The latest lamb ad – which has somehow become the barometer for our we measure the social and political climate in this country – is out, and it skewers Australia‘s never-ending culture wars via Broadway musical pastiche. No, we’re not joking.
The story is as follows: an Aussie mum is just trying to cook her kids some lamb on the barbie (on the front lawn, for some reason), when singing tropes representing the far left and far right commentators descend.
“If you’re a right, you think equal rights are wrong,” sing the blue shirts, a.k.a the right. “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”
“Your thinking is so 1950s era,” respond the pink shirts, a.k.a the left.
“All you care about is the War on Terror.”
And then there’s the guy who’s too scared to cause offence, so he’s just sitting on the fence, like a coward.
Give it a watch below.
Is this guy singing, “You tell ’em, daddy-o” meant to be some kind of Milo Yiannopoulos character?
He bloody well is.
MLA has courted controversy over the last few years by firmly aligning itself with progressive values; last year, its January ad pointedly didn’t mention the words “Australia Day”, and the year before that, it made a cheeky joke that Australia’s Indigenous population were “here first”. Naturally, the heads of the right-wing commentators in this country immediately exploded.
The truly bizarre thing about this ad is that it attempts to be all about proving that “what unites us is more delicious than what divides us”, while sticking itself firmly in the centre of these issues. And given that, in this Broadway pastiche, the right-wing guys are arguing for inequality and the left-wing guys are arguing for climate change to be taken seriously, it’s pretty clear that MLA is left-leaning in the first place.
Anyway. I want lamb now, so job well done, I suppose.
