ATO commissioner sent AI meme mocking Collingwood AFL supporters to all 20,000 staff

The Guardian

11 hours ago

The commissioner of taxation sent an AI-generated action figurine meme depicting supporters of the Collingwood AFL football club as overweight, slovenly and with missing teeth to all 20,000 staff at the Australian Taxation Office, describing it as 'not a bad likeness'.
The commissioner of taxation, Rob Heferen, sent the meme as part of a weekly email to all staff, referred to as 'Commish Connect', according to emails released under freedom of information rules law to the transparency website Right to Know.
In the weekly dispatches, Heferen discussed taxation in general and the latest news for the agency, but also frequently discussed sport.
In an email on 17 April, Heferen remarked on his weekend activities, stating: 'It started with watching a bit of Collingwood playing Sydney on Friday night. No need for any further comment.'
But in the following week's missive, he thanked a supporter of the Parramatta Eels NRL team who sent him an AI-generated image of an action figure of a Collingwood fan.
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In the image, the figure is depicted wearing a Collingwood jersey with his stomach protruding beneath it, hair unkempt, with missing teeth and accessory tattoos.
'Not a bad likeness, I must say,' Heferen said in his email.
Heferen himself is a Collingwood supporter, and discussed the team's results across several of the weekly emails.
'All I'll say is the AFL season is long, and it doesn't matter if your team loses its first game because everyone knows that the first round doesn't mean very much,' he said in one email after Collingwood lost the opening round to GWS Giants in March.
The alleged stereotype of Collingwood supporters is not new. Former Guardian Australia journalist Antoun Issa wrote in 2023, in a piece about resurrecting the Collingwood Pride support group, that 'toothless' and 'feral' were the most common responses he received when he told people he supported the Magpies.
'The ubiquitous loathing of the Magpies, rooted in century-old tropes of the working class, persists despite neither the club nor its suburb today reflecting their humble origins,' Issa wrote. 'The club is among the richest in the league and the suburb's current affluence masks its slum beginnings.'
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Collingwood is currently top of the AFL ladder in the 2025 season.
A spokesperson for the ATO said there had been one complaint to the commissioner, and one on an internal channel from the email.
'The commissioner's office received one piece of correspondence from an employee about the parody representation of a Collingwood fan (of which the commissioner is one himself), as part of a weekly email he sends to the approximately 20,000 ATO staff. Commissioner Heferen responded directly to the correspondence,' the spokesperson said.
'We also received an inquiry through an internal channel available to staff. This was responded to.'
The AI-generated action figure meme was popular on social media around April, with people using image-generating AIs to pump out memes based on themselves or their favourite subjects.
The email became public after an anonymous user known as 'Collingwood Fan' filed the request on Right To Know in April. It had not been previously reported publicly. That and a subsequent request for staff responses to the email are the only requests made under that account.