In many ways it shouldn’t be a shock. After all, it was only February when Anthony Albanese decided the best hit he could deliver on Peter Dutton was to accuse him of liking Nickelback more than Taylor Swift — the same month Scott Morrison ended his chaotic tenure in Parliament by peppering his farewell speech with as many Swift album titles as he could.
This doesn’t even touch the floods of content wrung from Swift’s recent concert tour — in those weeks, there was no topic, from Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock to the asbestos content of mulch in several schools in NSW, that couldn’t not be bent back, yoga-like, to the topic of Taylor.
The point is, the release of a new Swift album, The Tortured Poets Department, was probably always going to prompt some kind of clunky piggybacking from Australia’s political class. What’s more surprising is how little sense some of it makes…
On Facebook, Western Australian Senator Louise Pratt wished us a “Happy release day”, with Albanese’s face photoshopped onto Swift’s beneath the title “A tax cut for every Australian taxpayer”. Only… the tax cut isn’t “released” for a few months yet, and there’s not even a vague attempt to work a pun or allusion into the text.
Member for Cooper Ged Kearney went to a little more effort — sure, The Tortured Dutton Department isn’t a ton better, but Kearney puts together a track listing, including “Down Bad (For the Far Right)” and an addition to Swift’s “loml”, short for “love of my life”, which in Dutton’s case apparently refers to Mike Pezzullo:
