Over the past couple of days, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has been channeling his predecessor and whipping out a bit of a three-word slogan. He first broke it in on 7.30 with Leigh Sales on Monday night. Then ABC Radio in the morning, before heading to 3AW and dropping it four times in less than two minutes. The phrase: “continuity and change”.
In Turnbull’s eyes, this is an eloquent way of commenting on the ongoing drama between his current government and that of Tony Abbott. “The bottom line is there is continuity [many elements of old policy] and there is change [leadership, number of raw onions eaten, et al]” he said in that first radio interview. But, to the rest of the world it looks a bit like this:
“Continuity and change” is the official slogan of Veep‘s main character Selina Meyer (played by Julia Louis Dreyfus) as she runs for the US presidency in the show’s fourth season. It appears on her campaign bus, on her logo, and (as BuzzFeed‘s Mark DiStefano pointed out) is regularly whipped out in the same kind of interviews Turnbull has been facing this week.
While you may think this is simply a case of great minds thinking alike, it’s a little more complicated. This is more of a situation where some of the world’s best comedy writers crafted a perfectly hollow and contradictory catchphrase to use in a satire about the modern farce of politics, and then were proved spectacularly correct by our elected government.
This is a fact not lost on those involved. Overnight, some of the show’s stars including Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Timothy Simons along with writer/producer Simon Blackwell have responded appropriately on Twitter:
You couldn’t make this stuff up. Oh…that’s right…you could.
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal.
He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.
