Music

Queensland Punks The Chats Painstakingly Point Out Scott Morrison’s Faults In New Song

"Two firefighters dead and 1000 homes lost, I don't think Scotty cares." The Chats frontman sledges Prime Minister Scott Morrison for his lack of leadership.

by Hannah Story  24 December 2019
The Chats sing for Scott Morrison

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Queensland punk band The Chats have posted a video to Facebook sledging Prime Minister Scott Morrison today.

The band’s frontman Eamon Sandwith started off with a “Merry fuckin’ Christmas” to fans, before introducing the new, instant classic, ‘I Hope Scott’s House Burns Down’.

merry christmasdonate to the firefighters: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/21/how-you-can-donate-and-help-the-volunteer-firefighters-in-australias-bushfire-crisis

Posted by The Chats on Monday, 23 December 2019

 

The song parses through a number of Morrison’s recent failures of leadership, including his choice to bugger off to Hawaii on a family holiday as volunteer firies risk their lives to fight out-of-control bushfires that have so far burned 5,000,000 hectares of land, and killed nine people.

“It takes a lot of nerve to just fuck off when the whole country’s counting on you,” Sandwith sings.

He digs into Morrison’s insistence on extending “thoughts and prayers“, continuing: “Two firefighters dead and 1000 homes lost, I don’t think Scotty cares.”

You can donate to the families of Geoffrey Keaton and Andrew O’Dwyer, the two volunteer firefighters who died on Thursday night, when their fire truck overturned, here.

Sandwith describes Morrison as a “dimwit, dipshit, dropkick clown“, before making it to the crux of the song: that he hopes ScoMo’s house burns down.

The second verse sees him dig into Morrison for spending $100K in community grants designed to “protect children who are at risk of attack, harassment or violence stemming from racial or religious intolerance”, on his own church, Horizon in Sydney’s Sutherland.

“A hundred grand in taxpayer money all towards his own church,” Sandwith sings, before lambasting Morrison for his proposed new religious discrimination bill, which would overrides existing Anti-Discrimination Laws and give excessive freedom to discriminate to religious institutions.

“The religious discrimination bill states he can do as he pleases. But Scotty’s always morally right because he believes in Jesus.”

This time, Sandwith calls Morrison a “redneck, racist, right-wing clown” and a “hideous, hate-filled, homophobe clown“, before referring, as it must be done, to the incident at Engadine Maccas in 1997.

The song has already earned the praise of people like musician Jack Ladder and music journalist Andrew Stafford.

The Chats are perhaps best known for 2017 viral song, ‘Smoko’, a song that’s taken on new meaning in the wake of this catastrophic bushfire season. The band were booked to play New Year’s festival Lost Paradise, which was cancelled earlier this month due to the fire risk on the NSW Central Coast.

The video for ‘I Hope Scott’s House Burns Down’, has so far racked up over 170K views on Facebook. While on Twitter the band demanded that #ScoMoResign, their Facebook post requests that people donate to the firies working on the front line. Please do.