New Democracy parliamentary spokesman Dimitris Kairidis took a South Melbourne scarf into the Greek Parliament on Tuesday 20 October to mark the club’s Australia Cup win.
Kairidis, the MP for the Athens North constituency, said the South Melbourne scarf kept a promise to Greeks in Australia. He made it during a visit there with a parliamentary delegation.
The club, still known to Greeks as Hellas Melbourne, won the Australia Cup on Saturday 10 October. It beat Melbourne Victory and became the first club from outside the professional tier to lift the trophy.
“The diaspora is our strength,” Kairidis said, before he turned the moment into an attack on the Greek left over diaspora voting rights.
Scarf honours Australia Cup win
Kairidis raised the South Melbourne scarf before his speech. MPs in the Hellenic Parliament were debating agreements with Luxembourg and Slovenia on classified information. He did so, he said, “with all due respect to the protocol of Parliament”.
At a large gathering for the delegation, he had promised to raise the win in the national parliament, he told MPs. “I believe that successes of every kind reflect on the nation as a whole,” he said.
Kairidis also described Melbourne as the third-largest Greek city in the world by population, after Athens and Thessaloniki. “Everyone was very happy, and I wanted to bring this message here too,” he said.
As Greek City Times reported from the final, South won 4–3 on penalties after a 1–1 draw at AAMI Park. A record 29,911 fans attended. Full results are on the Australia Cup website.
Criticism of the left and KKE
After the South Melbourne scarf moment, Kairidis linked the club’s success to the right of Greeks abroad to vote from where they live. His government gave them that right for the first time, he said.
“We broke a tradition of kotzabasism, which the Greek left joined with great fanaticism,” he said. Kotzabasis was the title of local Greek notables under Ottoman rule, and Greeks use the term for closed, parochial politics.
In his view, the left wanted a narrow Greece. It swears by the strength of diaspora Hellenism but does not want it underfoot, Kairidis said.
Kairidis also singled out the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). “You of the KKE did it with passion when we tried to bring Greek scientists of the diaspora to the universities,” he said. He added that the party “did not want Harvard, MIT and Oxford”.
In the same speech, he said he wanted to share a message of optimism “as we head towards elections”. Overseas registration opened in August, and more than 15,000 Greeks abroad had signed up by mid-September.
Source: Ink
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