Joe Hildebrand writes: Kyle Sandilands, the fisherman and the horse that doesn’t give a f**k
KYLE Sandilands is the man Aussies love to hate. But proved the opposite when he showed up to his mate John Ibrahim’s house.
OPINION
THE immortal comedian Alexei Sayle has two jokes that between them tell you everything you need to know about life.
The first involves him being granted three wishes and deciding he needs only one.
“I’d wish to be stupid,” he says.
“Because when you’re stupid, you don’t even know that you’re stupid.”
This alone single-handedly solves the problems of just about every individual in Western society and also explains social media, reality television and public service training modules in one fell swoop.
The second is slightly more complex and goes something like this: A man goes to a horse shop to buy a horse but he doesn’t have much money. Nonetheless the salesman finds an affordable nag for him and the man is suspicious. Is it lame? Is it old? Is it sick?
No, the horse salesman assures him and so the man buys it.
As soon as he gets back to his property he takes it for a ride. He goes down a track and comes across a fallen tree but instead of jumping over it the horse ploughs into the log, casting him into the mud.
Shaken, the man rides back towards the house but instead of the horse slowing down as it reaches the gate it just charges straight into it, throwing the man into the ground again.
This time the man twigs. He gets back on the horse and rides it directly into the side of his barn. Sure enough, instead of stopping, the horse smashes into the barn wall.
Furious, the man takes the horse straight back to the shop to demand a refund.
“I know what you’ve done!” he yells at the salesman. “You’ve sold me a blind horse!”
“Nah mate,” the salesman casually replies. “That horse isn’t blind. It just doesn’t give a f**k.”
*******
It was hard not to think of that horse when Kyle Sandilands cruised up to the police raid on John Ibrahim’s house in his Rolls Royce or whatever it was and proceeded to offer the assembled media throng a smorgasbord of one-liners, including warning a Channel 10 reporter to be careful of his car because, as Kyle himself was about to work for the network, he would be obliged to bill it for the damage.
Kyle Sandilands has spoken to media outside the home of John Ibrahim. Police have raided the Dover Heights property in relation to a firearms prohibition order. #DoverHeights #7News pic.twitter.com/Sj9uEPi2rB
— 7 News Sydney (@7NewsSydney) July 31, 2018
According to the international linguistics bible Ethnologue, there are more than 7000 languages in the world and none in which that joke is not funny.
And in a world where we are all just one dumb tweet away from summary dismissal, by God it was liberating. He was that horse.
It is obvious to anyone with a heartbeat and half a brain that a critical driver in the election of Donald Trump, an event almost entirely unpredicted that has completely reshaped global politics, was what is called the “f**k you factor”. In other words, a whole bunch of people who didn’t much like Donald Trump or agree with him just wanted to stick a finger to the establishment.
And far from being a right-wing conspiracy theory, this sentiment was most eloquently and famously expressed by the left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore, who was one of the few to predict Trump’s victory as revenge for the Democrats’ neglect of the working class.
I am extremely opposed to populism and political extremes but I am extremely sympathetic to the struggling people they tend to catch in their dragnet. The mainstream parties forget these people at their peril.
And amid all the hype about last weekend’s Super Saturday result — which returned a status quo where the two major parties were concerned — that is yet another thing that has been conveniently forgotten.
Leaving aside the two effectively uncontested Labor seats in Western Australia, the South Australian seat of Mayo was won with an increased majority by a brand new party that had just lost its leader; the Queensland seat of Longman saw a massive spike in the One Nation vote even though its leader was replaced by a cardboard cutout; and the Tasmanian seat of Braddon saw some random local fisherman pick up more than 10 per cent of the vote even though his primary claim to fame was that he’d once assaulted an off-duty police officer in Geelong.
These are nothing if not interesting times.
Ideologically these parties and candidates are all over the place: One Nation is obviously right-wing, the Centre Alliance is obviously of the centre and the Taswegian fisho was preferencing the Greens and Labor. The only thing they have in common is that they are all rogues, and they all came home with an explosion in their vote.
Earlier this week, I wrote that Malcolm Turnbull had in fact dodged a bullet by losing Braddon and Longman. Had he defied history to claw back one or both from Labor it would have given a trigger to the ALP to replace Bill Shorten with Anthony Albanese and Turnbull would have gone from a fighting chance to no chance at the next election. As it stands now the Coalition will probably still lose to Labor but that will be despite Shorten, not because of him.
Even the Labor operatives who so valiantly saved Braddon from certain death just a few weeks ago acknowledge that Turnbull, for all his unpopularity, is still far more popular than Shorten — leaving a space you could park a bus in for any third-party candidate.
One Labor figure told me that perhaps the strongest sentiment in Braddon was voter anger at the constant calling and polling, a sentiment that in the US resulted in some voters deliberately gaming pollsters by telling them they were voting for a mainstream candidate when really they were planning to go rogue. And we all know what happened there.
Indeed, one of the great mistakes modern politicians and pundits have made in recent times is to confuse what people say they want with what they actually do want.
According to almost every 2016 poll in the US, Hillary Clinton is supposed to be President right now. According to internal Labor polling of just a couple of months ago, Braddon should have been a landslide for the Libs.
And according to public sentiment, Kyle Sandilands is the most hated man in Australia — but he still has the number one FM breakfast show.
The great Paul Keating was fond of saying: “In a two horse race always back self-interest because at least you know it’s trying.”
But in these straitened times of straitjacketed language, times in which political leaders are incapable of saying what they mean and ordinary people are criminalised for saying what they think, voters are turning to a different horse: The horse that doesn’t give a f**k.
— Continue the conversation with Joe Hildebrand on Twitter @Joe_Hildebrand
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