Meme-aganda: 2024 as told through 10 godawful ALP posts
Earlier this month, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese shared an Instagram post purporting to reveal his most listened-to songs on Spotify for 2024 — and it would appear the workshop process for his year’s listening acknowledged that the optics of favouring foreign megastars like he did in 2023 hadn’t played as well as it might.
Thus 2024’s list features a suspiciously spot-on mix of inoffensively trendy and entirely Australian acts. We assume there must have been some real agonising about whether it would be too divisive to include more than one Indigenous artist.
January
Back in the more innocent time of January 2024, when vast swathes of the media were trying to initiate a Dismissal-level crisis over Labor’s changes to the promised stage three tax cuts, the social messaging was simply a dull echo of a meme format only known to the terminally online.
March
This post appeared after the ALP apparently concluded that its straight campaign video from January wasn’t grabbing the attention of tax-cut-obsessed young Australians. What better solution than to just plonk on a bit of unrelated attention-bait at the start?
May
Jesus Christ.
A bonus for the following lazy number. As we’ve noted before, the use of the “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme is itself a profoundly “How do you do, fellow kids” move these days.
June
For God’s sake guys, what is this? Who is it FOR?
August
Nothing better than a fun little CD-based gag for all those ’90s babies currently struggling through a major cost of living crisis. Added points for attracting an absolute flurry of community notes pointing out that much of what the post covers wasn’t going to be “so helpful” until well into the future.
September
Surely the nadir. Where to start in this rancid cocktail? The AI generated voice spitting out Gen Z slang explaining why under 16s were about to be banned from social media over the deliberately ugly overstimulating stack of videos hits a symphony of tone-deaf notes. And let’s remember it’s aimed at an audience who you want to ban from viewing it and, let’s face it, isn’t watching your feed in the first place.
October
Cracking stuff. Incidentally, within two weeks of this post, Newspoll showed that the Coalition had pulled ahead of Labor for the first time since the May 2022 election, and Albanese’s approval rating as prime minister had fallen to its lowest level yet.
November
November was absolutely lousy with lousy posts — presumably aimed at arresting the continuing slide of approval ratings — but for whatever reason, the ALP social media team was particularly excited by the surreal interview conducted with the stars of the blockbuster Wicked, in which the interviewer … you know what, I’m not doing this. If you think it’s worth doing some googling to find out why the government of Australia is posting a picture of someone holding someone else’s finger, then that’s your business, and I suppose it’s also a validation of the ALP strategy here. But I bet you don’t.
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