Because Australian politics is parochial and deeply unedifying in all its forms, the past few days were spent forensically deconstructing a Liberal campaign ad featuring a tradie who was not keen on Labor policy.
Watch our new TV ad: Labor’s war on the economy will cost jobs #ausvotes #auspolhttps://t.co/VQf9jF4s3C
— Liberal Party (@LiberalAus) June 19, 2016
People momentarily forgot the wildly successful electoral strategy around Howard‘s battlers back in the 90s and declared the entire thing a sham. Everyone assumed the bloke’s weird delivery meant that he was an actor who’d never laid a hand on a tool in his life. His support for the Libs was just icing on the cake.
For reasons that elude even the keenest thinkers, the prevailing thought was that the best use of everyone’s time was to dox the shit out of the guy and prove that he was, I dunno, actually an investment banker or something. Some straight up Illuminati methods were employed to prove it:
Ha, how many takes? Grip on the cup changes at the cut at 0.10 #faketradie pic.twitter.com/2hWT9s7BUp
— Mike Sampson (@mfsampson) June 19, 2016
Mmm, that investment banker grip.
After a couple of false starts – BuzzFeed reported that the Australian Council of Trade Unions put the blame on an actor named Andrew MacRae – the Daily Mail have come out and confirmed that the bloke in the ad is a metalworker who works as a sole trader on Sydney’s North Shore.
A… real tradie, in other words. Turns out tradies can and do hold a wide spectrum of political beliefs.
Look, make no mistake: the ad sucks. It is a bad ad. It proves very little and doesn’t do anything about refuting the actual statistics around who benefits the most from negative gearing. Any ad that features someone delivering a spiel about how good investment properties are straight down the barrel of the camera is probably never going to be that wonderful.
The politics of the ad are totally unrepresentative. The union movement’s opposition to it – including a very strong take from the CFMEU – proves that. But haranguing one dude in a campaign ad isn’t the way to fight it. You’ll just end up with egg on your face.
Honestly: it’s probably worth developing an actual opposition strategy that doesn’t hinge on trying to work out whether a guy in a campaign ad is an actor or not.
Are you a Lib? Make better ads. Are you a Labor/Greens person? Your energy is probably best directed elsewhere. Everyone can shut up about it now.
Source: Daily Mail.
Photo: Liberal Party of Australia.
