vote for lame

The above clip is an ad for one of this year's federal unnatural selection candidates for the seat of Wills (in Melbourne). Namely, it's an ad for Zane Alcorn from Socialist Alliance (SA). If you can stomach watching it, you'll see a failed attempt at winning the youth vote. Somebody has clearly neglected to tell SA that it takes a bit more than a terribly unfunky aesthetic to win a seat. And who the hell thought it would be possible to win a seat by appealing to just one cohort within it? Especially with that terrible attempt at humour? Strangely enough, I couldn't bring myself to vote Zane second, despite the Greens 'how to' card asking me to do so. It was very difficult bringing myself to vote at all.
SA are allied with the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP), so that explains why Zane's been posing as a woeful Emcee posing as a politician: feeding votes, more or less, to the DSP.
There is an argument that content is more important than aesthetics. But sometimes there can be a lot of content in aesthetics. In Zane's case, there's a very clear agenda of attempting to win the youth vote by presenting himself as an alternative to the other politicians.
So I'm not criticising Zane on the basis of his content (not of this clip but of his policies [the usual SA/DSP suspects: environmental sustainability/global warming, worker's rights and youth rights, etc.]) because no doubt there's plenty of merit to the ideas he's put forward, in principle. My assertion is that, if Zane's intention is to effect change in regard to these issues, participating in Government isn't going to help. Representative Democracy is a sham. It won't solve issues, it creates them. Zane's aesthetic belies a disingenuous attempt to paper over this fatal flaw in the logic of our so-called democracy: the illusion of choice.
Having said all that, I did vote. It was a guilty pleasure helping vote out Howard. But I'm certainly not labouring under the misapprehension that there is a substantial difference between Howard and Rudd and his lackeys. Or if I were Zane I suppose I'd say, "Rudd and his homies."
now playing: battles - rainbow