In 2007, I was named the Visy Environmental Ambassador. It was a huge honour. I got to promote environmental awareness for a cardboard box company; it was any kid’s dream come true.

Until recently, any payment I received under the Visy deal was outside the AFL salary cap. Can you believe it? I couldn’t; it was awesome.

All of a sudden though, Football Operations Manager, Adrian Anderson, leaves the AFL and I’m told it will now count under the salary cap. You only get one Adrian Anderson in your life.

If you’ve been reading the papers over the Summer, you may have read I tried hard to stop this happening. Unfortunately, I failed.

I thought it best to be clear about why I tried so hard to do this. There are two major reasons.

Firstly, $250,000 a year is a lot of money. It’s probably more than you earn in five years, unless of course you are a Melbourne supporter. Then it’s just a rounding error in your household budget.

The fact this money counted outside of the salary cap meant the Blues could pay me top dollar on my salary too.

No matter which way you look at it, it was win-win for me. We all say we don’t like a rort but let me tell you, when you’re the beneficiary, it’s pretty sweet.

When the governing body of the sport then rubber stamps your rort, well you start to think living in the Turks and Caicos Islands after footy is not such a bad idea.

The second reason (and this is strongly linked to the first) is that I had to do stuff all to get the money! How good is that?

The longer the arrangement went on, the more I came to appreciate this point.

Getting $250,000 is great but getting $250,000 for doing almost nothing is amazing! A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.

I used to just sometimes sit in a chair for hours and think about how amazing it was.

Sure, I had to do a few things like write ‘green tips’ for the AFL Record each week but hands up who thinks I actually wrote those?

I also had to show up to a few Visy customer events but that’s hardly arduous. There was usually free food and I’d head off pretty early citing, ‘Early training.’

Throw in a few photo shoots and a couple of school visits and that’s the easiest quarter of a million dollars you’ll ever earn.

Now, this is not to say I don’t care about the environment. Over the course of my deal, I had more than a million reasons to.

The environment is really important. It’s all around us. We should totally recycle our Visy cardboard packaging, for example.

But it’s not like we need to live in the trees and never wash like those crazy environmentalists. I mean, why are they trying to save the environment for free?

The original press release announcing my deal said about me:

It’s hard not to be swept up in his passion and commitment for environmental issues.

If I’m honest with you, this one is a bit hard to back up. I should have read this media release at the time.

I mean if you hang around with me non-stop for a year, you may hear me talk about the need to protect environment a bit but you probably wouldn’t find it that hard to not be swept up in my ‘passion and commitment’. Rather than swept up, let’s just say, ‘gently carried along’.

So there you have it. I hope you understand. Don’t worry about me, though; I’ve got a $1 million a year salary, so I’ll find a way to struggle through. I may have to sell the Prius though.

And remember; if anyone ever offers you $250,000 a year to be an environmental ambassador, say, “Yes.”