Here’s a question for you: is the Prime Minister’s Office full of work experience kids? Because breaching long term conventions on use of parliamentary footage is the sort of thing which is pretty easy to not screw up, and yet here we are.
By now you’ve seen the video which this week’s PM Scott Morrison was enthusiastically sharing around of footage from yesterday’s Question Time and raising their hands to the stirring strains of Fatman Scoop’s ‘Be Faithful’ to coincide with lines like “You got a 100 dollar bill put your hands up! You got a 50 dollar bill put your hands up!”
Yeah, lit.
For posterity…. pic.twitter.com/7kAKjRjBZX
— Latika M Bourke (@latikambourke) September 13, 2018
And Morrison apologised and pulled the clip after listening to the rest of the lyrics – which are bracingly profane, to be clear – but that’s not actually the biggest problem. It’s that the clip was in breach of Parliamentary rules from the get go.
There are all sorts of rules around filming and photographing parliament, including access to and use of the official footage. Here’s the relevant regulation, but the important bits are that official footage can’t be used for “political party advertising or election campaigns” or “be digitally manipulated”.
Now, if this had been you – a savvy GOAT reader with a passion for spicy memes – then you might not be expected to know these fairly specific conditions.
But if you’re the Office of the Prime Minister then this is absolutely the sort of thing you’re meant to be across. Indeed, it’s why you have the gig in the first place.
What’s going to happen from here? There’ll presumably be a written warning from the Serjeant-at-Arms, the ceremonial bouncer of the House of Representatives, unless he determines that it’s so serious a breach as to require a more significant penalty like banning the party responsible from parliament altogether.
Although given that the PM himself shared the footage, which he should really have known was not OK after a decade plus in parliament, he’s going to own a good percentage of this little shmozzle.
If there’s a bright side it’s that he’s dodged a bullet in that parliament aren’t sitting today. But you just know that Labor are already choreographing some sort of riposte for Monday’s Question Time.