Meet #faketradie: everything wrong with modern politics in one shitty ad

You have to see it to believe it, an ad so sublimely bad as to challenge previous benchmarks for awful election advertising — viz., Labor’s Whingeing Wendy from the 1980s, and the notorious John Singleton Greiner octopus. The ad, featuring a fake tradie complaining about his investment property, had barely completed its first broadcast before it was being savaged by fake accounts and wisecracks on social media.

There are all sorts of oddities and glitches worth noting. The performer’s delivery is zombie-like, a stumble in his delivery about “war with my bank” has inexplicably been left in, he wears decidedly untradie-like bling and is perched in a most un-OH&S-friendly manner near a circular saw. And then there’s his rather modest election pitch for the Coalition: “stick with the current mob for a while”, a line you’d kill to see the focus group results for.

But the ad is nonetheless elegant in its demonstration of everything that is wrong with modern politics.

It was Kevin Rudd who first began fetishising “tradies”, along with “working families”, in political discourse. The word “tradie” was never far from his lips and from those of his ministers in 2008 and 2009, particularly given a key element of his response to the financial crisis was to pump money into the construction industry. But it was more than merely signalling how the government had selected construction (correctly) as the vehicle for its stimulus program. It was an attempt to co-opt the perceived authenticity of manual labour: “tradies” were somehow more real than other workers, service industry workers or office workers, more authentically Australian, and an easier image to evoke in voters. A man or woman in a suit could be anyone; a man or woman in a high-vis vest or safety gear was immediately identifable as being in construction or manufacturing, and therefore real workers. And with manual labour comes wisdom, of course, the sort of wisdom sedentary occupations can never provide, the sort of wisdom chattering class elites can never achieve: remember Julia Gillard contrasting brickies and “socialites”, upon whom she turned a “jaundiced eye”?

[Let them eat fake: pollies in high-vis evoke Marie Antoinette]

Ever since, politicians have been playing dress-ups, donning the garments of those occupations in order to acquire, or at least briefly borrow, the authenticity perceived to come from manual labour. Even the patrician, super-wealthy Malcolm Turnbull isn’t immune — remember in the first, town hall-style debate of the campaign when he felt the need to mimic Bill Shorten in saluting the work of “sparkies”, in words that clunked straight to the carpet as he uttered them.

But the figure on display in the ad is a particular kind of worker, a figure of Liberal party myth-making, the aspirational tradie, AKA Howard’s battler, or as I prefer to call him, Homo Aspirationis, the ultimate economic unit who longs for freedom from bureaucracy, who yearns to be a small businessman, an entrepreneur, an individual. It was the Howard government that devoted itself to creating incentives for Homo Aspirationis — increasing funding for private schools, encouraging private health insurance, pumping money into the private childcare sector, encouraging “mums and dads” to acquire shares as part of a dream of a great Australian shareholder democracy, in effect using taxpayer funding to subsidise, at massive cost, the dreams of individualism of Homo Aspirationis.

Fake Tradie, however, has another kind of subsidy in mind in his complaints. He “just wants to get ahead through an investment property”. That’s the investment property that might have been purchased by a young family looking for their first home, or a low-income earner trying to escape years of renting, but Fake Tradie acquired it ahead of them, helped by the taxpayer subsidy he gets via negative gearing. Homo Aspirationis must not merely own his own, preferably large, home, but own others’ homes as well — his aspiration, his entrepreneurial drive, is to be a landlord as well as an independent contractor, with all the tax benefits those statuses bring.

[Property sector gears up, but who speaks for the victims of negative gearing?]

This is politics 2016-style: a carefully coiffed middle-aged white man costumed as a “real worker” clumsily delivering his talking points about the need for taxpayers to subsidise aspirations to be a landlord. It’s so fake it’s authentic, because Fake Tradie is exactly, perfectly what he really represents — Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison donning high-vis and lecturing us about the dangers of touching negative gearing. They too have aspirations — though theirs have become steadily less ambitious since last September. At the moment, it’s merely to hang onto power in an election that should have been an absolute gimme for the government.