The Collingwood coach and former long-term captain of the club said theDo Better report had been “well overdue” and shone an important light on behaviours at Collingwood,which he admitted had for too long denied a voice for those who had felt marginalised,vilified or diminished.
“There was a presser when I look back in 2017 and it was dismissive and I needed to be better than that,” Buckley said in an interview with the AFL website.
“What I now understand is that is a form of systemic racism,the dismissing and denial of experience is not a direct act,but in many ways it reinforces the pain and trauma that Heritier felt and that[other former players] Andrew[Krakouer] and Leon[Davis] have spoken about. It’s feeling like they don’t have a voice and they don’t have somewhere to go and that’s the systemic aspect of it.
“When you reflect on that you[think] ‘OK,how can we do this better?’ because you’ve got to be aware and conscious of it,and there’s a lot of listening[to] and learning[from] that needs to take place from the people that have felt for a long time that they don’t have a voice. I feel like we’ve taken pretty good strides as a club.”
He added:“We don’t want people to ever feel like they’re diminished or vilified or seen as less than in our environment. If that is their experience then it needs to be acknowledged and for that I think the club has said it apologises unreservedly and obviously I have been a part of this club for a long time so I don’t like the fact that people have felt that way and I’ve got to – we’ve all got to – listen and learn more to the experiences and acknowledge them rather than dismissing them.”
In a candid interview with the AFL website,Buckley said it was “long overdue for us to acknowledge this[past] and to acknowledge the experiences of some of the people in our environment and the fact that we need to improve”.