Do we like them?

Do we like Cameron Smith?

Our score: 7 out of 10. A long, respected career, a Hall of Fame induction and no harmful words or acts found, though the digging was thin on the people-and-planet questions.

Cameron Smith is the hooker who became the benchmark. He was the first and so far only player to reach 400 NRL games, played 42 State of Origin matches for Queensland and 56 Tests for the Kangaroos, 33 of them as captain. He captained Melbourne Storm to multiple premierships, and in 2025 he was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame.

The big stoush of his career was with Channel Nine. In 2015 a 60 Minutes story questioned Smith's apparent lack of concern after a tackle on Alex McKinnon, and Smith boycotted the network for nearly a year, furious he'd had no right of reply. In May 2016 Nine apologised on air on The Footy Show, Smith accepted it and said the matter was behind him and that he'd worked through it with McKinnon.

On the harm test, we came up empty in a good way. Searches turned up nothing from Smith on trans people, women, migrants, vaccines or climate, and no pattern of working with people who push that stuff. That's an absence of evidence, not a glowing character reference, so call it a pass on a thin file rather than a rave.

The recent news is about what he does next. He took a leadership consultant job at the Broncos in 2026, a mentoring role first reported by The Courier Mail late last year with former Storm coach Michael Maguire reportedly involved. Parker says Smith is the man he would pick for the Kangaroos job once Kevin Walters leaves for St Helens, though the article doesn't say whether the ARLC has moved.

So would we support him? Pretty comfortably. He's a competitor who held a grudge against a TV network for a year, which is human, and then took the apology. Nothing found says he's anything but a good bloke in a sport that has plenty of the other kind.