This Parody Video Of Bill Shorten Trying To Interact With Regular People Is Depressingly Accurate
Bill Shorten: Working Class Man.
Even for someone who looks like the long-lost youngest sibling of the Bluth family that even Buster makes fun of, Bill Shorten has had a rough month. His best shot at becoming Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, was rolled and replaced by a shiny new PM whose popularity has sent the Labor Party’s electoral standing plummeting in recent polls.
Even now that Malcolm Turnbull has promised an election fight on penalty rates — an issue which Labor traditionally goes to town on — Shorten can’t seem to get a handle on what people want. His defence of penalty rates as “the difference as to whether or not [people] can afford to send their kids to a private school” yesterday was a chronically weird thing for a Labor leader to say, especially when Labor sells itself as the party of public education.
Are Bill Shorten’s lines becoming more bizarre by the day or what? http://t.co/9c2q6T7trI pic.twitter.com/HiRIA3h2Br
— Latika M Bourke (@latikambourke) October 6, 2015
What on earth is Shorten talking about ? Next he’ll tell us poor people don’t drive cars./ http://t.co/8x8lCdUixt via @smh
— Mike Carlton (@MikeCarlton01) October 5, 2015
Clearly Shorten’s “private schools” stuff comes verbatim from someone’s summary of a focus group, right?
— Jason Wilson (@jason_a_w) October 6, 2015
Shorten’s long and storied history of sounding like a bland political version of the malfunctioning robotic Richard Simmons from The Simpsons has been heartily mocked before; Shaun Micallef was the first to note his now-legendary Zingers. Now Sydney comedy troupe Topaz Jones have done a spot-on takedown of Shorten’s strange, ham-fisted attempts to interact with everyday people, complete with a Jimmy Barnes soundtrack and a succession of schooners Shorten seemingly pulls out of nowhere. It ain’t half-bad.
It shouldn’t be this easy to mock the guy who almost used to be our next Prime Minister, but it’s way too tempting to imagine a spluttering Bill Shorten spitting out his beer after the camera stops rolling and berating the poor staffer who gave him a Tooheys.