Club Bloggery 9: Not Funny

The election may be over, but our Club Bloggery series for ABC Online continues unabated for now (if perhaps at a pace more commensurate with the impending summer holidays). This week, we take a look back in some degree of anger at the 'just kidding' defence for political stunts gone wrong, which was employed several times during the campaign. Barry, Jason, and I have now posted the article at ABC Online and on our group blog Gatewatching.

Not Funny

By Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, and Barry Saunders

One of the most prominent recurring features of the long election campaign we've just put behind us were our politicians' and journalists' usually ill-fated moves to attempt the humour defence whenever some political stunt or statement didn't pay off.

We saw this first with Labor's star recruit Peter Garrett, who was reported to have said "once we get in, we'll just change it all" in what he was later at pains to describe as a "short and jocular" conversation with Channel Nine personality Richard Wilkins and talk radio shock jock Steve Price.

We're tempted to believe Garrett on this - you'd hardly spill campaign secrets if you found yourself talking to those two - but if nothing else he certainly showed some very poor judgment in joking with Price, who was subsequently proven to be Australia's unfunniest radio DJ this side of Kyle and Jackie O.

The "I was making a funny" excuse found only deaf ears and outraged faces when it was used again in the dying days of the campaign to soften the impact of bogus campaign flyers in the Western Sydney seat of Lindsay which claimed that Labor was sympathetic to Islamic extremism and supported the Bali bombers - a racist and deliberatively deceptive stunt which some commenters in the blogosphere dubbed 'bogangate'.

Not only were the flyers themselves offensive to anyone who bothered to read them (they cast a pall over retiring Lindsay MP Jackie Kelly, and ensured that in the face of a 10% swing to Labor, would-be MP Karen Chijoff's career never even got started) - what was even more execrable were Kelly's painful attempts on radio and television to pass off the flyers as "a Chaser-type prank". As Laurie Oakes pointed out when he savaged Kelly with righteous rage after her interview, nothing about the Lindsay events was even remotely funny.

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