Cory Bernardi might not be the single weirdest unit in Australia, but I feel pretty confident that if we held an Oddest 100 for cooked political types, he would end up pretty firmly in the single digits.
The far-right politician relatively recently jumped ship from the Liberal Party to form his own venture, the Australian Conservatives; seemingly sick of (alongside the likes of Eric Abetz and George Christensen) holding a wildly disproportionate amount of sway over the government, he decided to go freelance, presumably so that there’s no one to slap him on the wrist if he makes any more comparisons between homosexuality and bestiality.
Following a streamlined version of the trajectory nearly every right-wing reactionary follows, Bernardi has given up actually trying to effect change in accordance with his personal beliefs and those of the people who elected him, and has settled on just using his huge taxpayer salary to try and piss off all the people that he doesn’t like. He does this primarily through entry-level shitposting and with memes that look very much like memes made by someone who just discovered the word ‘meme’ for the first time 2 years ago.
His latest attempt at dipping his enormous, low-polygon bonce back into ~the discourse~ is his response to Triple J moving the Hottest 100 from Australia Day, namely: starting up his own. The “#AC100” (probably the ‘Australian Conservatives 100’, but at no point do they ever refer to it by its full name or, indeed, not as a hashtag) is Bernardi’s go at replacing a nationwide countdown run by a dedicated team of professional music industry experts with a Spotify playlist and a shitty web form.
Apparently misunderstanding the entire concept, Bernardi has offered up a pre-selected list of 100 songs, from which you can vote for your top 3. So essentially you know exactly what the countdown will be, what’s up for voting is which order it will be in? Except it’s not going to be broadcast anywhere, so not even that? The web form is a free text form that allows you to write in whatever you want, so they are either expecting just about no one to write in and are happy to do the man-hours to count it all up by hand, or they’re just going to flub the results.
And, of course, the fact that it’s free text means you can put in whatever you like, something people are already (very appropriately) taking advantage of:
https://twitter.com/liamvhogan/status/953527904352088065
The playlist is more or less exactly what you’d expect – a bit of AC/DC, John Williamson, Powderfinger, and Jimmy Barnes – but also with a few surprises. For instance, I’m not entirely sure how many ‘fair dinkum Aussie patriots’ are going to be stoked to listen to Short Stack or Iggy Azalea but, hey, I guess he’s trying to reach a broader demographic (2005 emos and the worst people alive).
It seems unlikely that all of the artists featured in the playlist will be too happy to be associated with Bernardi and his bullshit. Including Solid Rock by Goanna seems like an interesting choice, given that lead singer Shane Howard has explicitly said that the song is about “the historical racism and injustices suffered by Aboriginal Australia at the hands of Settler Culture since 1788” and has already banned far-right group Reclaim Australia from using it at rallies.
Former Savage Garden frontman Darren Hayes has already told Bernardi to rack off in response to the inclusion of certified banger To The Moon And Back:
https://twitter.com/darrenhayes/status/953512337540919296
Maybe leave making countdowns to the professionals and stick to spending every waking second of your life screaming in outrage that everyone else is too easily outraged, hey Cory?
