Culture

Bill Shorten Has Turned #TheDress Into An Auspol Meme And It’s Just As Awful As You’d Expect

ZINGER.

by Meg Watson  28 February 2015

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In a move which will surely be acknowledged as the man’s sole legacy for generations to come, Bill Shorten has today jumped on #thedress controversy that all the #kids are talking about on the #Twitter and created an #auspol #meme in an attempt to do a #viral.

Much like lightly pushing on a newfound bruise, the pain it elicits is so strange and intriguing that it’s actually somehow appealing.

Behold:

Of course, these kind of cringeworthy tactics have long been in the arsenal of many out-of-touch politicians. The US Speaker of the House John Boehner regularly bombards President Obama with Taylor Swift GIFs in an attempt to connect with the youth vote. The Victorian Liberal Party took to Buzzfeed Community listicles during the 2014 state election, and Former treasurer and fledgling Redditor Wayne Swan has been building an especially heinous collection of wordy and incomprehensible memes on his Facebook page for the past couple of years.

During this time, Bill Shorten’s main strategy has been to launch listless zingers into the universe and hope that young voters either take pity on him or assume he’s being self-deprecating or ironic. Unfortunately this has only led to a greater call to make Shaun Micallef PM — the guy who pointed out the zingers in the first place.

Now, he’s trying to fix all this by seeking political wisdom from a day-old Tumblr and Buzzfeed-led screaming match about the colour of an ugly dress.

It has not gone very well.

Even if we ignore the fact that this is undoubtedly the next step in Shorten’s inevitable decline into total dad-dom, the post still has some major problems.

Namely, in its attempt to draw attention to the similarities between Tony Abbott and potential leadership contender Malcolm Turnbull it kind of, sort of, maybe draws attention to the similarities between the Labor and Liberal parties. After all, it comes just one day after Labor backed down and offered its support for the government’s data retention scheme — a $400 million plan that involves storing and analysing everyone’s metadata for two years which has been openly criticised by everyone with a working internet connection.

Hope you’re happy with your decision to back team #blackandblue or team #whiteandgold; this debate — and its related memes and #content — is never, ever going away.