It’s now banned on federal and state government devices but a popular social media app had been embraced by SA Labor to spruik the Premier and good times, writes Matthew Abraham.
If you need a guide to what rings the bells of a thoroughly modern Premier, one social media outlet is most revealing.
No, it’s not Facebook or Twitter. They’re so last Tuesday.
It’s TikTok. It’s modestly described as a mobile app that “allows users to create short videos, which often feature music in the background and can be sped up, slowed down, or edited with a filter”.
It’s proving handy in tracking if Premier Peter Malinauskas has become Party Pete, as the Liberal Opposition now call him, or if he’s still Medical Malinauskas*, as his party might prefer us to think of him.
The app’s videos can range from six seconds to 10 minutes, but most seem to run out of puff at the 30-second mark, the new attention span of the average human being.
Youngish people, otherwise known as “Millennials”, adore TikTok. Critics, and there are many, warn the platform has a highly addictive algorithm, making it like a social media “crack cocaine” for teenagers and even younger children.
The videos are often stupid, the music loud, the message simple and shallow, the attention span brief and the distraction index high.
For all these very same reasons, politicians adore TikTok too. What’s not to like?
TikTok all sounds tickety-boo, as it were, except for one small Debbie Downer. TikTok is owned by a Chinese company.
A few weeks ago, the Albanese Government, acting on advice from intelligence and security agencies, banned the TikTok app from all mobile phones and other devices “issued by Commonwealth departments and agencies”.
The Attorney General Mark Dreyfus, KC, didn’t stooge around, authorising his department to issue “a mandatory direction under the Protective Security Policy Framework” to prohibit the app.
The subtext, of course, is that the app could be used by the Chinese Government to snoop on Australian government ministers and agencies, something strenuously denied by TikTok.
Government ministers complied, of course, but can continue to use it on non-government issue mobiles.
Start the car, start the car! You can bet the local Telstra shops in Canberra did a roaring trade in cheap phones once that edict hit the inboxes.
Premier Malinauskas said earlier this month that “I already don’t have TikTok on my phone for security reasons”, and a day later banned it from SA government devices.
Unfazed by all this spy-versus-spy malarky, he’s still – securely – TicToking merrily away to his 14,800 followers, and to date his videos have garnered more than 309,000 “likes”, a form of social media approval, apparently.
The Premier has pumped up his use of TikTok as part of what is admittedly an impressive and potent social media armoury deployed by the Labor Party
The Premier’s first TikTok was on February 9 last year, spruiking Labor’s policy promising to ban cruel puppy farms.
It featured the obligatory cute puppies cavorting to the sounds of Edison Lighthouse’s Love Grows (Where my Rosemary goes). The Red Guard would have rocked along to that ditty.
You may recall that on the eve of last year’s March 19 state election, in the midnight hours, the Premier dropped into the RAH to say cheers and thanks to the ambulance officers who were instrumental in the stunning election victory that awaited him the next day.
He streamed a brief video of his impromptu stopover among the RAH’s ramped ambo crews on TikTok.
Fun fact: While he remembered to thank the ambos, he forgot to thank his wife in his victory speech the next night – a fail he later publicly rectified.
Since the election however, videos of ambos, or mentions of the state’s ailing health system, appear to have dropped down the Premier’s own Tik Tok “likes” list.
In September last year, he posted a video on the platform of a visit to ambulance officers with the heading “When your Be Real goes off just in time to thank these legends”. Guess you had to be there.
The soundtrack was Hello by Martin Solveig and Dragonette, now one of my favorite bands. They still have bands, don’t they?
Maybe his social media team could have had a closer look at the lyrics, that begin:
“I could stick around and get along with you.
Hello oh-oh-oh-oh
It doesn’t really mean that I’m into you
Hello oh-oh-oh-oh”.
After a slow start, the Premier has pumped up his use of TikTok as part of what is admittedly an impressive and potent social media armoury deployed by the Labor Party.
It’s smart politics. Writing in The Australian, RedBridge Group’s research director Simon Welsh says millennial voters already comprise more than 30 per cent of voters in Australia’s major cities and “in many key metro marginal seats they are the predominant electoral cohort”.
Even a casual glance of the Premier’s TikTok content over the last couple of months shows where his heart, and maybe his mind, have been so far this year. With Gather Round and LIV Golf, the label of Party Pete isn’t far off the mark.
It’s all been fun and a bit of a short-term morale and economic lift for SA as we head into our winter months.
The question now is whether the Premier finds the partying side of his job more intoxicating than knuckling down to the hard yards, doing the work that doesn’t thrill the fickle and feckless among his TikTok admirers.
Is he now happier in a golf cart with the Saudi-backed LIV Golf’s Greg Norman than riding the midnight shift in the back seat of an ambulance, as he did on June 5 last year, an experience he said was an “eye opener” to the “dire” problems facing paramedics in our health system?
Ambulance ramping, and the overloading inside our hospitals, is as “dire” now as it was in June last year, and more “dire” than in the four years of the Marshall Liberal Government. At least they didn’t run out of pillows.
Look behind the hoopla of the footy and the golf, and SA is facing serious structural problems with an economy trying to shrug off a bad case of financial long COVID coupled with a global downturn.
Last Saturday, with the boozy golf crowds hyped to the max around the fairways and greens at the Grange Golf Club, we learned many SA firms were stuck in the bunker.
The Advertiser reported that SA company collapses have soared almost 70 per cent so far this year “amid fears more local businesses will fail to survive a perfect storm of cost increases, worker shortages, and the cost-of-living crisis”.
The construction and hospitality industries, both big and small, are juggling the havoc caused by COVID-19, material shortages and rapidly escalating costs, while battling to attract and hold skilled and casual staff.
This week, the Albanese Government announced yet another review into our defence capability, probing the need for a large fleet of new frigates, scheduled to be built at Adelaide’s Osborne shipyards.
The Australian reports the review throws into doubt the $45 billion plan to build nine Hunter-class frigates, just as work is about to begin on the first block of the first warship in Adelaide.
With the AUKUS submarine jobs still illusory, the frigate contract is one fight the Premier can’t afford to lose.
The once highly-popular Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk allowed herself to be drawn to the bright lights and red carpets and is now finding it hard to shake off her Party Premier tag as Queensland faces serious economic challenges.
The latest opinion polls show her once popular government staring at possible defeat in the state election in October next year.
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It’s unlikely SA’s Liberals will manage to portray Premier Malinauskas as a party animal this early into his government. But it may stick in his almost certain second term. Funnier things have happened.
Or, as our good friends Martin Solveig and Dragonette sing in Hello:
“Oh you’re alright but I’m here, darling, to enjoy the party, don’t get too excited ‘cause that’s all you’ll get from me.”
* Just a brief note: Medical Mali is obviously catchier than Medical Malinauskas, but I refuse to refer to our Premier by the overly-familiar, blokey “Mali”, just as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese isn’t Albo and former PM Scott Morrison won’t be ScoMo to me.
Matthew Abraham’s political column is published on Fridays. Matthew can be found on Twitter as @kevcorduroy. It’s a long story.
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