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Max Gillies.
According to Max Gillies, Australia's finest political satirist,
these are "the best of times and the worst of times. We're living
in dark times and that's the best time to have a laugh and entertain
yourselves in the face of this black hole that we call Australian
politics. I'm doing this with Eddie because I saw [his show]
'Angry Eddie' too, and it was the best political show that I'd
seen - probably ever - and they were good tunes and very funny
songs, and we've ended up..."
"With more of them," says Eddie Perfect, finishing for Gillies.
Together Gillies and Perfect present 'The Big Con', set at a meeting of the Centre For Independent Analysis. Those attending the meeting and addressing the assembled include John Howard, Alexander Downer, Alan Jones, Philip Ruddock, and Amanda Vanstone as you've never seen her before.
Gillies is thrilled with the emergence of Perfect. "It's fantastic. There must be more, of course, but I haven't seen too many of them. I only say there must be more because you'd slit your wrists if you thought there weren't any more out there."
Perfect is a fan of the late political comedian Bill Hicks, and he thinks today's comedians are "appealing to the broadest cross section... possible. So in that respect a lot of comedians that are not filling the shoes of Bill Hicks are trying to be as openly marketable as they can. And we've taken the opposite approach in our show, of going pretty hard on our particular ideas and a script that really gets stuck into these members of the right. It's a dark little show."
I ask Gillies about the beginnings of his landmark series 'The Gillies Report', having just read that the Chaser team had ABC-TV executives recommend they remove the word 'election' from the title of their show. He claims it's nothing new, and that similar things happened to him, especially as an election was called just prior to his show. "So it's the same; nothing's changed when it comes to the Chaser story."
Is the nation's perceived political apathy then partly due to nervous media management? "There's a whole lot of factors. I think there's a lot of news manipulation, agendum manipulation. It's an extraordinary period of collusion between the popular media and the government, in a way that the media should be ashamed of. And the politicians should be ashamed of too, but nobody is. And it's all being done in the name of..."
"Protection..." chimes in Perfect.
"Yes, protection against all these terrorists. We're all going to be bombed in our beds, or raped in our houses. We live under constant fear. And it's the fear that's being manipulated by the media and by the government."
The lack of an effective Opposition is also a part of the problem, he opines. "That's as shameful as the government behaving the way it is," says Gillies. "It's complicit behaviour. And I can't imagine that there aren't good people in the government, either. But they're all complicit because they keep their heads down and don't complain. And there are other periods in history that we're not allowed to compare it to, where exactly the same thing happened... people know things are wrong and things are bad, but they either turn their head the other way or they find scapegoats or they just stay mum."
As the man said, the best of times and the worst of times.
Wade Howland
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Max Gillies and Angry Eddie present 'The Big Con' at the Cabaret Festival from Fri 10 June, proudly supported by dB Magazine.
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