Oh, Bill Shorten. You are not having a very good day.
The Labor party has been in severe damage control-mode all today after their shockingly short-sighted campaign ad was highlighted by Nine News. The ad, which has copped the most right royal of pizzlings since it was brought to the public’s attention, features Shorten standing with a bunch of exceedingly white people only, imploring businesses to shirk foreign workers and “employ Australians first.” The implication in that particular piece of imagery being that Australians = exclusively white people.
Shorten himself offered up something of a half-baked apology for the video, and frontbencher Anthony Albanese has gone public with his anger, stating that the is a “shocker,” and that it “should never have been produced or shown.”
‘Course the lingering question of just why in the living fuck would you do something so profoundly dumb remains; this kind of thing leaves yourself so wide open to criticism you’re almost better off pre-emptively issuing the apology before you release the content.
As it turns out, there’s one region – or One Nation, as it were – that Labor was specifically targeting: rural Queenslanders.
The ad, as SBS World News is reporting, was never supposed to be seen outside of rural QLD where the LNP and Pauline Hanson‘s One Nation party reign supreme.
The ad ceased airing on TV this past Sunday, and the Labor party reportedly had no plans to air it anywhere else beyond that.
It’s extremely good that the Labor party are pandering to the xenophobia vote, actually. In fact, it’s great.
Some people have pointed out the lack of diversity in the ALP’s video about local jobs. Fair cop. A bad oversight that won’t happen again.
— Bill Shorten (@billshortenmp) May 8, 2017
The grovelling press conference he’s almost certainly going to have to have tomorrow is gonna be good.
Source: SBS.
Photo: 9 News.
