Essendon’s champion player Michael Long was on the end of racist abuse from Collingwood ruckman Damien Monkhurst.

Long didn’t cop it in silence, as so many before him had.

He made a complaint. It became a big public controversy and marked something of a turning point in the way the AFL handles these issues.

That same year, it published its Racial Vilification Policy, embodying a stand against racism in the governance of the sport.

But it was shortly after that, sitting in the stands at the SCG as the Bombers took on the Swans, that I first noticed what seemed to me an even bigger turning point.

The earlier furore was still fresh in everyone’s minds so it was, strangely, both shocking and yet unsurprising when some clown in the crowd chimed in with another dose of abuse yelled at Long.

It’s fair to say I turned a look on this bloke he can’t have enjoyed, but then what struck me immediately was that I was far from the only one with the same reaction.

I was at first taken aback and then downright excited by the way a whole section of the crowd around him reacted almost in unison.

Suffice to say they let him know what they thought of his bigoted and nasty comments.

I’ve seen a lot of intolerance and discrimination in my day, but that was the moment I realised something was changing in the Australia in which I grew up.

It was a crowd of ordinary football fans declaring they would no longer tolerate racism.

I like to think that’s the way most Australians feel these days.

There have been other incidents since in football, though they are thankfully increasingly rare.

Who can forget Nicky Winmar in 1994?

That image of Winmar responding to similar taunts by proudly lifting his shirt to show the colour of his skin is one that burnt itself into Australian consciousness.

It made people proud, and not just Indigenous Australians, I can assure you.

The only way to change it is by mustering fairly overwhelming public support at a referendum, and that is the intention.

Both sides of politics support this and recent polling shows huge numbers of ordinary Australians would vote for it.

Race is a construct, a code word for people’s fears about others who don’t look or sound like them.

We’re members of the human race and the differences between us enrich us all.

Yet, we still have a constitution that implies otherwise.

Along with the amendment to remove the provisions that are downright racist, many want to insert a statement of recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their occupation and custodianship of this country for tens of thousands of years before European settlement.

Others have recently argued that this part is all too hard.

Whether it is or not, I don’t doubt that such recognition, while extremely important to many Australians, could be dealt with in alternative ways.

To my mind, though, what has no alternative is the necessity of deleting provisions that still make racial discrimination lawful from the foundation document of the Australian nation.

On that point, at least, I believe all Australians should be able to agree.

Still, there’s only one way to achieve that — and it’s by referendum. This asks something of each of us.

Just as Michael Long decided not to cop it in silence when he heard discrimination on the footy field, we shouldn’t cop it in silence when we see discrimination in our country’s governing code.

It’s time for us to be those people in the crowd at the SCG, driving prejudice into a hasty retreat.

Only, now we need to expunge it from the nation’s legal frame.