(Image: Australian Greens TikTok/Private Media)

Greens Last week we noted the dubious insight of using children in the Greens’ initial response to the budget. Dubbed as a “budget take you weren’t expecting”, it featured a group of kids, 11ish and under, giving us the actually highly predictable Greens take that the Liberal government gives far too much money to billionaires.

We wondered if the Greens took our feedback to heart when we saw the following video, shared via TikTok over the weekend. Predictable it certainly isn’t:

@australiangreens

Big Green Energy at parliament this week #fyp #auspol #auspolitics #greens #shrekinthesky

♬ original sound – material growl ??

For those not inclined to click, it features party leader Adam Bandt nodding along to the opening chords of “The Macarena” and looking approvingly off screen, with the caption: “Pretty excited for our newest Greens candidate”. We then cut to what Bandt is looking at, which is (and I promise you, there is simply no other way to phrase this) a giant sexy Shrek, decked out in a low-cut, black-leather catsuit and gyrating above Parliament House.

I cannot stress enough that this is a real video released by a well-established political party with nine senators and a lower house member, and not a description of a recurring dream where I’m a political consultant who’s addicted to mescaline.

Never work with animals, children or ALP media strategists The ALP is also adding to the world of fun social media — and whatever we may say about the following, it does at least fit within an established marketing strategy: babies! People like them! And people find it cute when someone dresses them up in gear that references adult things, like Pink Floyd or abolishing the Australian Building and Construction Commission.

So we understand what Labor MP Anika Wells was going for when she shared this pic of her tots in “Albo 2022” onesies:

We’d just suggest next time they could try a couple more takes to find one that doesn’t feature them looking quite so fundamentally unimpressed by what they’re selling.

Cult classics The Australian today features an ominous piece about the South Korea doomsday cult Shincheonji launching a recruitment drive on Australian universities. The conservative fringe Christian sect believes its founder, Lee Man-hee, to be the second coming of Christ. And it seems like it’s done its bit to help bring that doomsday a bit closer, at least when it comes to COVID-19.

A detail from its history, not mentioned in the Oz piece, is that it was allegedly central to the initial outbreak in South Korea, the first major hotspot outside of China. In February 2020, the Korea Centres for Disease Control and Prevention identified a 61-year-old member of Shincheonji Church as being at the centre of the outbreak.

Known as “Patient 31”, she initially refused to be transferred to a hospital to be tested and had attended several church gatherings before testing positive. From there, members most likely infected one another at services in the South Korea’s south-east and then fanned out around the country spreading the virus. It was one of many “pre-credit sequence in a dystopian thriller” developments of the early COVID period, up there with Iran’s health minister insisting everything was fine while drenched in sweat and very clearly infected.

Ozploitation Over the weekend, thanks to the work of a hacker, The Australian and its media section’s Twitter feed briefly started shilling Bitcoin:

We haven’t seen the Oz sell something this enthusiastically since the last time the PMO sent it an advance copy of a Scott Morrison speech.