Believe Me, I Know The Difference Between Satire And Reality!
A number of people commented on yesterday’s This is How Tony Got Elected
expressing the idea that the pictures were from a satiric site “Why I’m
Voting Liberal” and that I’d mistaken a satiric post for real actual
Liberal voters.
Now I am aware that people have sometimes taken made-up quotes from
my writing as genuine, even when they’ve clearly been satiric. Even when
I’ve used clearly fictional names and characters like “Hoe Jockey”,
“Tiny Habit”, “Arnie (I’m not sexist) Corperson”, “The Speaker: Dolores
Umbridge” or “Christopher Pyne”. Even when their behaviour has been so
outrageous, so unbelievable that surely, surely nobody could confuse
them with the actual Liberal Party. (Although there have been a
couple of times that the Libs have adopted my satire as their actual
policy a few days later – makes me wonder whether all those jobs Abbott
created for monitoring social media are actually just searching for new
policy ideas.)
Anyway, I always try to be careful not confuse what Liberals are
actually doing and saying with attempts to make them look ridiculous
through exaggeration. Admittedly, Abbott, Brandis, Pyne and others make
this an almost impossible task sometimes. But, in this case, the photos
weren’t taken from the site that wasn’t serious. I went back and
checked the site’s description. It asked for people under 30 to post
reasons that they were voting Liberal. I copied its description to show
to someone who assured me that the site wasn’t serious:
“Under 30?
Voting Liberal on September 7th?
Tell the country why!
We’re young people who care about our future and opportunities. We
care about the economy. We care about what jobs there will be for us in
the future. We care about good, sustainable and forward-thinking
government. We want real change.
I’m Voting Liberal is a campaign for young Australians.
Get involved! Get together with your friends and send photos to:
imvotingliberal@gmail.com or message them to this page.”
And I found the other site – the satiric one. Yes, it is hard to tell
what’s satire and what’s not these days. I mean, how do you
caricature Andrew Bolt or Alan Jones? And yes, if that description
hadn’t been written before the election, one might easily think that it,
too, was purely a send-up of the Liberal’s Real Solutions document.
So yesterday I added the following P.S. to the article.
P.S. Just to clear up some confustion, this is a genuine site and not the parody site. Check out its description here.
Update at 8pm.. The site seems to have disappeared in the last couple of hours and that link no longer works.
If you’ve just clicked on the link. Yep, that’s right. It no longer exists.
Given that there seems to have been no updates to the pictures since
the election, it does seem a strange coincidence that the day “This Is
How Tony Got Elected” appears that within a few hours, the site
disappears, leaving no evidence that these people once cared about
“good, sustainable and forward-thinking government”.
Well, this is hardly shades of 1984. I mean, I don’t even know that
there was a direct connection to the Liberal Party it may have just been
created by a group of concerned young citizens determined to create a
stronger economy led by someone who wears speedos and can do a pull-up.
Whatever, it’s gone, and if that’s because of what I wrote yesterday then I’ll need to be careful what I write in future.
I mean, imagine if I wrote about Tony Abbott, and he was gone the next day.
Labor supporters would never forgive me.
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