Culture

A List Of Very Well-Researched Conspiracy Theories About Tony Smith, Parliament’s Mysterious New Speaker

Parliament got a new Speaker today, but no one's ever heard of him. WHAT IS HE HIDING.

by Alex McKinnon  10 August 2015

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Parliament began sitting today for the first time since Bronwyn Bishop went down, rotors whirring, into ignominy and semi-retirement, leaving the government with the necessary task of picking a new Speaker to fill her extremely expensive taxpayer-funded shoes.

Their pick: Tony Smith. Yes, THAT Tony Smith, the one and only. The big guy! Big Tony! Tony “The Big Man” Smith! Tony, baby! Tonyyyyyy.

Literally no one in Australia knows who that is.

Smith has already promised to do a better job as Speaker than the infamously biased Bishop, declaring he won’t sit in on Liberal party room meetings and that he has “friends on the other side” of the chamber in his first speech. Following his selection Smith was ceremoniously dragged to the Speaker’s chair, as is Parliamentary tradition for some weird archaic reason, as MPs applauded and Bishop glowered from on high like a vengeful bird of prey. The moment was captured in this deliciously sassy Vine by the ABC:

All of which is tangential to the fact that, again, no one on Earth has ever heard of this so-called “Tony Smith”. He is aggressively anonymous. He’s so unknown that even the explainer ‘Who is Tony Smith?‘ articles cranked out by various media outlets this morning sound genuinely unsure. News.com.au noted that in becoming Speaker “he joins David Hawker, Neal Andrew, Bob Halverson and others you’ve never heard of,” while the Herald described him as having “cloaked himself in a sort of fame for a lack of fame,” which is a fancy journalist way of saying “I have no fucking idea who Tony Smith is but I don’t want to seem ignorant”.

Even his name sounds fake; when ‘Tony Smith’ started trending on Twitter, the bots that measure trends just assumed people were talking about a former college basketball player from Los Angeles. Hence this wonderfully bizarre tweet/gif combo: 

Look at him. So forgettable. Suspiciously forgettable.

hnnnnng

WHAT ARE YOU HIDING, FELLA.

Does this fiendishly beige dude harbour some dark secret? Are there nefarious designs lurking behind that pasty facade? We dug around in the bowels of the internet and unearthed some truly shocking revelations that definitively answer the question: Who Is Tony Smith?

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A Face Mash-Up Of Every Conservative Politician Ever

The most fascinating aspect of Smith’s lack of defining features is his face. As has been exhaustively explored by this publication in list form before, many Liberal Party politicians have intriguing faces, if by “intriguing” you mean “somehow manage to look like both a baby and an old man at the same time”. Smith and his furiously bland face inexplicably avoided making that list, possibly because long ago a powerful wizard cast a spell over him that makes your gaze slide off his face like water off a rock.

Several people — presumably immune to that wizard’s charms — have astutely noted that Smith’s insurance-broker appearance may mask some sinister depths, or at the very least that he looks like someone typed “Liberal backbencher” into the command prompter of a 3D printer.

The sheer nothingness of his face outstrips even his Liberal counterparts, though — he’s a visual distillation of generic, rich middle-aged conservativeness the world over. He looks like a Republican Presidential candidate stitched together out of pieces from every other Republican Presidential candidate. If I were better at photo manipulation, it would take you a good long while to pick him out of this line-up.

lineup

But the mystery of Tony Smith goes deeper than this. Shit’s about to get weird.

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A Series Of Ominous Black Sculptures

The power of Smith’s non-existence is so potent that when you search ‘Tony Smith’ in Google Images, not only is he nowhere to be seen — no human people appear at all. One of the most common names in the English language, and not a goddamn single picture of any Tony Smiths make it to the top of the world’s largest search engine.

That is some Illuminati shit, mates. Milhouse was right all along.

milhouse

Instead, dozens of pictures of mysterious black sculptures come up, standing sombrely in fields and courtyards with no clue as to their existence or purpose. They twist into strange, frightening shapes, contorting at hellish angles — relics of an ancient, forgotten evil that slumbers restlessly beneath a bloodied moon.

tonyasmith

Could this be Tony Smith as he truly is? We must consult the Oracle. Prepare the sacrifice.

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A Cool Fun Guy Who Likes To Lean On Cars

But their are shreds of evidence suggesting Smith — or at least some aspect of Smith — exists in flesh-bound, humanoid form. Alice Workman, a Canberra reporter working for Triple J’s Hack program, has spent the day diligently unearthing photos from Smith’s past, and has uncovered perhaps the greatest insight into the man who now sits in the Big Green Chair: he is terrifyingly eager to be photographed sitting on cars. Not in them; on them.

As her investigation progressed, Workman began to discover just how consuming Smith’s car-sitting habit is. He will sit on literally any car. The desire to sit on cars haunts his waking dreams, fuelling him and devouring him by turns. It is a fire in him, this need to find a car and sit on it. There is no car on this earth that Tony Smith will not sit on. One day, he will sit on all the cars there ever were.

We may never know the whole truth about Tony Smith — our investigation yielded more questions than answers. We only know two things: that the only way the government convinced him to sit in the Speaker’s chair was by telling him it was a car in disguise, and that he’s here to stay.