Don't be Hastie, the joke's on you

When the knives were out for Sussan Ley, Andrew Hastie went into Parliament and flourished his copy of Sun Tzu's Art of War. The message was clear: I'm going to win, but I'll fight when I have the best chance of winning.

If Sun Tzu were to produce a modern edition of his Art of War, he would need to expand his advice on deception to include social media.

No doubt it would include a sentence warning readers against waving his book like a sword in front of friends and enemies alike-as well as a paragraph on the Streisand effect.

Had such an edition existed, Andrew Hastie, apparently an admirer of the ancient strategist, might not find himself where he does today. Nor would One Nation's cartoon Don't Be Hastie have acquired such a wide audience-or proved so embarrassing to the entire political caste.

Pauline Hanson is currently the subject of a media pile-on from friends of the Liberal Party. Liberal MPs appear to be mining her media and social media for out-of-context snippets which can then be weaponised by friendly journalists and publications.

If she makes the reasonable observation that scarce public housing can become a permanent entitlement without any reassessment of need, it is warped into the demonisation of the Prime Minister's mother.

Should she make an observation about the technological sophistication of Aboriginal culture at the time of British settlement, it becomes racial abuse.

And if she pins Don't Be Hastie, a Please Explain cartoon satirising the Liberal Party and the entire political ecosystem through the prism of the reality program The Traitors, and starring the member for Canning, Andrew Hastie, it becomes not a calling to account of the whole system but an attack upon Hastie-and everyone who has ever worn Australian epaulettes.

Hastie called Hanson and Barnaby Joyce "lying cowards". Jacqui Lambie improved the tone of public life by calling Hanson an "angry little woman", a "bloody coward" and a "bloody maggot". Apparently, the proper response to inflammatory political language is more inflammatory political language. To most voters, the spectacle must look less like moral leadership than collective dysfunction-which, inconveniently, is precisely the subject of the cartoon.

Don't Be Hastie is a real work of art, and I owe it to Hastie-and his failure to consider the Streisand effect-that I watched it. Me and somewhere around a quarter of a million others.

Such is the shortage of civilisational context, and the surplus of bloodlust, within the political caste that its members have completely missed the cartoon's message. It provides a compelling narrative of the predicament of the Liberal Party and Australian governance so accurate that it could have been written straight from my own research.

Its framing device is the reality television program The Traitors, in which a cast of contestants, marshalled in the Australian version by Gretel Killeen, tries to identify the secret Traitors in its midst. The Traitors know who one another are and work to eliminate the "Faithful". They may also recruit a Faithful-a "Chosen One"-to their cause. The audience is in on the secret from the beginning, while the contestants descend into paranoia, treachery, mayhem and destruction.

Hence the opening scene, in which Traitor Number One, Anthony Albanese, recruits Andrew Hastie. He sets Hastie against Pauline Hanson by accusing her of using Chinese bots to flood his social media with accusations of treachery.

Hastie then sets off to mobilise the Liberal Party against One Nation while simultaneously mobilising against Angus Taylor, referring to himself messianically as "the Chosen One".

He and Taylor tussle over Taylor's balls-delivered from Amazon by an Indian delivery driver; this really is multilayered satire-and Taylor hits his head and falls into a coma. There, amid what appear to be heavenly clouds, he meets Sir Robert Menzies.

Borrowing from A Christmas Carol, Menzies shows Taylor visions of the misery of the Forgotten People, tells him to stop fighting his allies and sends him back to work. When Taylor returns, Hastie has usurped the leadership and is instructing his troops in the coming war against One Nation, Sun Tzu's volume prominently in hand.

Taylor reasserts his authority and turns his back on Hastie-who stabs him. There follows a flurry of backstabbing as each person touted as a future Liberal leader dispatches the previous contender in turn: Hastie, Paterson, Hume, Tehan, Wilson and Bragg. Finally, the hand of another, unseen traitor enters the frame.

The final scene has Sir Robert Menzies removing his jacket to reveal a One Nation T-shirt before sashaying into the sunset and declaring: "I guess it's One Nation or no nation. Good on you, Pauline."

While directed immediately at Hastie, the cartoon puts the political class generally, and the Liberal Party particularly, in the dock. Hastie is merely the traitor in focus.

It is telling Liberal voters that this might remain the party of Menzies, but it is no longer a party for Menzies. With around half the traditional Coalition voters in our research now supporting One Nation, it confirms those who have already defected while appealing to those who remain.

But it is also relaying an electoral truth: unless the parties of the Right stop fighting one another, Labor will win a third term-even as the cartoon prosecutes One Nation's own quarrel with Hastie.

Perhaps the political caste missed the joke because its members are not among the audience watching reality television. Yet this 68-year-old worked it out merely from seeing advertisements for The Traitors while watching free-to-air television news.

Isn't that part of our predicament? Those who control the levers of power, and occupy the pulpits in the public square, have seldom seemed so divorced from what their "subjects" are watching, doing, thinking and suffering.

Even Pauline herself, a former contestant on Dancing with the Stars, seemed oblivious to the depth of her own side's satire.

It speaks of utter despair and contempt for a political class whose members increasingly resemble characters in a reality television show rather than capable governors.

That may help explain One Nation's reputed appeal to Generation Z. This is political advertising which does not talk down to its audience. It assumes viewers can recognise cultural memes, unravel a multilayered satire and act upon its meaning.

The political class was not merely offended by the joke. It wasn't even in on it.