The Chaser Sent A Kid With A Recorder To Play Terrible Music At Politicians

There’s only nine days until the federal election, which means there’s only nine days until we can encase ourselves in a giant cocoon filled with antifreeze and hibernate until we’re ready to deal with the neverending shitshow that is Australian politics again. This has been the longest election campaign in living memory, and when it’s done you’re officially allowed to have some downtime from politics until the next awful thing happens.

It’s likely that the politicians are just as sick of this marathon to nowhere as everyone else, but they’re not allowed to show it. They have to greet every rude, hateful, bizarre, boring or otherwise insufferable punter with a smile and a listening ear, lest the TV cameras pick up footage of them telling someone to piss off (although Barnaby Joyce doesn’t seem to care that much).

To test out just how far that patience can stretch, last night The Chaser sent out an adorable young kid armed with a tool that strikes dread into the hearts of parents and music teachers everywhere: the recorder. Every Australian schoolkid had a red hot go at playing ‘Hot Cross Buns’ on a recorder at some stage, and every one of them managed to sound like a referee’s whistle getting sucked into a black hole.

Posing as a young musical prodigy with her proud mum, that little sadist tortured the ears of some of the country’s most prominent politicians with recorder screeching to see how long they could take it. Greens leader Richard Di Natale managed to shut it down fairly quickly while being pretty polite about it, whereas Tony Abbott visibly had zero time for this kind of shit. Labor’s Lyndal Howison, meanwhile, really needs to get tough on evil children who torment her for fun.

It’s almost over. Dear God, it’s almost over.