An absolute joke We’ve previously looked at the pain of being mistakenly dragged into politics. Poor @albo who keeps being accused of being a closet communist when all he wants to do is his horny drawings, or E!Online’s People’s Choice Awards being grilled about its views on a second Brexit vote. They will have been through something similar to what comedian Simon Kennedy felt when he found out he was running for the Liberals in John Howard’s old seat of Bennelong.
“I got a message from a mate in Bennelong saying ‘What’s all this?’ when the first article came out saying Simon Kennedy was in the preselection race and I thought, ‘Oh, this isn’t good. I can’t have my good name — if it is good — besmirched around my area,’ ” Kennedy tells Crikey.
It only got worse. Once the Liberals’ Kennedy — a McKinsey partner aligned with the party’s right — won preselection, he started getting messages of congratulations.
“I received more than a dozen emails from people saying they’d love to come to a fundraiser with me and Angus Taylor, one guy specifying that he’d come but he can’t eat mushrooms,” he said. “Plus I got invited to a wonderful-looking climate denial event in Roseville hosted by Rowan Dean.”
Indeed the Roseville event is a real two-for-one. It features rampant climate denial (climate sceptics Ian Plimer and Benny Peiser join Dean on the panel), with the invitation also expressing fury about the recent interference in preselection battles, lamenting the “once great” Liberal Party (further evidence about the sympathies of the event organisers comes from the fact that none other than Matthew Camenzuli has since been added to the bill).
Kennedy decided he had to act, launching a campaign of sorts to ensure no one voted for Simon Kennedy. With the help of Dan Ilic and the It’s Not A Race operation, Simon Kennedy produced a video dissuading anyone from voting for Simon Kennedy.
“Until election day, I will be dedicating all my energy as Simon Kennedy to saying: ‘Don’t vote for Simon Kennedy. There is no Simon Kennedy that can do any good for the electorate,’ ” he says. “And as a Simon Kennedy, I feel pretty qualified to say that.”
Making a hashtag of things Prime Minister Scott Morrison really does know how to focus on the things that matter. Who can forget the speed with which he acted when needles started turning up in strawberries? Or yesterday when he bravely and pointlessly resurrected an attack on transgender women in sport out of pretty much nowhere. Today he added another to his list of targets: hashtags. Speaking to David Penberthy, Morrison put his foot down:
Well, I think you put your finger right on it when you’re talking about hashtags, David. I mean, social media has been eroding the civility of our country, and not just our society, societies all around the world. And David, you’ve reported on politics for years and years. You’re telling me that people haven’t been saying these things about politicians for the last 50 years? Of course they have, but what happens now is you whack a hashtag on it, put it out there into social media, and then people report it.
Now that’s a vote winner.
How’ard is it to find another reference point? Albanese’s gaffe yesterday — not knowing the unemployment rate — was both a product of the terrible journalistic obsession with small sound bites that can be used to define and narrativise the drudgery of an election campaign and an incredibly sloppy own goal from the Labor leader. It served a third purpose too: the ceremonial wheeling out of John Howard.
Despite Howard’s long tenure and skill for targeted cruelty over scattergun incompetence, when compared with those who have followed for him he has been cast as a great statesman of Australian politics. And so columnist for The Australian Janet Albrechtsen immediately reaches for him as the cudgel with which to bludgen Albanese. “[Howard] said he would swot each night so he knew every necessary number, fact relevant to his job. It was his job as leader, he said, to know,” Albrechtsen says, completely ignoring the fact that Howard famously made an error of this sort back in 2007. The final step is complete when Howard is asked about it and, despite the wall-to-wall coverage, essentially says “Who gives a shit?”
