Of course there's nothing funny about the Andrew Johns-Timana Tahu bust-up - indeed a misunderstanding of the difference between funny and offensive is part of the problem - but a ray of humour can be found, thanks to the ever-reliable Anthony Mundine.

Mundine seems to be a genuinely good bloke with his heart in the right place, his single flaw being that he doesn't always know what he's on about. His origins are league, his main career has been boxing, but the connection between brain and mouth has sometimes gone fishing.

Being a solid friend of Greg Inglis, Mundine felt bound to speak out against Johns's racial slur. He condemned it, and supported Tahu's reaction, and anyone with any sense or decency would stand right beside him. But then, as so often with Mundine, he over-egged it.

First he called for a ban on Origin, not only by indigenous players but also by Polynesians or other players of any colour (or, as he put it with the usual Americanism, ‘any creed'), which would presumably include Melanesians, and while we're there why not include Middle-Easterns, Africans, South Asians, and why not Greeks and Italians because they've suffered too.

This has been a long-standing confusion of Mundine's. Where he could have been a coherent role model for Aboriginal people, his adoption of African-American linguistic codes and homogenisation of all ‘people of colour' only serve to weaken what should be an irrefutable argument. To lump together Australian Aborigines and Polynesians in one ‘coloured' group, and to inflect the language with second-hand African-American diction, is to buy into the racial vagueness and lack of education that spawns the very kind of rubbish Andrew Johns came out with: that is, that ‘non-white' people are all one group.

Listen, Anthony. Your people are the original inhabitants of Australia who were dispossessed and thrown to the margins of society, many to live in unimaginable poverty. Polynesian Australians are recent immigrants, solidly middle-class with their own traditions. African-Americans were brought across the Atlantic to the United States as slaves and have had to fight for more than a century for civil and other rights. All of these groups, and sub-groups within them, have distinct histories and cultures, and if they would resent being called black anything by an Andrew Johns, they may well equally resent being called black brothers by Anthony Mundine. Whatever prejudice there is in Australia against Polynesian footballers, it is a mere speck compared with what Aborigines have suffered. To bundle them together has a trivialising effect that Mundine surely does not intend.

Mundine's next foray was to claim that Inglis had always intended to play Origin for Queensland because he felt indigenous players got better treatment there. Yet again, the valid point about racism in league was undermined by the improbable factual statement. For Mundine to be correct, you'd have to believe that Inglis, from Bowraville in New South Wales, allowed himself to be recruited by the Melbourne Storm just so that he could play in their feeder team, Brisbane Norths, which would qualify him as a Queenslander. That seems a bit far-fetched.

The alternative, applying Occam's Razor, is that Inglis was recruited by the Storm, went to Brisbane Norths, found out that he was thereby qualified to play for Queensland, and thought that would be better for him given the heritage of indigenous selections in that state.

As always, Mundine's basic point is the right one. New South Wales does seem to have a problem, as do sections of the game at large. Education can only go so far when racism is ingrained so deeply that the offenders don't even know when they're being offensive. But the over-reactors in these debates always play into the hands of those they accuse. Mundine, by going over the top, gives the accused a chance to throw out red herrings. You hear them pointing out that Mundine has never got over the fact that Brad Fittler and Laurie Daley were better players than him. Or that Mundine has never got over his disappointment at dropping the ball when he could have scored the matchwinning try for the Dragons in the 1999 grand final. Or that he's still fighting those demons with his outlandish commentary on league. By going too far, Mundine enables them to play the man, when everyone should be focusing on the ball.

There will always be questions over why Mundine, or Preston Campbell, or Nathan Blacklock, or a host of other indigenous players have not been chosen for New South Wales (just as there are valid questions over why Matt Bowen, Scott Prince and Rhys Wesser, to name a few, haven't played many games for Queensland). Where racial prejudice has played a part in those non-selections, it should be exposed, and Timana Tahu has taken a big step in raising awareness.

Unfortunately Mundine has taken just as big a step in providing a straw man for the other side to use as a distraction.