As everyone knows, Labor leader Bill Shorten has an unfortunate habit of telling carefully scripted lines which are meant to come off as devastating burns but generally clang like a kettle tumbling down a stairwell.
These, as the ABC’s Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell so brilliantly coined them, are his zingers.
So you can understand why we were surprised when Shorten dropped a genuinely solid line over the weekend over Peter Dutton’s increasingly not-great-looking actions in giving visas to foriegn au pairs, for which he should be congratulated.
“I mean seriously, what is the go with the au pairs?” Bill said in an unpromising beginning to media on Saturday, thereby killing the meme stone dead.
But then he rallied: “Who would have thought such an arch-conservative, inspiration to the Institute of Public Affairs, was secretly working towards a nanny state?”
And look, we should unpack that because it’s actually a really solid joke.
Sure, that “inspiration to the Institute of Public Affairs” bit was probably surplus to requirements since a lot of people wouldn’t know who the hell the IPA are and nothing kills a joke like having to take a quick discursion into the role and function of policy thinktanks in the Australian politicoscape.
But overall, a very decent pun. We give it a solid 7 out of ten and look forward to Dutton’s comeback – unless he just plays the confected outrage card and threatens to give Labor “a whack back”…
Sorry, that’s exactly what he did?
Oh well, never mind.