Take over of the fake Julias

Impersonating politicians has long been apart of the Australian political landscape. In fact, there is a veritable industry of ''fakes''. How these fakes are going can be quite an insight into what's going on with real political leaders.

Julia Gillard, having risen to the top of the political heap, is getting impersonated left, right and centre. Although her new role as PM started only a few weeks ago, she has already expanded the market for that hair, that voice and those very Julia mannerisms. Now the fake Gillards have arrived, where does that leave the fake Rudds?

There are some fake Julias that are already well established, just getting a bit more attention for their skills, and some are brand new to the act. Julia-impersonating veteran, Amanda Bishop, who starred in this video parody of Dolly Parton's 9 to 5 and the slave driver that was her predecessor, is now fielding questions from the public on YouTube about Julia's new government.

Ex-full frontal star Gabby Millgate is a newcomer to the sport of imitating Julia. On her YouTube channel she has a range of topics that her “Julia Spillar” discusses, from the mining tax, to Laurie Oakes, to East Timor negotiations. Lynne Cazaly joins the troop of look-a-likes with her ''Gulia Jillard' and a catchy version of Tik Tok. GetUp! has even done a new ad using a Gillard impersonator to make fun of the government's lack of climate policy, to great effect, making the ad a bit of a success.

There were reports that early in Gillard's prime-ministership some look-a-likes were getting as much as $5000 a pop at corporate events. The real Gillard was quizzed on the matter, even giving tips to Julia wannabes, who needed to be “cutting edge”. She told ABC radio: “I think they're probably doing a Kath and Kim style voice. I think they're probably doing a lot of red hair.”

The fake Gillards have, in fact, sprouted up just as another impersonation door is closing. As with elsewhere, the Julias have taken over from Kevs. It seems the fake Mr Rudds have been having a hard time of it, with bad public sentiment and little of the political parody market.

Satirist Chris De Havilland took up the Rudd gig as his first political character. He and his partner even appeared as Julia and Kev for the 2010 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras for Amnesty International. At first “little Kevy was a little rock star”, De Havilland said, and people wanted autographs, smiled and laughed when they saw him.

But then, suddenly, he became what De Havilland calls the “dragging anchor''. ''It was great fun when they thought he was the messiah, but then it was far less fun when they decided to crucify him . . . I'm still having therapy.”

The vitriol from people who either confuse De Havilland with the actual Rudd or merely use his caricature as a public punching bag was apparently quite bad, especially just before the former PM's exit from the top job. It was only in the past six months that the actor noticed the change, saying people would yell out “you bastard” and De Havilland's Mr Rudd website even got emails for the real Rudd. “If the dollar went down as fast as that, the Queen would have got the bends,” De Havilland said.

The Rudd impersonator, who also does Ozzie Osbourne and Sean Connery, said “I had to get away from Rudd, it was making me look bad.” Except for a few gigs that have been pre-arranged for election time, he said he was now steering away from the fake Mr Rudd business.

For those who are getting into the Gillard impersonator game, some words of advice from the fake Rudd: if the real Julia's popularity also takes a turn for the worse, “be prepared for the backlash”.

There were quite a few Rudd look-a-likes and impersonators when the former PM was at the height of his popularity. Actor Paul McCarthy, from Channel Nine's Double Take and a co-star of Bishop's, did some spectacular Rudd impressions and Melbourne impersonator Ben Price did Rudd regularly on radio.

But since the spotlight is now cast elsewhere, fake Rudds (as well as the real Rudd) might need to start looking for a different job.

Please, Julia - stop moving forward!

Dear Julia (Goolia) Gillard,

I'm not sure why I might be writing this to you. I guess I just don't have the heart to let you keep going as you are, walking head first into a stinker of a political hole.

Not often does one feel like holding out a hand in front of a pollie, just as they've tripped, falling towards a precipice, but on this occasion I feel somehow compelled. Like watching an egg-and-spoon race between two knobbly-kneed asthmatic kids. Standing there, seeing one egg wobble in its metal cup and knowing how the tears are going to flow when it hits the ground and the tin trophy goes to the one who held theirs more carefully.

Julia, for the love of everything Labor, please stop using the phrase "moving forward"!

I know many have already remarked upon your unparallelled efforts last Saturday, announcing the campaign and mentioning the slogan umpteen times and I thought you might have got the hint - the phrase is doing you no favours. There are now those in the wings discussing its merits and flaws, and you, yourself, deciding on the fate of those two little words. I see that you deemed it inappropriate for the baby photo op in the morning on Sunday, raising hope for me. But no such luck, it seemed to be back in by the time you reached Sunday lunch.

Before you decide to keep or drop the phrase, I want you to look at this logically. Examine, before it does or does not go to the slogan guillotine, the pros and cons of the matter.

Pro — I guess it makes you look like you're moving forward?

Con — It makes you look not so dissimilar to your robot-like predecessor and his none-too impressive "working families", which had at least more semblance of content than "moving forward". But it remained an annoying irritant, a tick aggravating the average voter.

Pro — ummm . . . means you're not moving backwards?

Con — It makes a joke of your potential campaign, focuses everything on those little words without any other definition of the terms of this election and what it means. It reduces the narrative of the campaign to something so abstract that one really understands it.

Pro — . . . nope you've lost me.

Con — Gives your opponent easy targets to shoot for, and commentators, easy jibes to make. I mean, The Goanna could have easily enough jumped on the bandwagon but is restrained by an uncharacteristic need to step in front of the proverbial bullet on this one.

So as you can see, the numbers speak for themselves, three solid cons and only one (kinda) pro. I know you think it's catchy, and it makes you sound like there's no reason to look back to, say, your own involvement in the failed Rudd government, or perhaps the coup that got you here. "No need to look back there at those mucky political business or obvious facts", you can say, "we're too busy moving forward".

But Julia, I'm sorry to tell you, it's not going to work. Sooner or later something more substantial will be needed. Back to the drawing board you go.

Yours in faithful servitude to your ginger self,

The Goanna.

Do you like guns?

Pamela Gorman, of Arizona's third district, made this ad. As you can see, the gist of it is that she likes guns and puns, but she doesn't like taxes. As you wipe away that tear of laughter/despair and reflect on the worrisome tea-party types who are slowly crazifying America, there's actually something that we in Australia could learn from the straight-shooting Pam.

Imagine you're a voter in the Arizona third district, you like guns and you don't like taxes. Well, then Pam's the best gun-capable, anti-tax candidate for you. Conversely, of course, if you don't like guns and don't mind taxes, then she's not for you, right? This all seems a bit obvious. But looking recently at Australia's major parties and their leaders, things here are not nearly as simple as in Arizona three.

What if the internet filter is your big issue? You'd say there'd be one party for it and one party against, and you just pick which is which. But, instead, the government last week pushed back the policy into the uncertainty of a review about classification guidelines, promised for sometime after the election. So the policy could yet be dropped; there could be a review with recommendations and modifications; or the review could get ignored and then the filter may head on to become legislation.

In fact, despite the nation only being a short time away from voters picking a team, many of the big ticket items at this election are hard to track down. An emissions trading scheme; it might come back, it might not, but we won't know until 2013. A policy on asylum seekers; we could have a regional processing centre in East Timor, maybe not East Timor, maybe nowhere.

Of course, these are some complex and nuanced issues. Goanna understands that not everything in this world is a yes or a no. But the thing is, in politics the parties' jobs are supposed to be to sell what they're doing, what they're not going to do, what they like, what they don't like.

Inevitably, you won't agree with everything one team is selling. But it should be just enough to convince you to tick its name on the ballot paper. That's the whole freaking idea of democracy. If you don't know who's doing what, then it's time to play pin the tail on the voting donkey.

The Coalition is also guilty of the same lack of Gorman simplicity. Back to the internet filter. Opposition Leader Tony Abbott still seems unclear about the idea. Despite the Nationals recently voting at their federal conference to drop the policy cold, Abbott hasn't been able to make up his mind: ''I don't want to see our kids exposed to really terrible stuff on the internet.''

But . . .

''On the other hand, I don't want to see the internet destroyed by a filtering system that won't work.'' He said that he would ''wait and see'' how the policy developed before taking a definitive stand.

Of course, the reason for this is easy enough to figure out. If you said, for example, ''I sometimes like guns'', or ''taxes can be good'', then you've covered yourself for when you vote against some crazy ''gun for every child bill'', or a ''don't tax people who earn more than a kegillion dollars per annum bill''.

Qualify, obsfucate - it's the easier path to walk.

Pam Gorman maybe a lot of things, screwy gun-toting hick coming close to the top of the list. But at least Gorman's got some political cojones, the type distinctly lacking in Australia.

Gillard is no Twit

In the oh-so-quickly produced Downfall spoof video of Rudd's departure as PM, the witty creator summed up the ousted leader's media strategy as run by "Gen-Y morons" who wanted him simply to "use Twitter and say 'working families'."

Cruel though the sentiment might be, it does point to a certain irreducible truth about the former administration's use of social media. Rudd, much like US President Barack Obama in 2008, was hailed during the 2007 election for using new technologies in his campaign. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, this was supposed to be a new era in connecting with voters and expanding our democracy.

Once voted in, however, there were lots of token new media efforts. Not least was the terrible Rudd "yoof" blog, which was notionally about connecting with Australia's young people, taking their comments to inform policy. The project was unceremoniously dumped a short time later.

Rudd's tweets in particular were criticised as over-scripted, over-political and sometimes not actually written by him. He eventually even created a system where his staff would sign the tweets one way and his personal tweets were signed another, but often neither of them were actually worth following. This was always tweeting for tweeting's sake.

In a tumultuous time, the new leader of the Labor Party, Julia Gillard has been asked a lot about what her new administration, if elected, would be like. "Moving forward", as they say in the new red-haired parlance, are we going to get much of the same? What would be different in the new ginger regime? Climate change, asylum seekers — all the big questions. Including one that has been constantly asked since she became PM. Will she join Twitter?

Finally, the news broke and radio 2UE got the scoop, interviewer Latika Bourke ironically enough tweeted the fact the new PM would be joining the online community: "I just asked Julia Gillard if she will join Twitter. She says she will join soon and she will be authoring the tweets."

And so she did.On Sunday Gillard joined, tweeted her first tweet: "I've decided it's time to take the Twitter plunge! Hopefully I'll master it. JG."

So it remains to be seen whether Gillard will indeed master it. She's off to a flying start. It's a smart move to differentiate herself from her predecessor, confirming that she will write her own tweets. And despite only two tweets in total, she already has 13,695 followers at last count (although small in comparison to Rudd's 940,526).

But beware Julia, this maybe your first step in the Twitterverse, but it's a fine line between using social media as a meaningful way to communicate with people, or simply as another way to put out a press release. Rudd, of course, was seen as doing the latter, especially when it was written by his team.

Coached tweets are clearly not the way to go. The more interesting pollies who tweet are the ones that do it as anybody else would. I mean we don't want to hear about what you had for breakfast everyday, but there needs to be some unscripted, unprepared remarks (as Tony Abbott would say) that can be taken as truthful and genuine.

Of course, it strikes Goanna that Gillard is perhaps not a Twitter person, not like, for example, Malcolm Turnbull who was always inclined towards such things. But she is also not Rudd, she is not likely (we hope) to tweet for the sake of tweeting.

In this next election I wager the PM will not employ new media in the way that Rudd so successfully did in the last, although it will still feature (perhaps an inevitability of campaigning in this brave new world of ours). It will always depend on the individual style of the pollie involved. Julia, in the end, seems like no Twit.

Does anyone still want to go barefoot bowling with Kev?

BELLA COUNIHAN

Many politics nerds will now be looking at the series of events that led up to one of the more remarkable coups in recent Australian political memory, trying to dissect the past to a subatomic level. The tiny hypotheticals swirl around the mind — what could have been, and what has been left by the wayside?

Would Gillard, if the polls had gotten back into shape, have languished as deputy, Costello-style for the rest of her career?

Would Rudd, having lasted to the next election, gone on to win?

Would the Kevin O'Lemon ad campaign been successful?

Had Rudd contested and won the leadership challenge, what would have happened with Rudd and Swan barefoot bowling for charity for the mid-winter ball?

Yes, that's right, remember the Parliamentary mid-winter ball? It seems an ancient world away, where wine was quaffed by parliamentary bods, and where pollies were auctioned off for charity.

If you cast your mind back, you'll remember that there was a range of pollies and activities up for grabs. A surfing lesson with Tony Abbott, which infamously enough went to political organisation Get Up for $16,000, who in turn gave it to an Afghani refugee who they hope will give the Opposition Leader a lesson in refugee politics.

There was a one-on-one dinner with Julia Gillard, which now looks like a bit of a bargain for about $10,000. People are now paying $5000 a head just to be in a room with her.

And finally a barefoot bowls with then PM Kevin Rudd and his then Treasurer Wayne Swan, which got a decent $12,000 bid from TV show, The 7pm Project.

Looking back, it was all a bit of fun. As Barrie Cassidy speculated on ABC's Insiders the Sunday before the auction, perhaps cabinet would be putting in a joint bid for Rudd and Swan's bowling afternoon just to get a chance to talk to the prime minister.

Not any more I'd wager.

Now the idea of a PM bowling on the greens of an RSL somewhere retains a kind of sad resonance. If Rudd now were to agree to play with Swan, it'd be harder to find a more awkward bowls game in the history of the universe. A conversation filled with long pauses, the odd bowls even used as projectiles by a seething Rudd perhaps? Well, maybe not that bad.

But if Rudd is now replaced for the charity event, what a poignant little piece of history that is. Not only did he not get the winning bid as PM (much less than the Opposition Leader's surfing lesson) but less than a week later he's ousted as PM and no one wants to play bowls with him any more.

Indeed, the event may no longer have Rudd, stripping off sock and shoe, to barefoot bowl with the likes of Dave Hughes or whoever from the Channel Ten show. It seems the deal has become flexible in light of events and Gillard could well replace Rudd on the bowling green as well as in the Prime Minister's office.

A spokesperson from Channel Ten, the bid winners, have said that things are clearly still in flux: "We are respectfully giving the government some time to deal with the changes that happened less than a week ago."

Adding that they "are sure that the federal government will honour our agreement in one way or another".

This sucks, no one wants to be Rudd's friend now he's not wearing the crown? Is that the only reason we wanted to hang out with him? Well, some may argue no one really wanted to hang out with him while he was in power. But still Rudd remains the kid ignored, after having distributed all his lollies to kids in the playground, wondering what he got out of the deal.

But hey, a bowls game with Rudd still sounds like an OK idea to Goanna, so if you're listening Kev, there's an open invitation for a barefoot bowls at a green of your choosing, any day of the week. Let's throw this politics malarky out the window and just grab a beer, take off our shoes and roll a ball along some turf.