The dirt squads of Australian politics went in hard this week and unleashed troves of problematic social media history on all sides.
It was the week that an awesome wave of racist comments and offensive memes and problematic conspiracy theories about lizard people exploded in headlines across the media. Heads rolled and questions were asked, and both leaders of the major parties were forced to defend candidates they had either never met or didn’t know much about. Not that it meant much in the end.
It would have been nice to talk about policy this week. But we didn’t. Instead, the third week of the nation’s election campaign was dominated with multiple coordinated dropoffs of offensive social media posts from those vying to enter politics. Earlier this month, talking to political staffers, I commented on how clean the campaign seemed to have been so far. They assured me there was chaos coming, some Marvel-esque Big Bad Guy just over the horizon, and that there would be a lot of dirt to go around. They were right!
In the last week here are all of the candidates who have fallen as a result of Bad Times Online:
- A Liberal candidate in Tasmania was turfed after screenshots were passed around to media of a Facebook account in her name making derogatory comments about Muslims.
- A young Labor candidate in Melbourne withdrew himself from the race after days of criticism for posts he made to Facebook seven years ago – including a meme that joked about rape – as well as a bunch of comments about watching women have sex while others were “roughly taking” her virginity.
- Two old dudes trying to get seats as Liberal candidates had to abandon their efforts after comments they made on blogs were discovered and published: the first claimed Muslims secretly supported killing or enslaving non-Muslim Australians. The second made homophobic comments about Liberal MP Tim Wilson and wrote about the “dangers” of gay people in general.
- Labor’s Northern Territory senate candidate was caught out sharing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish shape-shifting lizards who apparently run the world and also apologised for posting an image that depicted former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull cutting the head off of ABC journalist Emma Alberici.
- A Greens candidate also apologised after his Facebook was scraped and a bunch of memes that showed Luigi campaigning for Palestinian sovereignty as well as a picture of Sonic the Hedgehog with the caption “Who gives a flying fox about dead cops?” Yes, it’s stupid.
- A Facebook account in the name of Tony Hanley of the United Australia Party was caught calling Saudi Arabians “tea towel heads“, describing the children of taxi drivers as “future terrorists,” and let’s not forget One Nation’s candidate Ross MacDonald, who had posted photos of himself at a strip club on his Facebook and also tagged a woman’s cleavage with “mmm YUMMY!!!”
All of this in a five-day span. For many of these candidates it was unlikely they were going to win anyway.
In an election campaign that has featured a Prime Minister who would rather focus on the major bargaining point that he’s literally not the guy he’s running against and little else, some policy discussion would have done good. But policy is complicated and boring and tired. Show me someone’s shitty posts on social media instead. I can’t wait to cancel them.
There’s been a lot of commentary about the deluge of social media-based destruction across the political spectrum. Do the parties not have a proper vetting process? How did these people even become candidates? Is it wrong to get someone kicked off the campaign trail for things they said years ago? And, hell, what’s with so many of them saying these racist things in the first place? Has that always been the case or is it new? Are we just seeing it now because of social media? All of these questions are worth asking.
Opposition research has always been a core component of politics. It’s not like there’s never been cases of candidate’s pasts coming back to haunt them. In 2011, footage emerged of Liberal candidate John Alexander standing in a Brisbane pub in the 1990s making racist jokes.
In the early 2000s, veteran Australian journo Laurie Oakes brought up the time when, in 1993, then-Australian Medical Association Vice President Brendan Nelson was caught on camera saying “I have never voted Liberal in my life”. Nelson went on to serve as the Liberal member for Bradfield – and leader of the Liberal Party – but that footage was passed around to preselectors on VHS.
Political parties have always had squads dedicated to finding dirt on opposition – and it makes sense that they do. The internet and the development of social media simply evolved the ways these dirt squads operate.
The political landscape is now made up of a bunch of older people who adopted social media without the intuitive understanding of a younger generation who grew up on memes and shitposting. That’s not to defend any of this; it is all very bad. But at some point we will have to differentiate between shitposting and genuine hatred, and doing that is difficult.
It has long been predicted that social media will result in no one being able to run for Parliament. Whether or not that’s actually true, the conversation is going to have to shift. Are Facebook posts set to become such an issue that parties will have a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ about what’s off limits? Maybe they’ll all come together and chat about the difference between what does and doesn’t constitute fair game? Or maybe the younger generation, born into the internet and fully aware of the privacy issues that come with it, will handle all of this differently.
Just kidding – it’s politics. As long as the dirt exists there will be someone to give it to. Burn it all down!
