hysteria may have been sincere but, if so, it’s not the product of some liable external agent but of their own profound drunkenness.

I once smoked so much dope that, while in the kitchen preparing a bowl of afternoon cereal, I deliriously mistook the haunting, atonal “secret track” at the end of an album then playing in my bedroom for actual wolves.

That’s on me.

Now, having not only puked in this cab – which, and I can’t stress this enough – is one of the worst things that can happen to a cabbie, short of being punched, stabbed or generally intimidated – Kerr and her partner smugly refused to concede fault.

Now before we continue this story, you might think that a cabbie whose office has just been grossly desecrated by two obnoxious millionaires might already command our sympathy.

Anyway. The exhausted cabbie – or kidnapper – arrives at the police station, where our hysterical millionaires kick out the back window in a fit of pique (or liberation). Once in the station, the behaviour of our beloved Sam Kerr is captured on video and we can see that her pissed arrogance has not been tempered by custody.

She’s slurring, though in this moment she must think she’s speaking with articulate and righteous fury, and she calls the driver a “dodgy cunt” and one of the coppers “fucking stupid and white” and boastfully flashes her phone to show the depth of her bank account when asked if she can pay for damages.

What’s curious – hilarious, actually – is that this woman, who would claim that she was variously “terrified”, “scared” and “powerless” is not crouched like a frightened animal, but slouched contemptuously like Liam Gallagher after a dozen pints.

I’m wealthy and powerful, she reminded the exhausted coppers.

And so she is.

When the police officer asked Kerr if she thought that a man who was actually kidnapping them, or had intended to rape them, would drive them straight to a police station, she told the copper that he was a “white privileged person”.

Asked in court why she had replied this way, she said: “He had no idea about the power and privilege he had in that moment or in life, because the way he commented on what the driver could have done to me showed he had never had to think about what can happen to you as a female.”

Here, as elsewhere in her testimony, politically correct justifications – cliched, theatrically self-pitying and brazenly shorn of self-awareness – were given for what was just basic shitty behaviour. And Kerr knew that enough fans and journalists would fix upon it.

But what Kerr was on trial for this week was racial vilification, which is unfortunate, because that seems dumb to me and I’m glad she was acquitted. What I’m not glad about is the density of fucking stupidity that engulfed it.

Here’s the ABC: “Sam Kerr’s trial started uncomfortable conversations about anti-white racism and forced the world to consider the complexities of power, celebrity and discrimination.”

No, not for most people.

For some years now it’s seemed like there’s a legal obligation to affix “most beloved team in the country” to the “Matildas” whenever the latter is used in public. Now, I love them, the sport and was thrilled by their World Cup run in 2023 – but for years now there’s been a terrible whiff of desperation that now resembles something like propaganda.

If you’re paid to write publicly, one’s words should be one’s own, but upon the Matildas are stuck obligatory phrases. And Sam Kerr, as the team’s most celebrated player and global star, has been sanctified in a manner that now obliges co-ordinated interference.

By “co-ordinated” I don’t mean that writers are talking to each other and determining their lines. It’s not that explicit, and it doesn’t need to be. That’s not how cultural enforcement works. It’s all unspoken and, after a time, a “position” solidifies into conventional wisdom and one can intuit the costs of breaching it.

The same applies to just about everything else.

Sam Kerr has become protected, and one now reaches for complex arguments to justify simple obnoxiousness. Here’s Craig Foster, the ex-Socceroo and football pundit, from last year: “As many experts and leading anti-racism groups have pointed out, interpersonal comments can be offensive, abusive or inappropriate, however, racism can only be perpetrated against a marginalised person or group, which anti-racism frameworks are specifically designed to protect.”

Give me strength.

I don’t think that Kerr’s behaviour, if this isn’t already obvious, is terribly wicked. What irritates me is the witless canonisation of athletes, the complication of simplicity, and the tribal stenographers with dull minds whose expression of Girl Power is spewing jargon to justify shit.