I’ve been mucking about on Twitter today, trying to track down a story about a poster. It seems that once upon a time, a few months ago, a poster appeared in the window of the Preston KFC (128 Bell Street). The poster contains a really awful sexist joke about Julia Gillard, one which may be traced back a few years. The earliest online example I could find of the poster in question appeared in July 2011…
kfc julia gillard snack pack lol http://t.co/QCyew4d
— Simon Wang ♕ (@simonwang12) July 7, 2011
…but the KFC theme has its origins in similar jokes made about Hilary Clinton back in the ’90s (as documented by snopes.com and indirectly referred to in a recent column in The Australian about #menugate). Anyway, to cut a long Twitter story short, the writer Anne Summers assures me that, based on a conversation she had with a journalist who witnessed it, the poster did indeed appear at the KFC in question. The only other detail I think worth adding at this stage is that local (Darebin) Greens councillor/comedian Trent McCarthy apparently contacted the shop and got the following response:
See also : Anne Summers, ‘More in Anger: The politics of gender in Australia in 2013’ (Emily’s List Oration 2013), June 19, 2013 [PDF].
There are many reasons to object to Julia Gillard, but her sex, her appearance and her dress sense are not included in them. If you want some good reasons to dislike her, try:
(a) Dumping tens of thousands of single parents off the Supporting Parents Pension and onto Newstart;
(b) Coming up with a refugee policy which rivals John Howard for racism, and actually goes further in one aspect by declaring that Australia is not part of Australia;
(c) Legislating a neo-liberal approach to global warming, which will become politically impossible to sustain the minute it starts getting results;
(d) Gutting the Mining Super Profits Tax so that the big mining companies are paying a pittance and laughing all the way to the bank; and
(e) Pretending to have “restored balance” to the workplace when the changes to Work Choices retained 90% of it, including its vicious restrictions on the right to strike.
But no. The Tory press and the Right wing shock jocks agree with all of this, so they attack her instead on irrelevant things, or on things that only serve to display their own troglodyte nature.
Hear, hear Ablokeimet.
Can’t find it on the web, but, a decade or two ago, there was word of a KFC Liberal Party Pack: full of right wings and, er, parson’s noses.