Politics

Cory Bernardi Has Recruited Famous Postal Survey Failure Spokesman Lyle Shelton

It's Okay to Vote No.

Lyle Shelton

Want more Junkee in your life? Sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook so you always know where to find us.

Lyle Shelton has announced today that he will join Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives party as its federal communications director. Lyle is best known for running the immensely unsuccessful “No” campaign against marriage equality, and for being told by the entire world to eat shit.

Shelton revealed yesterday that he was leaving his position as Managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby for a career in politics, the “direct-to-DVD sequel” of career moves. Today in Toowoomba, leader of the Australian Conservatives Cory Bernardi announced Shelton would become the “spokesman for the party outside of the parliamentary ranks”.

Shelton said that after a decade “fighting for truth and freedom” he had decided that Canberra was “broken”. He also declared that the major political parties had  “abandoned the virtues that made Australia what it is and handed responsibility for social policy over to the “Green rainbow left”.

He credits the marriage equality win for demonstrating “the lack of common sense and principals in Canberra”.

“Watching a Coalition government tear itself apart over whether or not marriage should be between something as basic as a man and a woman helped me to realise that Australia’s conservative political party had lost its way,” he said.

As well as spearheading the “No” campaign, Shelton helped carry out the negative campaign against the Safe Schools education program while at the ACL.

“The Coalition government’s inability or unwillingness to even provide basic protections for freedom of speech and freedom of religion quite frankly left me stunned,” he said in his speech.

“As a result of their silence, elites are telling us we’re bigots if we don’t support teaching children their gender is fluid,” he said.

Bernardi used his time to praise the new addition to his party, saying:

“Here is a man who lives his principles every single day, not only in the public sphere but in his private life as well,” which is probably depressingly true.

However, since the announcement, people haven’t exactly been overjoyed at the news: