With an election looming we speak to environmentalist, journalist, and political meme connoisseur, Sean Doherty.
Last time we spoke, Sean Doherty was fighting the now-defeated PEP 11 offshore gas project and highlighting much of the environmental shitfuckery of the L-NP government on his Instagram page, particularly the work of our Hairwaisher-In-Chief Scott Morrison. Now, with an election closer than ScoMo’s lips to Murdoch’s ass, he’s holding onto hope that Aussies are fed up with the current government ready to move into greener pastures come May.
We caught up with him to help make sense of everything that’s going on in Auspol (Australian politics, duhhh) and hear his predictions for the election. Follow him on IG here and peep the interview below:
Back in August 2020 you said you’d semi-reluctantly taken up the position that you’re in, in terms of being an activist on Instagram. Has that changed? Have you grown into it?
There’s still a lot to be pissed off about, that hasn’t changed. In fact, it’s probably got worse, if anything. I came to it [activism] from the surfing world and there were a lot of people on the coast who felt similar to me. But it’s funny, you see a lot of crew have become really active, particularly coming out of music, comedy.
It’s a similar pattern to how I’ve done it, it’s just out of sheer frustration. These people have gone, “Well, we’ve got a profile here in our own little world. Why don’t we speak up on climate? Why don’t we speak up on fossil fuels? Why don’t we speak up on some of this other bullshit?”
You got all these different voices coming from different worlds and talking about the same thing. We’re all like orphans in a way, in our own little bubbles. A lot of those worlds crossover too. There’s a heap of crew I talk to all the time from different places. I chat to Jack River, a mate of mine, she grew up in Forster where I grew up, so I talk to her all the time. I talk to Sarah Wilson, I’ve talked to Dave Pocock from rugby.
Your follower count on Instagram has nearly doubled since then, do you think the shitter this government gets the more people come to you?
Scott Morrison’s certainly been good for my number of followers. It’s not exactly the metric I’m chasing, but he certainly hasn’t heard it, for sure.
Sticking with that, memes have become a big part of what you do. I think people tend to respond to that, or at least the visual draw people in and then they stick around for the other content. I’m wondering how important you think humor is for getting the message across to people?
Oh, man, it’s huge. You’d think it would just be for the young crew, but it often visually represents something that’s a bit abstract to them, because they don’t follow politics, or whatever. Then they latch onto this because someone’s done something quite funny with it.
But it’s kind of my crew, my age, as well. We love to take the piss out of everything. And some of the memes you see in that it’s like… fuck… half my day is spent sitting there laughing at some of that stuff. It’s hilarious.
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You follow Friendly Jordies and Michael West. How crucial do you think “alternative media outlets” are in presenting people with “truth”?
Man, it’s like now we’re in a post-truth world, that’s the sad thing about it. And I think there’s a bit of a correction coming back, right now. There’s a lot of independent news that I look at really closely, and for me, a lot of that, I take to be gospel because I see what they’ve written, and done my best to check it out, and it seems legit.
Is independent news worthy trade-off for potentially dangerous conspiracy theories that some sources peddle?
There’s the extreme other end of it, which is what we’ve just seen the last couple of years and what you’ve seen going back to the Trump election where just complete nonsense is being published, and people are actually taking it as gospel. But for me, the more damaging aspect of that is what’s regarded as mainstream media today.
That’s far more damaging because that’s part of society, an accepted part of society. A lot of it’s crook, it’s fucking really crook. So sometimes, you got to look to some of these smaller outlets who don’t have financial interests and don’t have agendas and whatever, and they’ll cut through, and throw a couple of truth bombs.
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Moving on to ScoMo related content…
My favorite subject…
We’ve recently seen his fumbling response to the floods and how poorly that’s been handled, how people have been left in the lurch, especially, in the Labor seats. Do you think people are capable of forgetting things like this come election time?
The way the world’s calibrated at the moment, it is designed for people to forget stuff. It’s been so quick that you go through a 24-hour news cycle and something else flashy pops up, and there’s another disaster somewhere else, and you forget about it, and move on.
But I think the bush fires and the floods, there’s a deep hurt with people that were directly affected, directly let down, afterward. I think that will never go away with those people. I think that’s just fed into a bigger picture that this mob just doesn’t care about climate and they don’t care about the future. They don’t care about future generations. They don’t care about what kind of world’s going to get left eventually.
At the same time, these jokers just will not lift a finger to do anything. In fact, they’re just making it worse, they’re just chucking more fuel on the fire. So yeah, to go back to the question, I don’t think people will forget. I reckon there’s going to be a big shake up coming.
It seems that Morrisson is really ramping up the military talk as we head into the election. Do you think Australians could trust him to lead us in a war?
Mate, I wouldn’t let him lead me into McDonald’s.
Well, especially McDonald’s, maybe…
He’s hopeless. If you look at the last three years with him out front, it’s just been incompetence, but with a real kind of nasty element to it as well. A real spiteful element to people that aren’t his people. I sit here and just go, “Look, these idiots are talking about war, mate, they can’t even save people from a flood.” What the fuck are these jokers going to do in a war?
Flipping to the other side, do you think Albanese and the Labor differentiate themselves enough on the issues that you care about?
Not enough for my liking. It’s like they say with elections, you never get the perfect candidate you want, but you do get the opportunity to vote out the least perfect one, which is the case here.
Labor has to almost become Liberal-light to get elected, because they lost that last election with all these scare campaigns, and all these bullshit death taxes, and all this made-up stuff. The mainstream media is so calibrated behind the conservatives, that it’s the only way they’ll get elected because everything is all geared against them.
I guess you’d much rather see your government being bent over by The Greens than bent over by…
By Barnaby or Pauline Hanson. That’s exactly right, mate. They’re [Labor] far from perfect right now, but they’ve got to get into power for anything to change. I’m confident that in the long run, if you had them in there, it would be a far better result for Australia on all fronts.
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What are your predictions for the election? Is it possible for ScoMo and Murdoch media to turn this around?
I’d like to tell you it’s going to be a complete landslide and they are going to get swept out of power for a decade, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think it’ll probably be closer. They’ll get more desperate. The mainstream media will prop them up and there’ll probably be a heap of scare campaigns, and they’ll chuck money at everything.
But I can’t see a way they can win. I think Australians are just too, I don’t even know what the word is for it, just shell-shocked. It’s just been three years of just chaos. And sure, bits of it were going to be chaotic, but it didn’t have to be this bad.
I think there’s a big future vote coming. There’s no one I know under 30 who would ever vote for these guys in a million years. The challenge is to just convince a few older people to just see exactly what’s happening, and get them to vote accordingly.
If ScoMo does get voted out, will you celebrate? And what do you think his legacy would be?
Oh, don’t worry mate, there’ll be celebrations. It’ll probably go for six months. Legacy-wise, he’ll go down as the single worst PM this country’s ever had. This is me judging him. I don’t want to even think about how younger generations are going to judge him because they’ll be way more ruthless than I will.
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