TODAY’S DAILY TELEGRAPH EDITORIAL

Meat and Livestock Australia’s annual lamb promotions for Australia Day have featured numerous amusing television commercials.

Eat this and instantly be as one with all people of every culture

Meat and Livestock Australia’s annual lamb promotions for Australia Day have featured numerous amusing television commercials.

This year’s commercial is a little different. Aiming to promote cultural harmony through meat consumption, the ad declines to mention Australia Day at all while pushing lamb as “the most multicultural meat”.

Quite how the politics of lamb differ from those of beef, pork or chicken is difficult to judge, but we’ll take Meat and Livestock Australia’s word for it. Possibly cows are secret racists.

But given the deliberate omission of Australia Day, shouldn’t Meat and Livestock Australia drop “Australia” from its own name?

As previous Lambassador Sam Kekovich would say: “You know it makes sense.”

UPDATE. Further lamb-related thoughts from Michael Mann:

I desperately wanted to love this ad. I truly did. It has great production values, a diverse cast, it even borders on entertaining. But I just can’t bring myself to like it.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m smart enough to know I SHOULD like it, and I know WHY I should like it. It’s inclusive. It’s warm and fuzzy. It's multicultural. It doesn’t alienate anyone — not even the vegans. And as someone who worked in advertising for a while, I can hear that script and watch the cinematography and editing and think “nice!”

But that’s just it. It’s so… nice.

It’s got just the right amount of diversity. It ticks all the right minority boxes. It’s just so gosh darned earnest and is trying so gosh darned hard that it ends up being mostly… nice.

And PC nice is not nice at all.

Good call.