Title: Simon Hunt [Part 2] interviewed by Scott McKinnon, 17 August 2022. Last Updated: 2025-09-09 1:00PM Origin: https://amplify.gov.au/transcripts/SimonHunt_Part2 This transcript was generated by Amplify and may contain errors. Read more about how this transcript was created at https://amplify.gov.au/ 00:00:02.000 This is Scott McKinnon Part 2 of an interview with Simon Hunt on 17th August 2022. This recording is taking place at Simon's home in Surry Hills and the interview is being recorded for the State Library of NSW Oral History Collection and ah Simon, for the, we've reached the point of the next big moment in your life as an activist and artist, which is the birth of Pauline Pantsdown. 00:00:31.000 Do you want to talk about where she emerged from? [Simon] Sure. Well, I mean, around about 1996, I was finishing off, it was, ah, spent ah 3 or 4 years on that ah trying to get that giant feature film up ?Risk? set, that's set, set, in the German underground to the German cabaret underground prior, prior to the Nazi takeover. Umm. And that was sort of, ah, as that sort of wound up 00:01:01.000 It became my a, my Master of Fine Arts. So I was basically did a Master of Fine Arts by research as, as my highest qualification was essentially a Year 10 school certificate. And, umm. 00:01:16.000 And, although I've done the SAT's in America, umm, I was sort of becoming more entwined with the university. I was still doing some casual semesters, but then also some part time ones, like it was sort of heading towards a full time thing and so they were very happy that. 00:01:31.000 I was actually able to have some sort of degree to show, as I didn't have an undergraduate degree. So a lot of my historical research into that and the way that was used in the construction of a fictional narrative have become that. So I sort of finished that off, but my head 00:01:46.000 Because I've been reading a lot of German in particular, that my head was very much full of ah theories of fascism and and connections and the way things like that had happened and umm, when. But but yeah, I was essentially, you know, between projects and suddenly. 00:02:06.000 Pauline Hanson emerged now Pauline Hanson was a Liberal candidate who had been ah dis-endorsed by the party after umm after making. 00:02:16.000 Some statements about Aboriginal people but it then run as an independent after being dis-endorsed and and. 00:02:23.000 Because of the lateness of her disendorsement, ah was still a Liberal on the actual voting ballots and stuff and had been elected to Parliament and had immediately made a very highly public splash with. 00:02:39.000 Particularly when she got to the point of her maiden speech where she said we are in danger of being swamped by Asians, um, she was representing Aboriginal people as being privileged, more privileged than than the rest of us. 00:02:54.000 It was some very outright racist statements that we hadn't heard in public discourse for quite some time. I think Australia by the sort of the mid to late 90s, was at a point where racism has always existed in Australia as as a white colony, um, has always existed here and still does exist. But I think we've gone through a period since perhaps the mid 70s where it hadn't. 00:03:24.000 Been a lot in public discourse. The racists are disorganized, um, they're in smaller groups and that individual people would would sort of keep it to themselves and mutter it under their breath. But here we had it on the floor of federal parliament and she made this enormous splash in that way. And it did, really, it was funny that it sort of it rang bells for me immediately just in terms of the research I've been doing that, that really the construction of the construction of fascism 00:03:55.000 Within a nationalist, nationalist context always requires, for example, like an external foe and an internal foe and you have to fight against both at the same time. And you know, with for example, with the Nazis, the external foe was essentially Versailles and everything that Versailles, the Versailles treaty represented. With Hanson, the external foe was Asian people. They were like a wave. They were a wave of people who were. 00:04:25.000 Who was swamping us? Who were going to like take over and dominate and destroy our culture? And then the construction of of nationalism in that context always also requires like an internal foe. And so in another sense, you had like the privileged Aboriginal people or the privileged Jews within the German context. And so it was sort of matching, you know, I don't think Hanson would have been directly aware of of of the broader. 00:04:56.000 Perhaps international reading of what she was on about, but it was it was something that was immediately recognizable. But on a personal level, it's just sort of 00:05:05.000 Her words, everybody was talking about her, everybody was, everybody was on about her, but with a different response from different people according to how you were affected. You know, I think to Aboriginal people it was just like more of the same, more of the same racism, you know. For Asian people, for Asian people. I mean, she hadn't discovered Muslim people yet that that was the next time around. But um for Asian people, it was just, it was a bit of a body blow. I mean, it's like these people who've been here for generations. 00:05:35.000 Not that that matters whether people have been here for 5 minutes or for 30 years, but like, it was new to hear that in a high profile public discourse um. You know ah, my partner at the time was, was an Asian man and he was, it was something that he'd never heard, you know, he was, he was born here, you know, and it's something that he'd never quite heard in that sort of a high level public discourse, you know, and um whereas I think for like a lot of white people, it was more like, Oh my God, she's such an embarrassment, you know? That, that, 00:06:06.000 That she's an embarrassment to us because she made international headlines initially through Asia, but then as she grew in stature eventually through the world, it was more like how embarrassing she was. So it was a different thing. But you know, to me, it was something that really needed to be faced off. And I guess in thinking back to, you know, I'd been doing a lot more cut up. I'd been doing, my shows with cut up voice had gone from 00:06:34.000 the single voice of Fred Nile through a variety of sort of theatre productions, where it'd been like, taking things from media and making sort of comedy 00:06:43.000 Using a bit of a dance beat going more and more towards song form. So I decided to actually make like a beat driven Pauline Hanson song and develop into, into some sort of a show. And so you know, I was using that. I mean, going back to the the research once again is that um, 00:07:03.000 I'd been reading and corresponding with um, ah, Professor Peter Yellovich who was a bit of a primary theorist about um, ah, the political evolution of, of ah pre war ah, Berlin cabaret and stuff like that. 00:07:18.000 But his, his book, which was called I think Berlin Cabaret from memory [laugh] was, there'd been like certain constructions he'd begun to examine in that. And it was about the use of absurdity in regards to Hitler in particular like that, that that um people had ah found Hitler hard to satirize. And particularly, you know, the early period, the mid 20s, the late 1920s, before he really came to power when they were allowed to satirize him. 00:07:49.000 And you know, because he was so over the top and so ridiculous and so superlative and hyperbolic 00:07:55.000 Within his use of the German language that 00:08:00.000 They had to, what they had to do was to, just imitate that rather than try and exaggerate it, use an imitation of that, but to change the subject matter, to point out how ridiculous it was. Because like in the real world, you had like Nazi people saying things like, you had these pronouncements, you know, saying like, you know, we don't need higher bread prices. We don't need lower bread prices. We need National Socialist bread prices and things like that, which is just absurd, you know, ridiculous. That's, that's sort of the real world. 00:08:31.000 So what they do with Hitler is they would take, they would imitate the look, you know, the unique look for little moustache. He had, like Pauline Hanson, he had an unusual voice and accent within the within the um context of the German political parliament. You know, he was that, he was that, had that Austrian slant still to his voice. And so they would just imitate him completely with barely any exaggeration in his manner, ah but have him talk about completely absurd different things, not about his racial policies or anything like that. 00:09:05.000 And then show up the absurdity of him in doing that. So I started actually used that as a model with the first track, which is called I'm a Backdoor Man for the Ku Klux Klan, which sort of went there's a lot of different sort of takes in it. But some of it was really about, you know, I like trees, I like shrubs and plants and trees and plants, but I put up the fence so they can't get in, you know, which is obviously like a direct illusion to to immigration, but it's just sort of absurd or she's just saying ridiculous things. But in her manner that she's actually in the in the song, she's actually. 00:09:38.000 A proud gay man who's completely intolerant of people who are not gay. And ah, if they, if they're not gay, they should get out of they should get out of the country. 00:09:48.000 So it was sort of like, in that way, Pauline began pretty much like as an extension, you know, of that, of that sort of thing. So now I was putting the song, I was just like putting the song together and I played it to a few friends who were who were just loving it. And the context of it is that I also wanted to make, it was the first time I'd used a digital recording system to, ah to put one of these pieces together. Prior to this, I'd been using a combination of like a low grade sampler, you know, which I could only get about 5 seconds into at a time, which I could play on a keyboard. 00:10:23.000 And reel to reel tape recorders, predominantly in an 8 track reel to reel tape recorder. So all of the shows. 00:10:29.000 Had been put to that together they've been recorded to tape um but with me sort of adding things playing things off the sampler. But we had just, at the university where I was casually teaching, we just um bought ah Pro Tools, a digital recording system and I thought I need a project to teach myself how to do this, you know and so that project was Backdoor Man, you know and it was still a bit of low grade. I got all I had to get all these, I recorded lots of Hanson off on, on VHS at home off the television. 00:11:01.000 And then I had to go through one program to sort of de-noise it and remove VHS hiss and then I better be putting it into Pro Tools and start cutting it up. But um in those days if I wanted to like 00:11:15.000 to get coherent speech, which I was really finicky about, you know, I think that's what really got people about the song, that it just didn't sound edited, you know? But it was a, it took months because I was like, if I wanted to slow down a word, I'd have to like go to a different program and then bring it back again if I wanted to change a pitch in the word 00:11:34.000 I'd have to go to another program and come back again. So it was a very, Backdoor Man was like a very long, laborious project. So I was working on it, playing bits to people. And my friend Tobin Saunders, who was the drag queen Vanessa Wagner, at the time, he had quite a successful series of gay events. He'd been working in partnership with a guy who went by the stage name of Jamie, Jamie James, and they were having the Jamie and Vanessa parties, which are like really great, fun, humorous big gay parties. 00:12:05.000 Tobin was also building a bit of a profile in the media. He'd done like some promotions in the Vanessa character for I think, Aussie Male and stuff like that, and had, did occasional 00:12:19.000 scene chats with people on Triple J. Now he decided to sort of go his own way and have his own party. And he's having a big party at the Metro Theatre in Sydney and said, you know, can we use the song for them? And I said, yeah, no, that sounds like a really good place to launch it. Let's launch it at the Metro Theatre. 00:12:37.000 I'm thinking of it as just another live performance, you know, like the other ones I've been doing for years in the Queer underground. And he said, OK, well, you know, so he said, well, look, I'll do Pauline. I said, actually, I think I'd like to do Pauline. I really want to, I'm sort of being sort of getting into this character while I've been doing it. And he said, OK, so and he constructed this show where 00:12:59.000 I would be bursting out of a, bursting out of a spaceship as Pauline and then doing the song and he had this whole family, this cast of dancers he's working with who are like a,  00:13:11.000 Like a family. Vanessa was like the mother of the family, like a real Aussie scene, you know, Hills hoists and stuff. And ah, some of them were animals or some of them were children and all these costumes and Pauline was attacking them. And um, then basically at the end, she would, she'd grab Pauline, rip the wig off, exposed me as an alien, you know, with my bald head underneath and these two antennas that popped up and then threw me into the spaceship. 00:13:41.000 Which, you know, I went, I went away in. And so that was like a construction of the show. But prior to the performance, he was doing one of his regular Triple J interviews and you know, just saying what's on. Look, I've got this party on and here's this song we're going to use for a show and played it on the radio. And it just went absolutely wild. It was like the number one request on Triple J for like 6 days in a row. Just went absolutely crazy. And all this I had, I had 00:14:11.000 We did the show was really successful, very sort of wild night. 00:14:15.000 But it continued on, on for like, I think it was 6 days, or it could have been 10 days, 6 to 10 days, we'll say. And then I had record companies coming at me saying, you know, they wanted to release it. But obviously, like a lot of my other shows, the music had been built by some quite intricate 00:14:35.000 cutting and editing of other people's music, but nevertheless a lot of it very recognizable in this case. 00:14:42.000 And so I very quickly, I spent like a week, spent most of that week actually like redoing 00:14:47.000 music for it, having it sort of replaced by that. Somebody saying we'll need to get a choir to sing. There was this series from, there was a chorus, a vocal chorus from a 1930s film called The Perils of Pauline. Which, you know, I will have to get a choir and maybe we can get the gay...it was all in planning processes for the big release. Then Pauline Hanson took legal action against the ABC because I was not public as it was just, you know, under the name Pauline Pantsdown. I was not and I was not, I didn't want to be public with it because I wanted the character to exist on their own, you know in the  00:15:21.000 way that I saw Pauline Hanson herself as a bit of a character in the media, in the limited media that we had in the mid to late 90s, which was pre most of Australia being really connected or regularly on the Internet. 00:15:36.000 I wanted to exist in that context, but so she took tried to get a temporary injunction on the grounds of defamation that the song defamed her. 00:15:49.000 In order to, 00:15:51.000 In order to have it taken off air, and she was successful in the Supreme Court of doing that. So the song was suddenly gone off air. 00:16:00.000 And, but she had, she hadn't delivered her statement of claim to give reasons as to why that happened. The judge actually let them, you know, let that sort of be delayed because the idea was she was getting a temporary injunction while they're getting the case and then they were going to sue. And then 00:16:23.000 basically, you know, we were hitting a lot of the major media and stuff at this stage. It was like a big story. But then Princess Diana died in a car crash in a tunnel and world media and Australian media in particular was just completely taken over by Diana. And so just like it was gone over, finished, end of story, bang, you know, it just sort of disappeared like that. Pauline Hanson having, having gained her temporary injunction in the expectation by the court that she would then deliver her full case with a statement of claim, 00:16:55.000 didn't do anything, just held on to that statement of claim for like sort of 13 months or so. 00:17:01.000 That point, 13 months later, the ABC issued to have to have the injunction overturned because of the non delivery of the case and then she finally, her lawyers finally delivered the statement of claim which was that 00:17:17.000 a whole lot of it was basically taking the song as everybody would think. This is Pauline Hanson that she's put out the song, that she believes these things. You know, I guess it was a bit of a compliment to my editing skills, but, 00:17:29.000 nevertheless, and had, it full of ridiculous clauses like, 00:17:37.000 the song imputes that the plaintiff is proud to engage with anal sex with members of the Ku Klux Klan. And there was a there was another one was there was this line in the song that said, 'I'm a very caring potato'. And it had just been a ridiculous line which had been, you know, I found this really smarmy sample for saying I'm a very caring person. And I just run through all the P words I had digitized and potato sounded really funny. So I thought I'd just throw that in. I'm a very caring potato. But there was a 00:18:09.000 But in Hanson's statement of claim, there was this line. The the song imputes that the plaintiff is a potato, which is understood, which is understood to mean a male engaged in sexual acts with another male who has voluntarily 00:18:28.000 Inserted his genitalia into the anal passage of the other male and it was just this bizarre, ridiculous, decontextualized stuff, you know and so 00:18:39.000 Engaging with the ABC lawyers, but the weird thing was that it was a defamation case and my father as a judge like he's, he's was seen as like a huge precedent for defamation cases. Most defamation cases in Australia would be quoting various judgments that he'd made. And in this case, both the ABC's lawyers and the Hanson's lawyers were offering different interpretations of of my dad's judgments about it. 00:19:11.000 And so what he was doing was he'd be writing out all these interpretations of why. 00:19:18.000 Because he genuinely thought that the Hansen's lawyers were completely wrong and that the judge had made an incorrect judgement. You know, apart from the fact of him being my dad, which I guess, you know, was ah, fueled his passion for the whole thing. But he'll be writing these interpretations for me. And he would attach a very legalistic letter to them saying, Simon, these are, 00:19:37.000 this is advice I'm giving to you. You are, of course, allowed to share this advice with anyone you wish. And so then I would immediately pass that on to the ABCs lawyers. You know, we'll sort of get back to that, but I think we'll get back to that. Because in the meantime, I mean, basically at that point in time, it all sort of died down. You know, for me, it was this moment where I had suddenly been lifted out of the sort of a queer underground performance cabaret, burlesque 00:20:07.000 sort of context, where I'd been existing with my performance work and sound work for 5-6 years or so at this point and thrown into a mainstream in that way. And it was quite interesting in terms of the possibilities, I sort of realized that I'd actually like 00:20:26.000 to, you know, something that it was a pop song. It was essentially a pop song. It was political, it was funny. It sort of combined everything that I'd sort of done before. 00:20:37.000 [Simon] I was extremely unhappy that Pauline Hanson had managed to stop it and sort of kill it off in this way. And, you know, but I wasn't going to like spin it and have a lot of money. I wasn't gonna spend money on trying to challenge it and sort of overturn it. But just, had this thing in my head of just wanting that I should do another one, you know, that I should have do another, another song. [Scott] And was it exciting experience to suddenly be in the public eye like this or was it stressful that 00:21:08.000 [Scott] You hadn't intended it to turn into the thing that it became? [Simon] No, there was it was exciting. It was exciting the entire and particularly when we, you know, start talking about the next stage of it. The entire experience was to me, it was like quite fun and joyful and satisfying in a political sense of of my political beliefs, you know, that I wasn't, you know, there at the forefront of activism and smashing Pauline Hanson down, but I felt that I was actually making 00:21:38.000 A contribution that worked for some people. I mean, as I said, she was received very differently according to whether or not you were a target of hers or not. You know, so like I would, didn't know whether whether I would be received by people who were affected by her. And as a white man, I was not a target of hers. 00:22:00.000 That, you know, it depends how that and I think the way it came to me was that, that, the way it came to me that perhaps it was worthwhile was things like 00:22:11.000 I had a lot of people, whenever I'd meet anyone on that, someone would tell them who I was or they would meet me in a context where they would know who I was. You know, because I could just, I wasn't recognizable by face and out of drag. 00:22:25.000 Is that like, 00:22:28.000 one Asian guy would say to me like I, you know, I feel a deep anger, sort of towards her and all that. But it's like your song gives me a conduit. 00:22:40.000 That when I, it's like a conduit, he said. Like when I, when I laugh at your song, that I'm laughing and getting back at, at her, you know, that it's giving me like this path to be able to 00:22:54.000 not feel, you know, that she's knocked me down. It's like I'm hitting her back by enjoying the song. And I thought, OK, that's that gives, you know, that gives it something that gives us some sort of meaning in that way, you know. But, you know, it was unfinished, unfinished business at that stage, I think. I mean, so, you know, like a year went by. I mean, the only thing that other other thing that happened in the meantime was that we did do a 00:23:18.000 Mardi Gras parade, you know, it was. You got to remember that like at this stage, we're still very much in a pre Internet and pre 00:23:27.000 music sharing stage, you know, like the download music illegal sharing really sort of popped up really about 2 or 3 years later than this. So what you had apparently was like a lot of people who'd recorded it off the radio on cassettes and there was like a lot of cassette sharing of it going around, you know, some people, you know, obviously some people would have had digital files, but 00:23:51.000 It was around there at that stage. It was very much this underground thing, you know, And I did a few, remember, I did do a few sort of pop-up performances in places. But the main was at then at the at the Mardi Gras. See, the year before, she'd appeared in 96 and and they had built a giant puppet of her for the Mardi Gras at the beginning of 97, before I even envisioned doing, I didn't do the song till the middle of the year. 00:24:20.000 And they bought, it was a really amazing, well built Pauline Hanson puppet and caricature, very, very large. And that had her chasing a group of non white people, Aboriginal people, Australian Asian people and others. They all had fish and chips on their head and the giant Pauline puppet was chasing them down, it was a very funny thing. So in the halfway between doing Backdoor Man and the next song, so we had the Mardi Gras 98 and ah 00:24:52.000 They offered it to me that if I wanted to redo something with it and they put a, they made a new Chinese cheongsam dress for her this time and had a giant summons where, she had a giant legal summons that she would wave towards me while I'm just in front on a truck 00:25:14.000 performing the song again and again and again and again with a bunch of people, with Pauline Hanson, Pauline Pantsdown T-shirts, dancing and stuff like that. So it was like the banned, the so-called banned song 00:25:26.000 Umm, just being played everywhere. The actual legal status was, it wasn't actually banned, it was that she delivered an injunction against the ABC broadcasting it. And occasionally during the year I'd be doing like an interview on 2SER and I think even TodayFM, at one stage I talked them into it where I'd make it clear that like there is no injunction against you playing this song, which there legally wasn't and would get it played occasionally in that way, you know, but 00:25:55.000 Yeah, so then we, 00:25:57.000 [Simon] we got to the next point and this time I thought I really had to, had to um. Might just take a little... [Shane] Take a break? Sure. 00:26:07.000 [Scott] Scott McKinnon with Simon Hunt just returning from a break and continuing the story of Pauline Pantsdown. So a year later, post Back Door Man. [Simon] I think we're in August 1998 and I just hit the microphone thing. So I might say that again, we're in August 1998 and the context of the time is that Pauline Hanson, after initial large splurge of media coverage, had managed to pull about 1/3 of the seats in the QLD Parliament and was now seen, 00:26:41.000 particularly by the government as, as you know, a major, a major threat in some ways. She was 00:26:50.000 running, she was actually running for a different seat. They changed the boundaries a bit this time. She'd actually been advised by the very, I mean, she was always surrounded by this total crew of misfits, but the people with a little bit of nous advised her to run for the Senate, which she probably, which she would have won if she had actually run as the Senate, but 00:27:12.000 And set that advisor to run for a different seat, the seat of Blair. But she was seen as a major threat in some ways. But at the same time 00:27:24.000 There'd been signs of, you know, not collapse. But every time, Pauline Hanson, this continues to this day, every time she tries to build a party, it doesn't work. It's always about a personality cult, and she always ends up in a complete mess with the people around her. And there was signs, actually of that 00:27:44.000 happening at this stage. So there she was a little bit of an unknown quantity as to what she was going to do. 00:27:52.000 I had of course decided to do another song and Backdoor Man as a hit, as a, as a very sort of public known quantity 00:28:02.000 had been a complete accident in terms of my planning. You know, it's just it was just going to be another, another show at the Metro Theatre in Sydney. But so, this time I really put a heavy 6 months work into the preparation for it. I wanted to release it at the time of the, at the time of the federal election. You know, I wanted it to be during an election campaign. I had sort of thought about running but wasn't quite decided yet on that. There was a lot of rigmarole to go round about that point in time. 00:28:35.000 And I wanted it to be a hit. I really wanted it to be a pop hit, to be sing-a-long. A lot of people had talked to me about kids singing along to Back Door Man, even though it's sort of, you know, full of anal sex zllusions. And so I wanted to sort of like purposely 00:28:51.000 You know, I was very calculated about it. I wanted it to have sing-a-long sections in it. Definitely for kids. 00:28:57.000 I wanted to have it so it could be like a children's song, but then at the same time 00:29:02.000 There'd be like, lines for the adults in there, like, you know, please explain. Why can't my blood be coloured white? I should talk to some medical doctors. Coloured blood, it's not just right. And so it was all to rhyme. Technology got a little bit better over the years. I was able to work a little bit faster. And I sort of had my method down. It was like, and there's some very calculated things about the musical style. It was, I mean, we're in the late 90s, but there's something very 80s about the song. 00:29:32.000 My calculation there was that, that real sort of mainstream radio that, you know, we wanted to get beyond sort of Triple J and stuff this time. 00:29:43.000 That most of the DJs are really about 40 years old, while all the kids who listen are about in their 20s. And that the DJs would all love it if it's something that sort of takes them back to the 80s a bit. So there was like, there's even like a guitar stab in there, which is really like too Triple M commercial and stuff like that. 00:30:02.000 So being sort of really, really calculated about that. 00:30:08.000 I, I got like a small record company who had been they had a few artists and a few things they've been releasing but they, their main business was that they were delivering anti theft CD cases to all the mainstream record, CD shop chains around Australia and so they had trucks going all around Australia and so the idea was that I could get into all 00:30:33.000 without, you know, without a record, I didn't want a major record company because I just thought that would be controlling it in some way and telling me what to do. You know, we want to have full control. So we thought as an independent artist, we just wanted to get it into all the Brashers Records and all of those sort of, you know 00:30:53.000 still existing at that stage, CD networks and that worked out really well. But it did mean that we had a publicist at the record company as well, but was also doing a lot of it myself, you know. Like if a magazine wanted a photo, I had to go walk across Surry Hills to the photo guy and get him to do another print, which you had to supply prints at those at that stage. So it was all sort of set up, timed it for release around when we thought that John Howard was going to release the election and 00:31:23.000 as that sort of came closer, we did it like a very specific legal move to stop it being, to stop it being banned or an injunction being taken out. Although, even though I had been, I've been running lines from the song across to my dad and, and getting an analysis and then talking to some other lawyers. And I also had a manager at this stage, a guy called Owen Trembath, who was like a media lawyer who also had a profile on Triple J and stuff like that. 00:31:55.000 So running it, running it, running it past Owen as well for checking out. And we were pretty sure that the general advice, combined advice from everybody was that like, she was able to stop Backdoor Man because it was saying that she was a gay man and that she is actually not a gay man. It's not true. 00:32:13.000 Whereas with all the allusions, no matter how convoluted they were, all the allusions, and I don't like it, are about her being racist and that she would definitely or her lawyers would not allow her to take it to a case. You were saying it's defaming because she's not a racist. Because then you could go in with a defensive truth and whether or not it could be proved, it was not the sort of legal action that she'd want to be intwined within, but just for safety, 00:32:43.000 We basically 00:32:47.000 Released it late on a Friday, on a Friday afternoon, and then had all the trucks sending copies around the country during the weekend because she couldn't, you know, she couldn't approach the courts during the weekend with the idea that it would already. And then got it all out to radio and everything at the same time late on the Friday. And so by the end of the weekend, it was being played on every major radio station around the country. 00:33:13.000 And she would have had to have, you know, last time she just had to get an injunction against Triple J, but she would have had to have taken separate injunctions or much larger court actions. So it sort of wasn't able to be stopped in that way. 00:33:28.000 So yeah, it was basically that and the time we worked out perfectly because on the Sunday John Howard announced the election date, which was for five weeks ahead. So we had like a five week run leading leading up to the election for the song to come out. So it was this, you know, 00:33:44.000 immediate hit and you know, you did have all the kids sort of going 12345678 racist, rubbish racist hate as like a as a children's chant and stuff like that. It had a pretty immediate mainstream success as well. You know, it gave the actual launch, the initial launch of course to Triple J because they've been so helpful for everything last time, but then it sort of it it jumped when I had 00:34:15.000 some people from today from from today FM who really took a love to it and then invited me to be on a guest host on this television show they had called Ground Zero. And it just sort of went high rotation on all the commercial radio stations as well. So then, you know, had this sort of, this hit song climbing, climbing the charts essentially. And as soon as that happened, you know, within a within a week was very clear. OK, we've got a major 00:34:44.000 hit on her hands here. I thought, OK, well, you know, let's let's run for the, you know, let's run for the Senate. Let's run for the Senate. This involved me having to change my name because you're not allowed to use a pseudonym on the 00:35:00.000 ballot papers. So I had to go down to what was then called the Office of Births, Deaths and Marriages, and it just down the hill and it 00:35:14.000 walked in, you know, and wanted to change my name to Pauline Pants down 00:35:18.000 and the, the woman who was, you know, at my counter, you know, you never know who you're going to get. There was like, well, no, you can't do that. That's an obscene name. Pants down and but um 00:35:31.000 you know, it's pretty much in a pretty sort of on fire adrenaline mood at that stage. And immediately noticed that her name batch was Jenny Bottom. And I said, well, you know my name, if your name can be Bottom, my name can be pants down and can I speak to your superior? And there was a little chat and then it was agreed to sort of, you know. 00:35:50.000 Let it go ahead. And so I basically changed my name to Pauline Pants Down, which stays on my birth certificate forever. Now you have to list former name. So whenever I have to use a birth certificate, as always, there's two entries. Below this person's name was previously recorded as Pauline Pants Down, and then below that, this person's name was previously recorded as Simon Hunt. You know it was. I changed it back. There was a real rigmarole later on, actually about changing it back was immediately after the end of the election campaign when the song dropped out of the charts 00:36:20.000 so I sort of went back in and they said no, you can only change and that's, I'm very sorry, Mr. Pants down, but you can only change your name every six months. So I had to wait an extra 00:36:29.000 four months at the end. But anyway. So yeah, big successful song happening. 00:36:35.000 I got exposed at that stage. There was a paparazzi exposure job or done on me, you know, I was still very keen about not being Simon dressed as Pauline. It's just like Pauline pants down was 00:36:48.000 Someone who had just appeared in that way, you know, that I was, I think there's a lot of sort of like media construction and the analysis of the way it was set up in that, you know, I wanted to be some sort of more like a simulacrum. There was, I'd found Hanson very constructed. You know, she was like that American model of, you know, born in a cabin type thing where it didn't really hold up to scrutiny. You know, I'm just a fish and chips woman. But then, you know, people sent me stuff about how she was actually paying her workers less than minimum wage, you know, that she was a stingy employer 00:37:21.000 which I'd always use information like that. So I was very much about like deconstructing her image, you know, because her image, what she put forward was like, I'm just a normal person who's been through the kicks of life. I'm not a professional politician. But it was all very staged and managed and run by men and, you know, all that. So a lot of what I would do in public appearances and stuff was that was that I would um, yeah, try and undermine and satirise and do exaggerations of, of that idea of construction because I was so obviously constructed. But the idea was the like, you know, I'm the 00:37:57.000 people's Pauline was doing a joke, you know, using the stuff from the Philippine revolution of like, you know that the idea of, you know, the people's the people's leader and I was the People's Pauline. 00:38:14.000 The, you know, obviously, like I wasn't going and campaigning different, different elections. It was like having a hit and then doing publicity appearances, but then also giving little speeches, you know, so I'd be in like CD stores and doing signings, but then give a little speech and all that and allude to actual political things. I would actually give out little bits of information in between the jokes about that and then sort of perform my songs and do that. And sometimes. Did Pauline have a set of policies that she was running on? Pauline pants down? 00:38:44.000 There were the there was completely, you know, there were the real ones, you know, like a non racist Australia and that sort of thing like that. But it also whenever she would release a press release 00:38:54.000 we would satirize it. There was actually an Internet page. There was a guy called Gary who approached me via e-mail, who was um, 00:39:02.000 who was 00:39:05.000 uh like a tech job working with the Internet and he was 00:39:09.000 also working from home, he was like a HIV positive guy who was on a pension and so and he had a lot of free time and I actually he he would like take and he was, he was doing a lot of the work on the website by imitating my method like there would be like a news report 00:39:26.000 about Pauline Hanson. And he would grab all that text, Photoshop my head over the photos and then rearrange the text to be about me or to be absurd in some ways. And sometimes I'd work with him on that and sometimes he would do it his own way. It was the Pauline Pants Down fan Club fan club page and it actually got uh 00:39:48.000 Trove who, who hold a digital digital record of websites. They actually archived it as it went along, so at once I don't know how 00:39:58.000 how it looks now, but there was one stage I looked at it about 10 years later or something where, you know, they're right next to each other. There was like a Pauline Hanson page that had been archived by Trove right next to the Pauline Pants Down one, which is really wonderful because it was on, you know, I don't remember exactly the platform, it was probably on Geocities or something. But it's lovely. It's all been archived. I mean, I actually had this little team of people that I would work with. There was there was Gary who would come along and, and come along and, you know, we became great mates and 00:40:30.000 and um his boyfriend um Yuki, who was another HIV positive guy who was actually legally, legally blind, you know, so I had this like this funny little team of people along with me, there'd be Gary, there'd be Yuki. There was Sally Regan who was a videographer who videoed everything over the, over the five week campaign. And there was Gary. They were sorry. There was Tony, who I met through, through Yuki and Gary, he was an Aboriginal guy. 00:41:02.000 Really funny guy and he would he would sort of play my bodyguard and all that. So it was like a little team of four who would sort of be out on the on the road with me. 00:41:14.000 Obviously I was doing, I mean I was doing like a particular, I was also being invited to like political rallies and stuff like that, particularly like uh university campus stuff locally in NSW. Obviously most of the time I was Sydney based. 00:41:29.000 So, you know, University of NSW. 00:41:31.000 And so following the same thing where I'd be giving like a, it's like I'd be giving a stump speech, but at the same time 00:41:38.000 sort of getting information about Hanson, particularly in environments like that where it was politically active students, you know, But there'd also be things like there was like, you know, doing gay bar events and there were like um 00:41:53.000 like at one stage there was like a rally, the gay rights lobby, they were having a rally for um the age of consent, having the age of consent in NSW, which at that stage was still 00:42:07.000 18 for gay men rather than sixteen was a compromise had been made 00:42:12.000 back in back in 1984 and didn't actually get fixed up till 2003. 00:42:17.000 But I remember that one I actually did Back to All my just did Back to a Man was like the gay context. I went down, performed at the Adelaide Feast Festival and stuff. 00:42:30.000 I'd be sometimes be putting, I'd be putting a lot of handbills around the gay venues, you know, trying to get faith. So I knew I wasn't going to 00:42:37.000 I knew I wasn't going to get elected, you know, because obviously I was an independent under the line, but it was really about it was part of imitating her. She's running for government so I am running for, so you know, I'm running for NSW Senate. 00:42:50.000 I had the various sort of mock hand bills of things like, you know, vote 1 Pauline Pants Down, clean up the racist rubbish. And I was giving my, I was nominating preferences. You could you would, you could just nominate preferences, particularly under the line. You know, someone voted for me. I think I, I ended up getting the highest number of votes of anybody who was under the line, but obviously not enough to get ahead. But 00:43:14.000 my preferences went to, um I was like, yeah, I was offering a dual alternative was either uh it was either Jason Yatsen Lee from the Unity Say No to Hanson Party. He's now I think a NSW Labor 00:43:32.000 Upper House member recently elected last year or so, but he was running for the year the unity Senator Hanson party and to we've got a name Aiden Ridgeway, who was  00:43:45.000 Aboriginal senator for the Australian Democrats or running for that stage. I think he actually got elected. 00:43:53.000 There was like a I guess the effect of you know, at the same time Hansens campaign was a total disaster. There's a wonderful book by Margo Kingston called Off the Rails where she a journalist Margo Kingston, who was at that stage of the Sydney Morning Herald where she she basically wrote a book about the handsome campaign, the disaster where the David Oldfield. 00:44:17.000 Pauline Hanson's evil sidekick. 00:44:21.000 The 4th man who to be in charge of, You know her campaign at that stage. 00:44:26.000 Was basically turning turning the supporters who turning supporters against the media like putting the media sometimes in in quite physical danger. It was it was really sort of. 00:44:41.000 Collapsing a little bit as a campaign. 00:44:45.000 Particularly with she was a little bit doomed because all of the parties at that stage had preferences against her. As opposed to these days where you know, the LNP are a little bit more easy with fascism and more preference. 00:44:57.000 One nation ahead of ahead of Labour. 00:45:03.000 At the time when they get articles about her, the song was it was impacting on her campaign in some ways. Like there are lots of articles of things like she'd do a tour of shopping centers and all the shops would play the song really loud against her, you know, and she was finding a little bit hard to grab media, media thing. But she was doing a slightly more boring campaign where she wouldn't talk about race. You're talking about just these crazy ideas of jobs and, you know. 00:45:31.000 And and taxation, she had some weird guy who had this thing called easy tax. She wanted to introduce easy tax so there wasn't giving her as much coverage. So it was really like I had the hit song and somebody said at one stage, look, I think that your version of her voice is actually getting heard more than her voice at this particular time. 00:45:54.000 Things went really, really wild. 00:46:00.000 During the last week of the campaign, in particular in the in. 00:46:05.000 To it, it was sort of like right up the charts at this stage. I think it ended up being #10 nationally because it didn't really take off over in WA and things like that. It was like #2 in NSW #3 in Melbourne, but it was heading up the top of the charts. I was doing quite a few television appearances. 00:46:25.000 A lot of the music shows like like Channel V on on the Fox network, Co hosting the Ground Zero show, Little sort of. 00:46:36.000 5 minute news segments where they would follow me from home and going through the makeup thing. It was just really wonderful working with everyone. Everyone was really enjoying it as a campaign, you know, as a particularly people affected by it, I got to know in particular. 00:46:55.000 I guess the other person with the team I should really mention is a drag queen, Varushka Darling, who would do my makeup every day. You know, like, like really early, like 7:30 or 8:00 in the morning. 00:47:07.000 And do the makeup job, but for Uska is like a long standing drag queen from the community who does a lot of charity work, a lot of really good did a lot of really innovative work during the lockdown of live shows and things like that. I had I didn't come from the drag scene. I think as I've talked about before, I'd be more the art scene, lesbian SNM performance scene and stuff like that. And and drag had never it never been something that had been part of sort of my own personally entertainment. A lot of it I sort of found like. 00:47:41.000 Man, miming to a song. OK thank you. 00:47:44.000 You know, but got to know a lot of the drag Queens during the course of this and of course, it's a nice rush, was busy and someone else would have to do it. Earlier. There was Stuart Gaskey, who was a more experimental drag queen lady bump at that stage and gained a real appreciation of the role of drag Queens play in the queer community. That they raise all sorts of money, that they work for virtually no money themselves, that they're sort of like lightning rods and spokespeople. 00:48:15.000 That they sort of coordinate and keep things calm within venues that saw a lot more of it. I was on the gay saying a lot more. 00:48:24.000 Than I usually was, you know, it's like I'd sort of never really been like a regular gay club goer and stuff like that, though. No, I guess in my 30s, I guess I'd be doing the big parties more. But but yeah, gained a real appreciation for, you know, the role of the role of drag itself, you know, within, within the community. But anyway, so we hit this like we, we, we hit this final week where just all these different things happened. 00:48:53.000 First of all, I wanted to sort of confront Pauline Hanson at some stage, but it had been sort of, you know, she was not actually in the major cities a lot, not coming to NSW much is extensively meant to be running a local campaign in Queensland. But she wasn't even pretending to do that, even though she was running for a seat. You know, the conceit of it was that I think she had seen her or had been told by people around her that her great success within the Queensland election where she'd won all the local state seats. 00:49:26.000 Was that that she'd have a possibility of eventually becoming Prime Minister and that's why she'd take on for a lower house seat rather than. 00:49:32.000 A Senate seat her big mistake for the for the 98 the 1998 election, but. 00:49:41.000 Did I was tipped off by journalists that she was going to be delivering her tax policy and tax policy? No, it wasn't an easy tax. I think it was the health policy at the Mortal Bowling Club in in southern Sydney suburbs. And I was told approximately what time or you know, where should be going from one point to another. So. 00:50:02.000 Headed off there with my little team of Gary and Yuki and Tony and Sally. 00:50:09.000 And the idea was the idea, we've tried to work out where we're going to get it, but then she'd be sort of jumping ahead. It was a bit hard for the journos to keep up with her because they she wanted to get the TV pictures but didn't want to be caught out doing anything bad. But she had to. She had two federal police. 00:50:30.000 With her and they were able to run red lights so the media would often get left left behind her. 00:50:35.000 So let's say so we're traveling around different areas of South Sydney. OK, So she's going to be this fish and chip shop and I'm like perfect. And like no, no, no, she's leaving now. She's going and that ended up it's going to be at the Mortal Bowling Club. So which was two stops ahead. And so we went the two stops ahead. 00:50:51.000 And I lay down on the back seat of a car right next to the entrance. And the idea was, let's sort of jump out and confront her. 00:50:59.000 But so she walked up she, you know, obviously like they're always like a couple of steps ahead of the media in that way. And so her and all field sort of came up and I jumped out and went, you know, Mrs. Hansen, would you please explain your racist policies? And, you know, and she just went headed straight down this path into the Bowling Club. And then David Oldfield sort of blocked me as have helped me start arguing with me about a few things. And so all the media photos. 00:51:26.000 Are of. 00:51:29.000 Of us arguing, both looking quite angry, you know, like the sort of going off at each other a bit. And that photo was then reused a lot because there started to be reports about how the two of them had been fighting. And so they would use the photograph of myself and David Oldfield in order to stop that. So anyway, they went inside the Bowling Club and all the media was sort of like outside. And then she started doing this ridiculous launch of her health policies and. 00:52:00.000 After and then the main sort of launch and they're finished, you know with David Oldfield getting supporters to yell down, the media was really reaching a bit of a nasty peak for them at that stage. And then so they when he started doing that a lot of them came out and then Pauline Hanson stayed behind a bit to talk to supporters and they're obviously hoping that I would go in the bed an hour and a half you know but we were still there so all the media came out so we just sort of chatting with them and they all got a photograph with me and I. 00:52:29.000 Perform the song for them, you know, just so they had lots of extra footage to put up on the news. You know, it worked out very. And the rest of it is finally, you know, they realized I wasn't going to leave until she was going to leave. So they came out of the club along the path and. 00:52:46.000 And I was sort of there by the side, but some big guy with no neck sort of came and stood right next to me and I thought he's going to do something. And then just as she came down. 00:52:59.000 He need my put his knee into the thigh of my video videographer Sally while one of the federal policemen came in and sort of blocked me off next to him so that there were suddenly two people between me and Hanson so that they media couldn't get the head to head shot like that. But people still managed to get it. There was one from, you know, 10 feet away and there was one where they they sort of catch me looking a bit malevolence in the background. They're like that. And all the news was like. 00:53:31.000 You know, seeing double with like superimposed heads where they'd made that, they'd made it superimposed anyway. 00:53:37.000 To sort of make up the shot. So that was the actual sort of moment of confrontation. Actually, the only time I have a other time I met her was like about 10 years later when I was just walking through the city and with my friend and she was doing a book launch in, in Pitt St. Mall. And, and we went, Oh my God, it's Pauline Hanson. And but you could buy a book and get a photograph with her. So I went and bought a book with or without with, you know, just like on the basis I was just probably not going to recognize me. I'm 10 years. 00:54:09.000 Ten years older, you know, she's never seen me face to face and got this photograph with, you know, her hand around her and she put a hand on my hand and wrote a dedication in the book and stuff like that. And it was just to have a photograph together. But she had absolutely no idea it was me. Was it tempting to tell her? What's that? Was it tempting to tell her that it was you? No, I didn't know. I didn't want, you know, I'm not against like, you know, sudden confrontation. But of course then I used the photo. I think I'll then wasted another five years. 00:54:40.000 Until I launched myself on social media and sort of, you know, put it up as they put it, put it up as the joke later, but. 00:54:50.000 Just gonna post for a second. 00:54:54.000 So, umm. 00:54:56.000 We have. So you know, that was the beginning of the crazy week with the mortal ball and club, the actual confrontation. The next thing was I think it was like 2 days later that I've been invited to what apparently is a major event I'd never heard of before, the AFL Grand Final breakfast where it's the day of the grand final in Melbourne. And then there's a big, all the major politicians from both parties are all invited to this Big Breakfast and there's like people roasted and all the footballers and everyone's there. It's a major, major. 00:55:29.000 Event and I had been invited instead of Pauline Hanson. So you had all the political leaders, you had Kim Beasley, you had John Howard, you had everybody there except I was Pauline Hanson. 00:55:45.000 In that way. And everyone's introduced with a little song and they sort of go up to the stage. And so it was a fairly crazy event. Now, Sally couldn't come down, so my boyfriend Cedric came down at that stage. Cedric, I should say, was also part of the team. He'd come along a lot. It was a. 00:56:01.000 And one friend, he said to Cedric, because Cedric was Asian, he's a Chinese guy. And that say, you know, your Pauline St. credibility having an Asian boyfriend. But anyway, so Cedric was filming from the back because what I wanted was a photograph with John Howard, the Prime Minister. And so he said about the back of the room and what they were doing was they were introducing celebrities one by one. They had all the politicians lined up at these seats on the stage and that introduced someone and have a little song to introduce them, whether it be a footballer or me or whatever. 00:56:36.000 So politicians are on stage, but celebrities, you know, So even though I'm meant to be a politician, I'm A Celebrity as well. And they do a little songs, obviously they play a little bit of I don't like it. 00:56:48.000 And I went up there and then just as I approached John Howard and he's sort of like in his seat, sort of crouching down, trying to hide a bit. Just as I approached, it approached them. Cedric is up the back with his video camera. And these two, you know, guys with little, little coiling earpieces stood to either side of him. 00:57:09.000 And as I approached John, how they grabbed Cedric by the shoulders and turned him sideways, like with his camera, turned him sideways, held him for five seconds and then let him go and walked away. So they'd been specifically sent to turn the camera away from the shot of myself and John Howard. But luckily another sort of media person sent me that, sent me a photograph, a photograph later on. So there was that. There was that day, and I think I did, I did some Melbourne. 00:57:40.000 Club performances that night and then about two days later was just coincidentally, after all the, you know, the year since Backdoor Man was the ABC's challenge against the temporary injunction holding Backdoor Man off the air. And so the idea was that now five days, four or five days from the election that we would be able to release Backdoor Man as a second single in the final leader to to the election. 00:58:14.000 Now, I, I wasn't going to go because I had an extremely bad cold at this stage. And it was also, it wasn't thought that Pauline Hanson would be, would be turning up to this, you know, but then I got a call. I got a call sort of, I think it's like 7:00 in the morning from, from a media person. And she informed me that Pauline Hanson was going to actually turn up to the court case and that I really should come up and just like. 00:58:44.000 Oh my God, Varushka wasn't available. I couldn't get any drag makeup people, because I'd really never been a drag queen as such, you know, I've never done my own makeup and particularly turning into something specific, you know. So the Pauline makeup was a bit different. It wasn't like trying to look pretty or anything. It was actually based on on cartoons, caricatures of Pauline Hanson that people had drawn in the media. Like the very first time that I got made-up for the Back Door Man show at the Metro Theatre with Tobin's Night. 00:59:16.000 Stuart Garski, the makeup artist he just had in front of him. I just made the sheet of all these different cartoons of Pauline Hanson and he'd used that and we developed it from that. 00:59:25.000 It's with like a lopsided mouth and then obvious drag, things like exaggerated eyebrows and. 00:59:34.000 As a neutral face, it was designed to look angry. So if I'm just sitting there looking at you, I look angry. And so then when I put on an angry face, I look insane, you know? So it was, it was designed that way, but I'd never done it myself. And I rang my manager and he said, yeah, no, we've really got to do this. 00:59:50.000 And so I basically like, grabbed my outfit, grabbed a bunch of whatever makeup had been left here and got onto a plane and did my own makeup on the plane. 01:00:02.000 And I looked ridiculous. I looked like like one of the football players on the TV footy show sort of doing a joke Aetna average doll drag type thing. I just had these ridiculous eyebrows and green. I just looked absolutely ridiculous, like it looked like a man who done drag as a joke for for the office party, you know, and and I was chain smoking, I think at the time, you know, and I was I had a really bad cold and I was full of all sorts of you know. 01:00:34.000 Those cold drugs to sort of like keep me up and going and I remember when I actually got there, there was this photo of me with a siggy, which has turned out to be one of the most used photographs of me ever since then when the one time where I did my own makeup anyway, so we got to. 01:00:52.000 We got to there. What happened in the court was that was something, yeah. My dad described it as a as a real injustice. Later on, it's something where. 01:01:05.000 It was a decision to actually uphold the that and and and also with comments from the judges that. 01:01:13.000 The panel of judges, because it was an appeal in the Queensland Supreme Court that it was that it was something that any any finding of the song is not defamatory really should be overturned itself should such a case ever come. And but their legal, their legal reasoning was a total mess. And it's really it's a case where I could go to High Court and have that overtaken. But that would like mean that I pick. 01:01:39.000 That would be all the money I have in the world. And it's, it's, it's, it's. 01:01:46.000 Whatever it is, 25 years, life moves on anyway, so it got overturned and, you know, and Pauline Hanson came outside the court and. 01:01:59.000 Said, did this stage to I got there, I managed to get a media type of this and she was smiling and laughing on the way there. But as soon as she hit the microphone, she burst his tears and then walked away smiling and laughing afterwards. But really sort of went for it. Put a, you know, a reasonably good performance and. 01:02:18.000 And then she. 01:02:20.000 Walked away and apparently just as she hit the hit the court building to go back inside my taxi from the airport pulled up and I jumped out you know identically that in the media sort of like swivel their heads and there was and they said and they're all we got about it and they said OK you got to they came and they stood me exactly where she'd been standing and and all this and I gave this yeah it was probably the most serious I ever was in there where I'd sort of like talked about I was I had a little bit of anger as well you know people. 01:02:57.000 If people, if people can't handle satire, they should, you know, get out of the political game and leave it to people who can actually justify their actions and words and policies and. 01:03:10.000 Stuff and. 01:03:13.000 But I like the way I call it a political game, you know, that it's all a game that I was playing a game. But anyway, so Backdoor Man was not able to be, was not able to be that. And the media take on it was pretty much like, why is she wasting her time? 01:03:27.000 Turning up and making a highlight of this, you know that she's she's really, she's really got more important things to do at this stage. 01:03:38.000 So, so then and then, you know, a couple of days later, of course we get to election night, which which coincided this year with the Mardi Gras sleaze ball book to perform. But it was a very long night. You know, I, I, I went and I think I did an appearance at Fish Records on Oxford Street earlier in the day. I did autographs and CD signings. 01:03:59.000 And then I went and and voted up at up at the national art school and all that, we took an illegal photo inside of me voting. They sort of stopped it after we already had the photo. And that photo exists on there's in Routledge books. There's an American professor Larry Bogart who wrote a book about political electoral satire a couple of years later, which about 1/3 of the book was about me. He came out and spoke to me in Australia. But I'm on the cover of the book voting for myself at the. 01:04:32.000 National Art School and Pulling. What's that dressed as? Pulling. Dressed as Pauline. Yeah, of course. Yeah. The whole day. I think it was like, I don't know, it was like incredibly hot day, but I'd walk from fish records up to there and then when voted. 01:04:45.000 And then went, went home. I think it was, yeah, it was a three shave day in the end because like I shaved in the morning, I got a very heavy facial growth. Did that one, did that one. And then in the evening I was booked as the entertainment at Anthony Albanese. 01:05:03.000 Victory Party Anthony Albanese, of course, now in 2022 as the Prime Minister of Australia. At that stage it was his he was the second run in Marrickville for his. 01:05:16.000 Being reelected to the seat and we was of course successfully re-elected and asked me to come along and he was a wonderful guy. We're the same age. I think I'm six months older than him or something. 01:05:28.000 But remember actually turning out turning up at the night because. 01:05:35.000 Had a shave, got into trade, got already and Sally was filming everything and got out of the car and and Anthony was he was a bit ****** at that stage. He was a few down, he was a few drinks down. You know, he'd been successfully reelected. He's having a party with his mates. That's all good, you know. But he just went he went Simon the ******* ***** she lost to ******* ******* out, you know, and then he saw the camera and then stopped swearing. But that was how we actually find out that that. 01:06:03.000 Pauline Hudson had lost her seat. You know, she got the news from Anthony, Anthony Albanese, the one who told us about it, because it had just apparently come across on the ABC. And so he took me inside and he introduced me as the person who was fought the best against the fascism that Pauline Hanson represents and all that. And so I did my show. You know, it was all his friends and supporters and family and everyone who was there. 01:06:33.000 And. 01:06:33.000 The show at this stage I used to open, I used to introduce Backdoor Man or actually I think it was must be the first time I'd done it because. 01:06:41.000 I was using the transcript from the Queensland Court of Appeal because it had this beautiful opening of the judge announcing, you know, the the the lawyers having a little disagreement and then the judge announcing the court will now listen to the song known as I'm a back door man. And So what I did and the first I did this first time Anthonys party was get people to play the roles and read out the court transcript as a way of introducing playing backdoor man. So Anthony in this at this time was the playing the judge. 01:07:11.000 And his wife, Carmel Tebbit, who was the the local state member for the same seat, was one of the lawyers. And Andrew Rasagi, who was then the. 01:07:21.000 NSW deputy premier for the Labour Party was the was the other lawyer. So they did the introduction. We did Backdoor Man did I don't like it. Chatted with some people, had a good time and then I had the Sleazeball. But I was doing the 10 AM show. So I basically went and partied all night at the Sleazeball at the showground, you know, in this huge cavernous Royal Hall of Industries with whatever fits in there, 10,000 people or something. Sleazeball being a Mardi Gras dance party. 01:07:52.000 Yeah, the sleazeball, this annual sign you'll gain lazier Mardi Gras, I think, I think it was some time in the late 80s they added the sleazeball, which was like the the winter party that went on until I think sometime in the mid 2000s or something. So it's just like the Sydney game, lazy and Mardi Gras, it's the gathering of the clans, you know, And so everyone's there for the party. They have various shows and international acts and things like that. And then people are taking lots of drugs and and they're partying all night. 01:08:23.000 We're still, I think that's actually the very big ecstasy season of Joy. And I was booked to do the closing show at 10:00 AM and. 01:08:35.000 Once again, that renewed the Pauline Hanson giant puppet, which had been in the two Mardi Gras parades previously this time, and I'd been present for it about a week before that, had to use an angle grinder to take the head off the the main stalk of the costume in order to have the head separately and. 01:08:53.000 The show we choreographed, I think just during the morning before they, someone had done a, a slight remix of it, a dance remix, which I disapproved of. So I had actually taken their stems home and remixed it myself, fascist that I am, with music technology and done a rehearsal with the world we had about, I think it was about 10 women who were also Pauline Hanson's who were an identical thing another person had made. 01:09:22.000 A sort of a glitter version of my classic red Pauline Hanson top. I just, I come back a little bit of a sight about clothing later on, but it's like a glitter version of this red Pauline Hanson jacket that I've been wearing for most of the campaign. 01:09:39.000 Came up from backstage, it had like one of those lifts where you know, you're on a platform and so basically I'm on a platform there's the giant Pauline Hanson head behind me and so they. 01:09:52.000 I remember, I remember. 01:09:54.000 Madonna's ray of light playing as I was sort of waiting backstage, that was very sort of. 01:10:02.000 Vigorous type thing. And there's also a song I really loved. At the time, we'd actually ripped off various bits of the film clip for the I don't Like It video, which had been made by me and a bunch of friends. There were lots of references to contemporary other video clips there like that to sort of see it in the pop things, And one of them had been Ray of Light where I'm in a shopping, trolling in a supermarket going around. 01:10:25.000 And sort of came up and, you know, screams, there's, there's the giant Pauline head there. Did the so we did the whole choreographed number. 01:10:36.000 I just. 01:10:40.000 There's was one of these big Mardi Gras shows that were always, you know, very slick choreography and a slightly sort of tacky way, I guess. And then at the very end of the song, they exploded the Pauline Hanson head. It actually, like I got told later, that one of the eyes had sort of blown out into the audience that, you know, they designed these things very carefully when they explode things, but one of the eyes had gone out of the audience and been, you know, passed from hand to hand like some sort of bacchanalian ritual or something. 01:11:12.000 And we all sort of collapsed at the end. 01:11:15.000 That and then I got up to the microphone and announced to. 01:11:21.000 This sort of screaming crowd of drugs. 10:00 AM. People that that I said little, you know, Pauline Hanson lost her seat last night, which brings us to the end of two sleazes at once or something like that. And, you know, and there was this sustained screaming for about. I timed it on the video. Must have been 60 seconds or something like that. Or just people going off at the idea of, you know, they'd be partying since they'd have been partying since, you know, early evening. A lot of people didn't know that Pauline Hanson had lost her seat, you know. 01:11:55.000 And then I think I just said welcome to the future and walked off. 01:12:00.000 And so that was very much, very much the end, you know, it brought it all to the end. It was sort of at the peak point in the charts. It was the end of the political campaign. It was the end of Pauline Hanson's van at that stage. It was the end of her career. I was really pleased to read actually, that there was a couple of days later, Cameron Thompson. She was defeated by Cameron Thompson, a Liberal candidate in the seat. Now, obviously she. 01:12:28.000 She lost because everyone had preference against her, you know? 01:12:32.000 And he went on the, he basically won on the basis of all the preferences going out. But he said he was asked why he thought he'd won. And he said, you know, we just ran a local campaign for local people while she was just out there battling with Pauline Panstan on the media, you know. And so, so it gave me the thing of like, at the very least, you know, that I'd contributed in a way to that defeat by being a distraction more than anything, you know, with all my careful planning and little political illusions and all that and the incense. But it doesn't matter, you know, that I know. 01:13:05.000 That, you know, I now have now described you in great detail, detail some of the political illusions and things behind it. But then on the face of it, to most people always like the shopping trolley drag queen. Remember that song? You know, it's just and that's how it exists. It exists to different people in different ways. But it did feel satisfied to hear the person who defeated her say that he thought, you know, I contributed in some ways to that. You know, I mentioned that the glitter top before actually, it's just it's it's going back a bit, but. 01:13:37.000 I had to buy a lot of new clothes at the beginning of the campaign, you know, because I didn't the initial Pauline with Backdoor Man and the show had been like a space alien version of her suits, you know. And this one I'd actually like walked down and thought I'd need to buy some of these clothes. And I just looked at all these videos of what she was wearing and I thought I'm going to go to those cheap and nasty like women's clothing stores down the bottom of Favour Street near Central Station, which is just really a 5 minute walk from from where I live. And so I just, I walked down there and I'd walked into this place called Delina and. 01:14:12.000 Just wanted around and just having a look at these sort of, you know, fake rayon, nylon, nasty. 01:14:18.000 Tops and stuff and I picked one and I said to this woman there like could I try this on? Now she obviously it's not obviously not a place people do their drag shopping. You know, it wasn't special or glittery or exaggerated. I was trying to at this stage not look like an over the, you know, I want it to look like Pauline as much as possible even though the makeup was pushed a bit. And she said oh why do you want to try this on? And I said oh I'm going to a costume party as Pauline Hanson. And she said oh Missus Hanson, she was here 2 weeks ago. She bought 3 outfits and I said can you show me which one she bought please? 01:14:55.000 And I bought two of them, you know, like the exact thing where she had wandered into that shop, that particular shop 2 weeks before and bought some clothing. And, you know, so I'd ended up with the actual same brand from the same shop from the same sales person just by, I think it's the only time I've ever sort of believed in some sort of a God was that that particular moment I did it. Sorry. Did it feel like a conclusion? Were you sort of building up to the election? 01:15:25.000 Did you see a life for Pauline Pants down beyond the election at the time? 01:15:31.000 No, no, I really saw that as and I was quite adamant about now this is over, you know that this is over. 01:15:42.000 That that, that that, you know, there could be special occasions or whatever, but that it was a particular, I mean, you know, probably going to have a I'll finish this now, but I'm probably going to have a little break before I talk about some of the aftermath. But but I really want to say that that. 01:16:03.000 It's always been driven by need for me. You know, it was fun being famous briefly and all that sort of thing, but I've always been extremely aware of when you take on something as serious as racism, that. 01:16:20.000 It can't just be a joke, you know that there really has to be a purpose on it. And you have to think of the effects of of taking part. And that's particularly in relation to raising someone's profile. And to me, it's like I've got. 01:16:37.000 At this point in time and you know August, August 2022, which is you know which same month, you know 24 years since since that election campaign this month. 01:16:49.000 That I still have people coming out like Pauline Hanson done some particularly stupid stuff in the press in the last couple of days, you know, and then there's still people on on Twitter sort of saying to me doing now it's time to do another song, you know? But I haven't felt that there's been a time since where it's been useful, you know, relevant. 01:17:08.000 Particularly as she's a waning star, you know, that's changed for a moment later or at one stage in 2016. Later on then we'll have a chat about. But but to me, when it was over, it was over. She was out. That if I was going to do an album or do an album of political satire or like do another Pauline song or release a remix, that at most of the time in the 24 year since of then, that the effect of that would be to raise her profile, you know. 01:17:39.000 The major effect of that and that I don't think her profile should be raised. You know, I don't want her to become a populist figure like her aftermath from that various, you know, short term jailings and things aside was the way she managed to build herself back was to be a mainstream celebrity, was to be on Dancing with the Stars, was to be on, you know, all these different. 01:18:05.000 Sort of mainstream things to raise her profile. We even had a thing a point at one stage where. 01:18:10.000 The generation after me of drag Queens and invite, you know, when she was a star on Dancing the Stars and they invited her to be a guest judge. No, sorry, a guest presenter to present the ***** of the year award at the Diva awards, at the Drag awards and myself and and Rushka darling, we did this like joint. You know, I hadn't, I'd had no profile. I wasn't even on Facebook as Pauline at that stage. This is like mid 2000s or something. 01:18:40.000 And we just bought out of it. Like, no, you cannot raise the profile of this racist person who was, you know, plus some stuff she said about queer people and all this other stuff. And it was, it was really a case of the these drag Queens in the early 20s. No, that had a yeah, she had been a politician and done some ****. But like, she's like this camp celebrity on Dancing With the Stars. And, you know, and so she was eventually we were successful in that. And she was. 01:19:10.000 They rescinded the invitation, you know, but it's, it's, it's things like that, you know, there's people can creep their way in in all sorts of ways. And that I felt it was important to only oppose her. 01:19:26.000 At times, at times where she had a high profile and that it was just part of a public engagement or using as I have since you know, using my remnant B grade celebrity for various good causes where I can see it be useful and that sort of way. 01:19:43.000 I think it needs to take a little break. Sure, yeah. 01:19:48.000 Scott McKinnon with Simon Hunt returning from a break and Simon, there were a couple of Pauline appearances later in the year to to talk about. Yeah, well, we talked about how it was really. So pretty much that is a finish point. I mean, it was a real culmination of Pauline Hanson being out of Parliament was the main, was the main thing that we sort of done. The song that it was. It was, it was very much a clear sort of finishing moment, but still. 01:20:17.000 Felt that they were, you know, stuff I could do with perhaps this reigning sort of one hit 1A celebrity that could be, you know, used for common goods. So things would come up, some interesting things. 01:20:30.000 Interesting in different ways would come up occasionally. I didn't do anything for like another three or four months, but then there were two events in in December of of 1998, one good and one bad. 01:20:41.000 That there were two days in a row, there was a day, there was a day in December which was a World AIDS day and I've been invited to perform down in Aboriginal community near Wollongong. It was a place near the ocean where there had been one of the first settled land rights claims where there was land that was owned by the Aboriginal community. Really beautiful place had been like completely regenerated with with. 01:21:12.000 With native vegetation and stuff, great people and it was a good Family Day. You know, it was World AIDS Day and there was information and stuff like that. But it was also like, you know, really good barbecue and community and like, you know, people in their houses and stuff. 01:21:28.000 Just this really positive day, kids dancing to the song, Tobin, Tobin Saunders, Vanessa was there performing as well. And it had been this this really enjoyable day. 01:21:42.000 However, the day after that was the Homeback Festival, and the Homebank was like a huge festival of Australian music run by Triple J and some other music organizations. It was an annual big concert in the Domain. 01:21:58.000 In Sydney, just near the art gallery in Parliament House and all that. 01:22:04.000 And so I've been invited to perform there, you know, just just having had a hiss and everything and being, you know, connected with Triple J and stuff like that. 01:22:13.000 There was some problems with it immediately they put me very high up the bill, you know that we were at, they were at the very much near the end of the day and performing after me were Tism. This is Serious Mum, which is a very sort of high energy rock show. 01:22:30.000 But it was mainly that was quite late in the day and that there was a young crowd of predominantly young guys all up the front, all very drunk and they were really waiting for Tism to come on and. 01:22:44.000 They weren't quite appreciative of my 10 minute excerpts of coming in before that. I think from the Triple J thing at that stage. Triple J sort of changed a bit later, but we're at the end of the period where Triple J was very much have to say, a very white audience, very sort of like white music rock'n'roll. 01:23:02.000 Umm, not quite as diverse as it is now in in some ways and so. 01:23:08.000 It was a real rock crowd and of course I was seen as a, they didn't care that I was actually indie, you know, I just sort of had to send all the photo guys out myself. I was like pop, not rock, you know. But anyway, could have gone okay because I'm usually quite good at winning crowds over. But as soon as we came out, there was a great introduction to it where we'd organized where I was actually on a crucifix being carried in on a crucifix by two gay male nuns from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence who are a very long term group of. 01:23:41.000 Religiously inclined but but satirical guy activists who have a long pass that stretches back into the 70s from the US and into the 80s in Australia. But two of them sort of pushing me on the cross with my two dancers. 2 gay Asian boys who, as they're doing synchronized dancing in their in their underwear. 01:24:05.000 Who like this really ******** Indonesian boys as well Who who like are not going to take **** from anybody either. Like they just like. 01:24:13.000 Really strong personalities, you know, and basically what happens, what really went wrong was that my backing track was coming from a CD and the CD player that had it was just somebody'd home CD player. And you know, obviously I had made the CD myself. It's early burning CDs days and the CD player did not like my CD and it kept stopping and jumping and then we had to wait while they got another CD player and the crowd were just completely impatient. 01:24:42.000 And start up throwing water bottles at the stage, like initially water bottles and spraying water and throwing things and trying to hit me. I'm up there, I'm the clown, you know, I'm the clown sort of there trying to make chatter, but losing my track a bit because it was going on for for sort of way too long. And, you know, and then we did the songs of all the usual jokes and the reading of the core transcripts and sort of did that. But the once people had got into the throw, the, you know, throw the ball at the clown. 01:25:13.000 Stuff that really sort of escalated until during the second song, somebody threw a small transistor radio, very old school thing at me in my head and made sort of a fairly major cut across my eyebrow. And I had blood running down my face. And, you know, gave this goodbye speech at the end, which had, when I watched the tape later, moments of anger in it, which is not a good thing to have happened. And then, you know, the ironic thing of being carried off the stage. 01:25:43.000 Again on the crucifix with the music as we had planned, but this stage I had not a spear in my side but blood running down my face there. So it's completely disastrous event that was meant to be televised on the home bake. 01:25:59.000 Thankfully delayed broadcast on Channel V, but it really marked, I think that to me was a bit like, OK, they're they're they're over me, you know, in terms of the mainstream putting this thing forward that you know that. 01:26:16.000 That as a novelty, you are in fact a novelty and a novelty by its definition is a short term thing. So apart from all my calculations about, you know, is there a purpose to doing this anymore? It was really time to give the thing a rest. And essentially for the next 10 years or so, I did give it a complete, almost a complete rest. I mean, there were individual events where friends would ask me to do things or the things that were for A cause like. 01:26:46.000 Tony, who'd sort of played my bodyguard, who was a good mate, basically invited, asked me to come along and do something. There was like a gay and lesbian Aboriginal night called Blackout that was regularly held at the downstairs bar, Imperial Hotel. So I came down there and performed and with all the Aboriginal drag Queens down there and it was just like a really lovely night. 01:27:10.000 I led the gay group and the the Reconciliation March across the Harbour Bridge in 2000, in 2000. 01:27:21.000 I did A2 Mardi Gras one with a reconciliation group in the same year in 2000 where I actually we passed Fred Nile, my old nemesis. He regularly at this stage still had a group of Christians protesting on the parade route against that. But I I was going along as Pauline and actually like pulled my dress up and bared my *** and showed him my whole at that stage more for the benefit of. 01:27:48.000 Of my mates who with me, her, all the Aboriginal drag Queens from the, from the nightclub. So it was a bit of a laugh for friends that one. And then the next year I appeared in another float, which was sweeties for a treaty, which was another Aboriginal group who were pushing the idea of a Treaty of an actual treaty rather than just reconciliation. Or, you know, in fact, a lot of those same friends now are talking about the fact that we need a treaty rather than the voice to Parliament, which in 2022 at this stage has been proposed to Parliament. 01:28:22.000 And then I think I, yeah. And then one time in 2011, I appeared on like a retro stage at Mardi Gras. And both then and also the there was a refugee benefit at NSW Parliament House. I'd constructed this show, which also made a joke of the, the time limited nature of Pauline. Like I, I made a version of the show of the two songs, which is based on the idea of like having a comeback tour in 2007. Like I just, I done this in 1998. It was like the tragic RSL tour of Pauline Pants down come back to in 2007. And so it was, it was set in an RSL. 01:28:59.000 With the sound of pokey machines and people just chatting to each other and being really bored where I'm doing a medley of the two tracks. 01:29:08.000 To the backing of like sort of jazz little guy on a snare drum and an upright bass and a piano, you know, so 12345678 races rubbish, racist and and all that. But then at the end of the song it kicks into the big dance mix version of it. So I was making a joke within the show about being a one hit wonder. You know, it was a human to me. It's always like I'm fascinated and find humor in the actual media analysis of, you know, of what I'd sort of done in that way. But essentially that there was like a stop. 01:29:45.000 For that. 01:29:45.000 I did. There was like a little follow-up attempt in 2000 where I tried to relive the the glamour with a John Howard caught up, which didn't really work. I was very happy with the project itself, but it didn't take up. This is of course around the time of the reconciliation movement where there was a major call for the Prime Minister, John Howard, to issue an apology to Parliament, which was not done until years later by the Labour Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. But. 01:30:15.000 The push was on to get John how to say sorry. And so I did a John Howard song called I'm Sorry, which is basically him apologizing for being alive, apologizing for everything, apologizing about his looks, using the same technique, all composed music this time rather than samples dressed as John Howard, which is a very fun thing to do with the makeup artist. You know, it was about aging, aging me as a man and like sort of drawing and wrinkles and then putting a base makeup on it. It's very funny now that. 01:30:48.000 20 years later that I see how clever the makeup artists were because I've actually developed wrinkles in all exactly the same places as they've done to age me at that point. You know, I've been bald since I was like, you know, 20. So that's always, that was very easy. It was essentially like a back piece for the wig and then. 01:31:06.000 A handful of hair that we would spray with spray with Hairspray and then I would roll in my hands and then just like wipe it over my head as a comb over because John Howard. I was using a slightly younger John Howard where it had a little bit of a comb over for a while before he completely lost his hair. And so I was being like a sleazy old man and and like learning to talk. I used to get people to do it in the performances where to talk is John Howard. You just don't move your lower lip. You go, hello, my name is John Howard and you don't move your lower lip and it just comes out right. 01:31:40.000 So yeah, it was a call for reconciliation. 01:31:43.000 That sort of thing. And my second mistake had been like, well, I wanted to release it during the Sydney Olympics with the eyes of the world on Australia. And that I don't have have a hit that it would perhaps like raise awareness within the context of the world's eyes being in Australia for the Olympics to the reconciliation move. But obviously. 01:32:02.000 I was completely buried. People didn't find John Howard as funny as Pauline. Pants down. I should have done it as Pauline with John Howard's voice. 01:32:11.000 People in terms of the media trajectory that my independent single taken before where I'd be. 01:32:17.000 Sort of gone from Triple J and then being picked up by mainstream radio and then go forward. That sort of got stalled at the Triple J end, where apparently a particular DJ at Triple J took offense to the fact that I was physically making fun of John Howard. He thought that was offensive. As John Howard saying, I'm sorry, I'm so enormous, sorry, I'm so big, sorry. My head is full of bacon and bacon comes from pigs. I mean, most of the lyrics were just ridiculous. They were just like complete. 01:32:48.000 Gibberish, but the parts we are talking about is his looks. I can't remember the lines right now. But anyway, it got stopped at Triple J. It never went to the mainstream. It never got hurt. It just sort of died and it just died completely. So you know that that sort of made me think, okay, look, I've really I'm really over this now let's move on. And the other major thing that happened that year in 2000 was that I actually became a full time university lecturer now that you know, I'd been a casual. 01:33:19.000 Or a little bit part time there off and on for 10 years since 1991. And they said, oh, we got a full time job going. And I said, I don't want a full time job. You know, I, I've never had a full time job. My life had been as an artist doing some casual work. And then suddenly a project would take off. I would drop the casual work and then make a little bit of money from, you know, doing soundtracks or whatever and then pick up the casual work again later and have been very successful in that way. And I had a fear that taking a full time job would stymie my creativity. And so I said to them, look, I'll, I'll. 01:33:52.000 I'll apply for it, you know, and if I get it, you know, I'll try it for a year and see how it goes, you know? And then it just turned into 20 years. 01:34:02.000 It turned into 20 years as a full time job and while I now as someone who who's gone to semi retirement for 2 1/2 years ago in a week before the pandemic hit the world. 01:34:19.000 That there's a satisfaction of what I achieved as a university lecturer and that I sort of worked very much on a one to one student basis. And I know I helped 7 or 8000 people with their art and received like very highly appreciative feedback. 01:34:34.000 Did suck away some of my work, some of my energy to work that I was really being a creative lecturer, that I was giving people my creativity. I was one of the sort of like two types of university lecturers. There's those who were there to get their research and get their research money and treat the students like ****. And then there are those of us who are just, they're, they're thinking we have a responsibility to the students. And as someone who didn't have a degree until, you know, later organising, getting an MFA and writing risk up as an MFA by research. 01:35:09.000 Um, that in some ways I always had imposter syndrome for that entire time, you know, and, and all that, but I think, but certain things did come out, particularly in the last five or six years of it. I mean, along that sort of first decade of the job that I was really, I did do some, you know, reasonably high profile music things like right after, right at the time of Pauline, I did the soundtrack for William Young's theatre production Friends of Dorothy. 01:35:42.000 Which was pretty much his history of the guy saying and an interaction with it which involved. 01:35:48.000 Sort of 30 or 40 years of different types of music and then we actually, I was in 1998 and we actually picked it up again for he was funded to do a television version for it for the ABC in 2017. We are actually redid a lot of the music with some some quite full orchestration and I was extremely happy with that one as a job. I took a little bit about the process of creating something like that, the process of creating a soundtrack for Soundtrack Scott. 01:36:19.000 We haven't talked much about center. I mean, it's always very different. It's always a it's something that I did less and less because I it's always something where you're under the vision of a director, you know, and, and I needed to work by myself and be sort of completely in control. But I found as I went on, I really just be taking projects where people would give me a lot of freedom and someone like William Wood, But there's back and forth if you know that you're expressing a particular idea. I mean, sometimes it was about capturing, capturing a particularly. 01:36:49.000 Particular. You know, like 70s gay disco, early electronic like that. 01:36:56.000 But other times there's actual discussions about what we're relating to and but are we relating to a character here or a place that we're reflecting the whole time or an idea as the editing structure? Are we taking it to a particular place? It can be quite abstract discussion sometimes, you know, it can really be like a particularly with me as like my, my soundtracks have always involved a mixture of sound design and soundtrack and. 01:37:27.000 Sometimes more than others, but it's really about the scene setting as well. You know, the idea of music. 01:37:33.000 Because music is sometimes what we call diegetic, where it's happening in a sense. Sometimes it's outside, but sometimes we're playing across those lines, you know, that we're representing an idea or representing a person. So it's lots of back and forth and, you know, meetings and trying things out and changing and, you know, disagreements and, you know, things like that. I did find a 2017. I hadn't actually done a professional soundtrack for somebody else for about 10 years. And I thought, I really am a grumpy old man now. 01:38:05.000 You know, not not taking **** or anything. I've done some things and working with orchestras as well. I've done a couple more with Brett Dean, who's the composer that I'd begun to work with in Berlin in the late 80s. And we'd released two CDs in the early 90s. Nineteen. Don't know where we talked about the CDs in 1991 and CD called Nobody Just Talks and. 01:38:30.000 Another CD called. I can't even remember the name of it now, but anyway, two CDs in this Belgian label of experimental. 01:38:37.000 Music frame, cut frame on band camp. My last two ads here, but also done some work with Brett in 1998 with the Australian Chamber Orchestra where I was a performer essentially, but given a slightly open interpretation. He was a piece called Carlo and he was sort of like summoning ghosts in a way from a 16th century piece by a composer called Carlo Jeju Aldo and all that. So I was playing samples from that piece and some a few effects and things using. 01:39:12.000 MIDI sampler, keyboard and playing within the context of the orchestra. But it's something where it's given a little bit of freedom. But that was interesting. It was my first terrifying orchestral performance. At that point. I also, I didn't write with the Netherlands Dance Theater, but Brett used some, he asked to use some of my own music. 01:39:34.000 A few a few fragments of things that were recorded together over the years we hadn't released any music for. 01:39:42.000 About about six years at this stage. Well, this is in 2000. The Netherlands Dance Theatre, a very famous international dance company. 01:39:53.000 And he wanted to use some places we've done together with piano, strings and drums and bits of samples and stuff and fragments of music we'd written together for the CD. One of them approaching Hegel Shalom, which been was a piece that was written about Brett helping some friends of his escape from East Germany. When. 01:40:17.000 In the short period where some of the borders began to open from West Germany, but it wasn't officially open. It was like that confusing time of the collapse of the Soviet empire in the in the mid 80s. 01:40:31.000 Which had sort of been using with like it was a staccato Viola and I've been using these sort of dramatic church bells that have been tuned and particular ways and sounds of crowds and ominous bass and stuff like that. So he was using sections of that. But particularly there's a piece I'd written a very lyrical piece. 01:40:49.000 It's like a very melodic harmonic piece, but entirely made from. 01:40:55.000 Rusty metal, like swings rusty metal, but not an industrial music sense like picking out the melody. I think we've done this before with some train braking in Berlin and people go, it must be this ******** industrial music. It's like, no, it's actually like this beautiful lyrical tone that has you can almost feel the air of like a bending piece of metal or you know, I've always been very. I think within the Western Canon of music, there's. 01:41:22.000 Been a ******** separation of people regard sounds like that as music concrete as separate, but don't acknowledge the fact that they that every sound has a melody and can be used that's, you know, the winds can be used in the same way that an oboe can or something like that. And I've always sort of broken across those lines, which is very useful for me as a as a teacher, as a lecturer for people working with sound, particularly in regards to film. So yeah, so in the I mean in the 2000s there's a bit of that and there was one more piece with Brett where. 01:41:53.000 For the Millennium changeover from 99 to 2000, we took some earlier work I'd done or we'd worked on a bit together with. 01:42:04.000 Australian game shows the game shows back again but used as like for their intensity of voice sort of the impact rather than the idea of the game or the actual content of the words but the the sort of the impact and the playback and forth between audience and performer of the game show and. 01:42:24.000 He did this piece called Game Over. And so it was the Millennium, it was the changeover from 99 to 2000. I hadn't been in in Berlin at this stage for 12 years. I'd left, yes, to come back in January 88. And this was 99 to 2000 change over. So I was pretty well dead on. Is that 11 or 12 years? And so Berlin, what? Of course, everything had gone. The wall had gone. I actually had trouble. 01:42:55.000 Got lost a few times because neither the wall is navigation. Like I was sort of like near a house I'd lived in and you used to walk along the wall and go somewhere. But then I looked across and there's a giant park and I've lost all perspective on exactly where I was. So it was fascinating to see that sort of, you know, that rebuilt Berlin. But Brett's piece was a as people were walking across the main centre of Berlin and we were near the the Berlin Philharmonic Hall where he used to perform a lot with the Philharmonic Orchestra. 01:43:28.000 And people, thousands of thousands of people were crossing this big open area. 01:43:35.000 To get closer to the Brandenburg Gate, which was the centre of the main and of course a unified Berlin now the central point, you know, the central point of the main celebrations. But Brett had these giant speakers set up over something like almost I think like 1/4 of a kilometer or something, all sort of spaced apart so that occasionally this piece would come on. We're full of sound effects and bits of music and little bits of storytelling and stuff, but it was really quite abstract in the end. 01:44:06.000 Particularly in that context, but people be walking along and something they'd be encased within 1/4 kilometer zone of life things that sounds it would move across and cross back and forth and and do all that. It was quite, it was quite beautiful over there. It was extraordinary way to like to spend the Millennium. By this stage, my my dad, my parents, my dad had retired as a judge from the Supreme Court, but then he'd been asked to be the Australian government's nominee for the international war crimes tribunal that was being set up in the. 01:44:38.000 In the. 01:44:39.000 The wake of the the Yugoslavian war, the Baltic, the Baltics and all the war crimes and atrocities that had occurred during that time in the mid 90s. 01:44:51.000 It was to become the International Criminal Court, but this was the first one. So I was under. It was the special, I can't remember the exact name, but it was set up for the former Yugoslavia that was used as a model to set up the International War Crimes Tribunal just as that, But so he. 01:45:09.000 Move to The Hague with my mom. So I went and spent New Year's Eve with with them their Christmas, Christmas and and New Year's Eve. They were remember they were living across the road from a from a gay bar which had this like giant pink triangle on the front of it and it was emit this pink light into their house sort of while while we're actually there, you know, I was busy doing things running around. Shouldn't should have actually gone and visited it, but I didn't I didn't go there. I didn't go visit the bar. But you know, it was just like a nice. 01:45:40.000 A nice sort of get together with with with family for a change of the Millennium. But anyway, so you know, so I became. 01:45:48.000 A lecture in 2000 and. 01:45:53.000 Did you, did you enjoy teaching? I enjoy. I always enjoyed the teaching. I always enjoyed the teaching more and more as the job got corporatized. You know, because when I'd begun there as a casual, I was at the very end period of the art schools being independent. 01:46:09.000 And the teaching, everything was based around making an artist and you know, of whatever type. But during my, you know, 10 years as a casual and 20 years full time, that very beginning of that was when the universities, they all became part of universities. 01:46:25.000 Like a Sydney college at the arts became part of City University, the place where I was at City Art Institute, formerly Alexander Mackie City Art Institute. Then it became part of of University of NSW and became the College of Fine Arts and then the School of Eight and Art and Design. And then then after I left 2 1/2 years ago, it got eaten up and joined together with arts and architecture and whatever, but it just became more and more corporatized with larger and larger teaching and learning departments. 01:46:56.000 Sort of talking about the little boxes you need to fill in. And I just found that it was being run by admin for admin sake, essentially. But I did love the teaching myself, giving something creative to somebody who's younger than appreciating that, taking what they want from me, rejecting what they didn't want. 01:47:16.000 That I found that immensely satisfying experience, you know, and, and was very much appreciated for that of people showing their appreciation in that way. So, you know. 01:47:28.000 Yeah, it did. It did really sort of work in that way. But you know, apart from those sort of odd Pauline things and those soundtracks around 2000, I think for the first half of the 2000, there's only a couple of things I did. I did it like a. 01:47:44.000 Soundtrack for the UK group Deviate, a soundtrack a show called Just for Show, which I never actually saw because they didn't video. And it was, it was a difficult project in that it was all by sort of e-mail, you know? 01:47:59.000 And then sending cassettes back and forth and you know, or very slow small 128 bit kilobyte files across networks and things. It was very. 01:48:08.000 I found that a difficult experience not to have face to face contact on something like that. And it was the Internet was in 2005, still a little bit too slow, slow to have, you know, a decent video contact. But nevertheless, you know, it was a dance company I'd always deeply respected with like a long queer history. And in terms of their representation, they've been very influential on the dances and performers who I'd worked with in in the in the early 90s, for example. And then we had one more Mardi Gras soundtrack where. 01:48:41.000 When John Howard politicized the and had a boat turned back the Tampa, which turned into like a highly politicized or politicization of of of of of refugees. A really disgraceful episode in Australia's history. And I was with a group who did a float. We did a float called the Tampa phobia, which was a boat being pulled by being pulled by people. And we were throwing things, throwing babies overboard. 01:49:11.000 Because the government had to contextualize that historically the government had used misinterpreted some photos and spread false information that mothers had been throwing their children overboard as a way of of getting refugee status, that they'd done that they'd endangered their own children. 01:49:30.000 In order to get refugee stations or complete dehumanization of refugees, really disgusting tactic that the government had used. And so we're throwing overboard babies that were covered like compassion and togetherness and things like that. And with some very pro refugee slogans around that. A lot of refugee people involved in the float itself. And so I was just part of the float, but I also did the soundtrack, which was in the Mardi Gras Manor. 01:50:00.000 Sort of placing these things in a context as that we. 01:50:03.000 It was like a cut up of John Howard talking on behalf of refugees. And I remember actually, yeah, performed and got everyone to chart this at the refugee benefited at the Opera House. Not the Opera House, the NSW Parliament later as well, one of the Pauline events, but it was a John Howard going in a mandatory detention. International outrage. Refugees are welcome. Join us on The Love Boat today. And then I would sort of it would kick in, the beat would kick into. 01:50:33.000 The Love Boat theme, which sort of operated lyrically and sort of quite an ironic sense, you know, should have made a little bit longer because it was only about a minute and a half long, which is a long time to listen to on a loop for like a one hour market operate. People got so sick of it. But yeah, that was one, that was one more thing there. But then that was essentially it until, you know, I think maybe we'll take a little break and talk about that like the last section. Sure. OK. 01:51:04.000 Scott McKinnon with Simon Hunt returning from break. And Simon, maybe we can talk a bit about some of the activism that you were doing later in the 2000s. Do we want to begin with the Tamari Ivari? Yeah. Well, I mean, just I guess the thing about this particular. As I, as I talked about before, that mean the the 2000, the first decade of the century, I was really. 01:51:34.000 Just doing occasional music soundtracks, you know, was a bit of a time off. Pauline was was well and truly well, well and surely gone, though of course she kept on. 01:51:47.000 Kept on trying to get back in in various ways in Queensland, in NSW, at one stage sort of federally, but around 2013 is where things have changed. She. 01:52:02.000 Formed an alliance. 01:52:04.000 With this guy who was like a well known prefer what he was called the preference whisperer and was stitching up all these tickets of people, you know, scamming their way into parliament via sort of, you know, sort of gaming their preference system and seemed to have a bit of a chance. But more importantly in terms of. 01:52:27.000 What I was doing that she started a Facebook page in 2013 and suddenly there was this, this Pauline Hanson page. 01:52:35.000 And I was, you know, once again sort of really busy at work and life had changed a bit because my both of my parents became ill in 2013 and for the next six years or so, 2013, 2019, I was their main carer. And one with a stroke, one with Alzheimer's. 01:52:54.000 And so sometimes looking for a bit of distraction and when somebody pointed out Pauline Hanson had a, a Facebook page and it was, you know, not very well managed and stuff like that, I just decided it was, it was just a joke. Initially I thought, oh, look, I'll start a Pauline Pants Down one. You know, the character who I'd effectively bar the occasional reappearance had killed off, you know, 15 years before this. So I started a Pauline Pants down page and the idea was that I would just appropriate everything. 01:53:25.000 On her page, you know, I'd use the same cover photo with a few wording changes and stuff, use the same design, sort of mock the posts and, and presented it as a competition as to who could have the most friends. Like I started this and it still exists this way as just like a personal page rather than an official candidate page or a superstar page or anything. It's just like a, you know, like, like everyone has their own personal Facebook page. And so we started presented it as this like, you know. 01:53:57.000 Must get it so we have more friends than Pauline Hanson. No and so just send out that invitation to everyone you know, join the poll just to all my mates join the Pauline pants down page so she can have more fan and then I would change the headers as I would take over her for a while, then she'd take over me for a while. And so it's like this competition and suddenly add, you know, a couple of thousand friends, friends with a limit of 5000 and then hit the 5000 and then everyone else had to turn into. 01:54:28.000 Followers and so it's just it was a time filling joke, you know, and I'd sort of go and joke about things on her page and she would actually bite back or her her social media people would bite back and it was just like a nostalgic humorous moment I guess. But as a sort of sort of gained a lot of a lot of followers, you know very quickly got up to about 20,000 or something and it's now about 35 thousand. I think it's sort of hit it's limited on what you can stretch to on the. 01:54:59.000 Personal page, but I'm not invested enough or wasn't invested enough into it in order to, you know, try and turn it more professional in a way. Are we OK with this truck noise or should we shut the door? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And move on. 01:55:19.000 We've yes, we've lost our truck now. 01:55:24.000 So from this just initially starting something as a joke, you know, just just a bit of fun to sort of like throw some pot shots at an old nemesis. We were heading straight into a federal election pretty after that. Now, Pauline Hanson, around the beginning of that campaign, there was some feelings among some political analysts that she might get back in because of her relationship with this, this preference holder. 01:55:50.000 As it turned out, he was double dealing her against a lot of other groups and making money off everybody and really wasn't helping her more than anyone else. And she didn't get back in. But I sort of became, I'd been researching in fact myself, the preference system a lot and how that was all working out. And there was for one thing we were, I was not wanting Tony Abbott to get in as Prime Minister, which he did. 01:56:15.000 But. 01:56:17.000 At the same time I started talking more and not really as Pauline but more as Simon using Pauline's face, which became a bit of a constant tension from this point on that I had to constantly reassess with each action. But. 01:56:34.000 That, you know, like even at one side of saying people are saying people shouldn't vote for the sex party because of the way the preferences fell, that this would favor Pauline Hanson, you know, so I was like actually taking some stances against some progressive parties who were. 01:56:51.000 Involved in preference, in preference lineups that I thought could favor Pauline Hanson and so as being a bit dogged about some of this. And then you started to do a lot of visual meming as well the first time. 01:57:04.000 And all then became quite involved in the election. But you know, that was in effect just saw a lot of Facebook chatter from me, just like a lot of other people do. Things changed a little bit the next year in 2014 with a particular incident where. 01:57:21.000 Began to sort of think about using social media as actual as actual activism. 01:57:28.000 Because we're at a particular point in time where people hadn't really begun to sort of game the system a lot within Facebook. Facebook, of course, was completely dominance in 2014, had a like a much broader age group of people using it. 01:57:44.000 And was a little bit looser in what you could do at that stage. You could set up fake accounts a lot more easily. You could you could maintain things. But we weren't sort of deeply dropped into the the age of misinformation that we that we live in and at this point in time. 01:58:01.000 So in 2014. 01:58:04.000 I saw a little story in a like a small classical music magazine in Australia was about this person the Australian Opera had hired to do a role in one of their operas. Now the background to this is that in 2013 in in Tbilisi, Georgia like an informer Eastern Europe. 01:58:28.000 A small group of activists, 20 or 30 of them, had organized to do a rally for the International Day of Day against Transphobia and Homophobia. 01:58:37.000 So I was known as Idaho or Idaho, Idaho bit and they had had a large campaign run by the church. There is one of the most homophobic churches in the world. And so these 20 or 30 activists have been faced by about 2000 opponents spurred on by the church. And this resulted in like a quite heavy violence. They were like at one stage taking refuge inside the small bus they had someone got a cracked skull, two people got broken jaws. 01:59:09.000 Was like a really ******** event in Tbilisi and the famous Georgian opera soprano Tamar Averi published a Facebook post which was widely shared the next day, which I might actually quote because it's something that I then made into a meme. It's said I was proud of the way that Georgian society spat at the parade. Please stop the vigorous attempts to bring the West's fecal masses in the mentality of the people. Often in certain cases, it is necessary to break jaws in order to be appreciated as a nation in the future. 01:59:44.000 Cancer needs to be removed in the beginning of the metastasis process. Tomorrow they will demand same-sex marriages. The activists had sort of begun to track her a bit after that and to try and get her fired from various positions. This is the year before and she'd actually been removed from the Paris Opera, from a major role, but had been allowed to say it was because of ill health at the time. And things are going quiet. And this had never really hit Australia, but suddenly here she was. 02:00:13.000 Opera Australia 2013, Fourteen, the star of their opera version of Otello. And I saw this little article and she was rehearsing in their practice studios, which is sort of quite close to where I live. And I'm just thinking of this person who said all that and said all that mean amplified as a homophobe. 02:00:35.000 You know, being supported by the Australian Opera and rehearsing close to me in, in, in air conditioned comfort. And I just thought this is a really bad thing. I took those quotes from her, put them over a picture. 02:00:46.000 Put it on my Facebook page. This is on a Thursday. This is something that happened over three days. On the Thursday I put the graphic on my page and I said to everyone, let's all post this on the Australian Opera page and ask them to remove. 02:01:02.000 To, you know, to remove her from from this particular role. And this was my first viral post. You know, it was shared 10s and 10s of thousands of times. The Opera Australia page was absolutely inundated. People started I hadn't asked. They started reviewing Opera Australia and having one star reviews and Opera Australia dropped from four stars down to a one star thing. They were absolutely inundated with people saying this person. 02:01:33.000 Should not be supported. She should be fired from this particular role. On the Friday it went completely viral and that way on the Saturday it hit the mainstream media and was in all the newspapers there. She put out tomorrow very put out a statement saying that her husband had actually written the Facebook page and she had known about it at the time. And Opera Australia issued put down a post with a link to her page saying look this is her explanation and rehearsals are going ahead. 02:02:03.000 This just escalated everything and it hit the international news. By the end of the day, the Brussels Opera had cancelled her for an upcoming thing. 02:02:12.000 I was continuing to try and escalate it and I started doing some Google translations of George and pages with follow on interviews after the event in Georgia and found her sort of essentially laughing off the activists who tried to oppose her. And I thought, OK, there's more here. At this point in time I decided I really needed to contact contact the group Identoba, which means identity. 02:02:41.000 Have been the people in the bus, the people who'd been attacked, the people who had had the rally in the 1st place and came in contact with a guy called Iraq Leave Oxide who offered full support from what I was for what I was doing. I've been actually reading a bit before this parts of a book by Dennis, by historian, famous gay activist Dennis Altman, who'd been writing about sort of the Western queer uptake of issues involving people elsewhere. 02:03:13.000 In the world and about how you need to be mindful. And this goes beyond, I mean, it goes beyond queer stuff. If you you don't sort of like take up a stance for Muslim women in a particular country without being aware of what the tactics of those womans are. Women are within their own country, what they think is appropriate and when. And so This is why I actually made the approach. But he was fully supportive and offered to translate some more material for me. He said take me a day. But she has actually been on television. 02:03:42.000 Sense and it's completely contradicts this this false story that she's just made-up about her husband writing the post. 02:03:49.000 So he was doing that and then on the on the Sunday the next day, I made-up lots of sort of visual templates of all of Opera Australia sponsors with, I've made some sort of short and easy to click hyperlinks of all their Facebook pages and said everyone, we have to get the sponsors to pull out. 02:04:08.000 Of Opera Australia's production and everyone just inundated all those pages. And I think Mazda and one other company, they called for a meeting of sponsors with Opera Australia for the Monday morning. And so that really escalated through the time late at night. Iraqi got back to me from from Georgia and it just gave me all this material that's showing that everything that she was saying was a lie. She had written that pace that post and she had backed it up later. I knew the meeting in Opera Australia was at 11:00 AM on the Monday morning. 02:04:40.000 So I published Iraqi's translation. 02:04:42.000 Think I used another graphic at that point of like. 02:04:47.000 What was it? It was It was from a 90s sci-fi movie of a spaceship crashed into the opera Sydney Opera House. 02:04:56.000 And told everyone to keep up the pressure on that stage. But I wanted that to, you know, everything, everything I was posting was going completely viral. I wanted this to sort of get through to the heads of everyone before this meeting. And at the 11:00 AM meeting, they fired her from the position of being in the Australian opera. So this sort of gave me like an indication of what you could do as an activist using online media. A 2014 was actually a little bit early in this. And that it wasn't just this Total War zone that it is now. 02:05:29.000 The right wing hadn't really grasped onto social media at this stage, you know, that we were able to do things like vote down companies, you know, with we with reviews and things like that. It hadn't been, you know, I guess I was sort of in an early stage of what became to be characterized by the right as cancel culture, which is a particularly, I think it's something that people need to look at really carefully linguistically because it's used as like, oh, you know, you're over using your power. 02:06:01.000 To cancel things. But it's only used against collectives of people who work together to do things. It's not used when, say, the Murdoch media sort of hound. 02:06:13.000 Yasmin Abdul Majeed out of the country for a single, a single Facebook post or they, you know, have an SBS newsreader fired for doing a different Anzac Day post where there's a slight commentary that the right wing, the right wing media can do these things and destroy people's lives. But when people get together. 02:06:33.000 As individuals and do it on social media, it's called cancel culture. But anyway, we're sort of in the early days of that. But I also thought about and I thought, well, that wasn't really Pauline, that was Simon, you know, and that. 02:06:45.000 If I'm going to do this on Facebook and still exists as like what was now an avatar of Pauline, occasionally photoshopping myself into images. But I'm not getting into drag. I'm not doing stuff about Pauline Hanson because she's irrelevant. You know, this particular time was more that, you know, I'd done AI just done a jokey thing with her a few months ago. But my impression by this stage of, you know, 2014 is that everything that Pauline Hanson had ever said was now either Liberal Party policy. 02:07:15.000 Or views held and expressed by the right wing of the Liberal Party. And so there's nothing unique about her. That the moment I'd captured her in 1998 had really been a particular moment in time where she was the only one saying these things. That everything was encompassed within her. Not that racism itself in Australia was encompassed within her, but it was the head of the snake. You know, it was the head of the snake. She was no longer the head of the snake. This is something that you know from John Howard onwards, that everything that she had said had been gradually. 02:07:47.000 Imbued into, you know, Liberal Party policy. So I thought I'd like to do a little bit more of this activism, but. 02:07:55.000 It sort of needs to be done within a context of perhaps some humor and some narrative and to be an interactive thing. What's what's different now is people talking back to me and taking part, which is what social media is. You know, as Paulie in the late 90s, I'd received some fan letters and all that, but either it was me suddenly placing myself into the same media as Pauline Hanson, making statements and presenting as an alternative figure, but is now with social media. 02:08:26.000 There was the opportunity for interaction and this happened about a month later actually. I'm just going to call a little pause for just for a second. 02:08:38.000 It's, I mean a couple, it was really like about a month later that what I saw as a next opportunity to take some action came about. I just got to set the scene on this a little bit. There's an organization called the World Congress of Families who are really a transnational anti-gay Christian organization initially based in the United States. They support what they refer to as the natural family. It's something that's like a mantra that happens with them, you know, which is unspoken. 02:09:09.000 As opposed to unnatural families meaning meaning queer people. Ostensibly a Christian umbrella body, they concentrate almost solely against fighting against LGBTI rights and abortion rights internationally. They've described the LGBTI community as being a breeding ground for all sexually transmitted diseases. Classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Centre. But they have about 42 organizations in 14 countries and they run an annual conference each year in a country usually outside the USA. 02:09:41.000 They had been involved in directly advising areas, parts of the Russian government and the formation of the. 02:09:48.000 2013 anti-gay propaganda laws that have, you know, obviously been shown out to be the cause of murder and violence against against the communities in that country. Their board member Scott Lively, who's a preacher author of a book called the pinks swat sticker. He's very much credited with inspiring the entire anti-gay kill the gay what's known as the kill the gays movement in Uganda. He'd worked very closely with David Bahati anti-gay preacher in Uganda. 02:10:21.000 Umm, so they've been very much and there's a couple of organizations that do this, these anti-gay Christian organizations. 02:10:28.000 Who have their feet in Eastern Europe, former Eastern Europe and and African countries are trying to use give themselves more power and influence as a Christian organization, but via a concentration on the suppression of LGBTI people. So they're one of those big organizations. 02:10:47.000 Their 2014 annual conference. It was meant to be held in Moscow, but due to. 02:10:53.000 The then invasion of Ukraine as opposed to the current one that we're. 02:10:59.000 Going through in 2022, but due to the circumstances of of the 2014 invasion the conference the the Moscow conference was cancelled and instead rather than have a full conference they set up a satellite event with speakers in Melbourne, Australia. 02:11:19.000 And it had received absolutely no coverage whatsoever in the Australian press. So they were due to appear in Melbourne. Someone just sent me like the the link to their program, which is this bad graphic, not on a website. Someone had too much information on. It was really complex to sort of grasp. But essentially the main people who are coming where they're managing director, a guy called Larry, Larry Jacobs who'd been very involved in helping draft the anti-gay laws in Russia in 2013. 02:11:49.000 And talk to Angelo and Franchi who was a leading sort of anti abortion Doctor Who spread conspiracy theories about how abortion causes breast cancer, which is a widely used conspiracy theory amongst Christian anti abortion organizers. But locally they had pulled in Kevin Andrews, the then minister for social services, who was down on their website as being their international secretary until I alerted a journalist to that and he. 02:12:21.000 Was in other issues he'd been referred to as their one of their international ambassadors. But when I got a journalist to ask about him being the secretary, that particular issue of their magazine disappeared from their their website and Kevin Andrews said no, I've never been the secretary of the organization. 02:12:40.000 And another guest was Erica Betts, who was then the the minister for Employment, who was going to hold an official lunch for these people at Parliament House. 02:12:50.000 So I thought, OK, we need something here, but it's got to be entertaining. It's like it's going to take it's five weeks until it happens. 02:12:59.000 So I need to the aim is to get the government ministers out of attending and perhaps other forms of disruption of the of the conference itself. 02:13:11.000 As an opening gambit, I basically published the details that people could use to RSVP to the event. I said, OK, let's all RSVP, Let's take all the let's actually take all the seats. It was down for some sort of small church in Melbourne. So everyone sort of did that immediately and just and just RSVP. 02:13:31.000 No, it was a tactic I'd stolen from a recent action someone had done somewhere else. And then I began to post. But I had to sort of set these people up as characters. So Angela and Franchi, the anti abortion activist was going to be doing speeches in every city. And so I did this like a rock'n'roll tour poster of her with a guitar with all the details of the events to use for all the women's organizations, all the all the all the activists who who want to pick up against this anti abortion activist. 02:14:02.000 Coming to different States and also if Erica Betts who is going to have his lunch. I was using an image of. 02:14:11.000 The the, the film that the cook, the thief, his wife and her lover, which is I think a 90s or an 80s film which involves someone eating human corpses. So he's sort of cutting up a roast human corpse on the table. Kevin Andrews was actually due to receive an award at the conference. They gave out an award for the Natural Family Man of the Year. 02:14:33.000 Award each year and it was Kevins turn to receive that award. So I had like a sort of a Superman breastplate with him as natural family man in a sort of a Superman outfit. So I started doing this sort of like visual memes to carry along. We we took all the seats and then we suddenly got reacted by the reaction from the Melbourne organizer. As it turned out, it was a very badly organized conference at this level was much smaller than their Moscow conference is going to be. 02:15:05.000 And the organizer was a woman called Babette Francis who's like an old anti abortion, anti-gay warrior from the 70s. She was like in and in now in her 70s or so now the bet was like a little bit technologically challenged. You know, she would reply personally to every e-mail sent to her. She didn't use templates and stuff. She didn't seem to use the Internet just except rather than for e-mail. 02:15:35.000 So. 02:15:36.000 Babette put up a babet on the organization's website, said this thing, said she's going to have to cull all these RSVP's and that if you wanted to RSVP you needed to have a reference from a priest, a minister or a pro-life organization. 02:15:54.000 And so we started characterizing this as the pro aborts border force like we're using the board, the new. 02:16:01.000 Peter Dutton border force symbol as as a thing because she said that's right. She had said all you know, it looks like all these pro aborts have RSVP. So we sort of took that on as the theme, the pro aborts. And I've made some references that people could use from George Pell, which had like a little slogans if you know, pro aborts for life and stuff like that on it. And then this is the stage where it got picked up by. 02:16:31.000 What are called the middle stage of media junkie and BuzzFeed sort of newly emerged organizations with Australian branches with news organizations, but were mainly get their traffic from 10 best lists and things like that but with with sort of quite a large. 02:16:47.000 Youth following and they published this article called people are flooding this nut house religious conference with fake RSVPS and it was the week it was the first week where Facebook was allowing news organizations to embed have embedded links to social media. There was like a change that occurred that week and so they had an embedded link of my call for people to RSVP, which just escalated the whole thing over the top. We started doing this like narrative thing where people started writing back to Babette and then they'd send Brevette would write individually back to each person they'd say no, I'm not I'm a. 02:17:25.000 Christian babes and this sort of thing. And a lot of school kids picked this up. There was this 15 year old school boy called Harry who had this long correspondence with Babettes and I published that as this big graphic of, you know, when Harry met Babette, publishing all their correspondence and things. And at the same time as it started to get picked up by media and then moving into mainstream media because of the Liberal government minister roles, the group started to form that they were going to react to this on the ground. There was like Radical Women, a socialist feminist group from Melbourne. 02:17:58.000 They wanted to blockade the conference and then there was another group called the Block Party Against Hate. They wanted to just have a big disco outside. So the two of them got together and actually formed a combined group called Call to Action, the coalition to beat back the far right. So I was coordinating with the two groups because everyone was coming to me for information. So I was sort of like a information propaganda minister or something and they were coordinating on the ground. But the thing was where was it going to be? Because we immediately. 02:18:30.000 Got them cancelled from the first venue by voting down this particular venue until they, you know, pulled back. Then this happened three times. They went to a weddings venue, we voted them down. They got pulled out of that. They kept on getting through, thrown out of venues with at this stage, two weeks to go and then eventually one week to go, we had them thrown out of four venues until they reached their final one. 02:18:59.000 And then the idea of them being in chaos and this right wing conference that government ministers going to attend didn't have anywhere to go to then became news. That's what took it into The Australian, The Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald and stuff like that. 02:19:16.000 They started but because we were on all their hours VP lists, you know they started doing things like they put, they sent an e-mail saying you know that you will receive an e-mail you to us because we're already on the R2P list. 02:19:31.000 You will receive a location e-mail at 9:00 AM in the morning and then I would use that e-mail itself. 02:19:37.000 And presented us like this is like a secret 90s Bush tour for something, you know, with like Kevin Andrews and in sort of sideways baseball cap and you know, people in sort of ecstasy gear and stuff like that. The cancellation actually got picked up by the American right wing and we had Mike Huckabee who was a Fox News commentator, ex presidential candidate who who put together this ridiculous document with 79 religious leaders asking Australia to stop cancelling this Christian conference, that they were good people and that we should stop cancelling his venues, which of course was just grist. 02:20:10.000 To the meal picking it up, it's not hit the mainstream media me afraid man attacked Senator Abetz on the project about the Angela Lynn Franchi abortion theories and he just made it. 02:20:23.000 A fool of himself and that led to his the cancellation of his parliamentary house lunch, which was like our first our first victory. I started talking to the Senate Greens Senator Larissa Waters to feed her some more information and she put forward a Senate, a Senate motion that government ministers should not attend, which is passed of a symbol like one of those symbolic Senate motions. 02:20:49.000 I pointed out to a journalist that that. 02:20:54.000 Andrews hadn't actually nominated his membership at the organization on his parliamentary parliamentary thing. And so then he had to actually fill in a form and get that nominated. And it all came to a head where, you know, two or three days before where they were not announcing the venue, you know, but then finally the day before the conference, they announced that it was going to be held at Catch the Fire ministries, this compound like far right Christian organization. 02:21:22.000 Run by Danny Nalia, who's also from Rise Up Australia, a far right group. 02:21:30.000 Who was then sort of famous. He'd talked about the the earlier Bush fire that he'd been preaching, that it was abortion that had actually caused these Victorian Bush fires from whenever that was like late 90s and stuff like that. So now apparently abortion caused bushfires as well as breast cancer. 02:21:49.000 But at that particular point that that reached such an extreme theme because it was Daniel Air and Catch the Fire that the government ministers. 02:21:58.000 Had to actually pull out the day before the conference. So we succeeded in our actual, you know, aim, which was to actually get the government minister taken out. So the day itself just really turned into a party. I sort of ran a live thread commenting on because they had, they had a video live feed of it and the radical women are outside trying to blockade them. But they had, you know, 30-40 police there who had formed a tunnel to let people get in the, the, the block party for hate were dancing to sort of famous disco tunes and partying with all the radical socialist women as well. 02:22:32.000 There are people the protests lots of beautiful costumes, women with women with kitchen sinks changed to them dancing. A Melbourne activist woman called who went under the name Hieronymus Posh. She actually got inside the conference and then did this exploding blood from the crotch thing about abortion and staged and some got some blood actually fell on Fred Nile and then she was sort of like marched out of there. And so it was a really anyway bit of a party, a satisfying day. Somebody had made a. 02:23:04.000 A beautiful when I started running the fade, I think I did 200 posts on the day. So I was pretending to be like a media page. Somebody got the the famous, you know, the The MGM logo sort of thing of the lion and all that sort of thing. We made it into a, you know, World Congress of families **** *** type thing. And and so, yeah, it was in that way, I think it was like a really successful and that it achieved its aims of having government ministers of because it's always been very important to me. 02:23:34.000 And continue to be over the couple of years after this that that you need to constantly call these organizations that go under a Christian banner but are solely based on on on on queer rights and abortion rather than the word of God. That they that you need to constantly call them cat and and and resist any attempts to allow them to place themselves within a mainstream and to be seen and accepted within a mainstream. 02:24:01.000 So you might just a little pause for a second. 02:24:07.000 Could I get you to talk a little bit about the value of? 02:24:13.000 Holding a dance party, of dancing, of celebrating outside an event like that, or of using humor in a response to that event. What that does within activism. 02:24:24.000 This is just something about being uplifting. I mean, what what I particularly like in that was the combination, you know, that there was like disco music and dancing. 02:24:33.000 There was like a an older activist not using a disparagingly here, but like the socialist woman's group, you know, been established for a long time when using quite traditional tactics of like of blockade. And they are both like these equally valid, these equally valid things, but they perhaps served a quite different purposes, you know. 02:24:54.000 With me and I find both of those within the activism that I've done, you know, that I want to actually stop these people getting getting accepted as a mainstream force. And so I understand the blockade that you've got to stop this actually taking place. You know that if you can stop one people, if you can, you know, stop violence against one queer person. Fantastic blockade, the venue, but also the dancing. I think the dancing, I mean, it's so dancing is so imbued within queer culture as as as you know, a major factor. I mean, it's just. 02:25:27.000 Something that. 02:25:29.000 When you make your body happy and, you know, let yourself go free, that it's, it's a celebration, you know, and that day very much was a celebration. It's particularly because we had had, you know, I think in the evening before the actual announcement that the government ministers would not be attending that, you know, and they said there wasn't just a Kevin Andrews and Erica Betts. It was also I think the, the the Victorian Liberal treasurer and a few other sort of Christian politicians. A lot of people had to actually pull out. So you really left with the ******** extremists there, you know. 02:26:02.000 And so it's that celebration of life, you know, that if people, if you've got these people saying that being gay is evil or sick or unhealthy and that sort of thing. And it's not enough to just say no, it's not unhealthy or sick and all that. It's to dance and say that this is actually joyous. You know, that this is a joyous, that this is celebration that our lives are the lives are beautiful and our lives are our lives are uplifted by being queer. You know that it is that positive that is, is that positive side, you know? 02:26:35.000 Which is something I don't know within myself. I have to always find a balance of that. I get angry about something and want to post something angry. And I think, well, that's just going to make everybody angry and have a million angry fire. You know, a million angry face responses to it is not going to do anything about it. You know, and particularly with this particular latter branch of, you know, rebirthing, Pauline is like a essentially a digital avatar who was really Simon, you know, but has to remember to be Pauline sometimes. 02:27:05.000 To to be able to give people an enjoyment of life, you know and. 02:27:10.000 To celebrate victory, and I get that particular that day I was about celebrating victory. 02:27:15.000 I want to talk about just a few other, just a few other of these events at this time. There's a couple of others. The same year, just after that there was, I began what was really a series of actions against the Australian Christian Lobby, who I think in Australia are very much at that heart of respectability being afforded to to people for running an organization under false pretences. And the Australian Christian Lobby under several leaderships and under several boards and a range of people who've gone through there. 02:27:47.000 Have since their inception been an organization that is almost entirely photo focused on LGBTI rights. And that's what they're about. And that's that's not a religion. And so, you know, for me, it's about any any activism that can actually shut them down, that can impede their progress. That, you know, things that can actually been done at a grassroots level by people like me and people who who agree with me as opposed to the greater ones that are perhaps have no control over such as. 02:28:19.000 You know what's really needed, which is ultimately the changing of the changing of charity laws to sort of disallow the advancement from religion as a charitable cause, which is what eventually needs to be done with these people. You need to take their money. But anyway, in the meantime, it's really just responding to individual actions such as that conference we just talked about or if it's a couple of months later when there was the Australian Christian Lobby conference, which is due to be held at Canberra at the Hyatt Hotel. 02:28:50.000 And so I thought, well, this let's let's stop this one. You know, I think I was on a bit of A roll at this stage and decided to do this one by approaching the company directly. 02:29:03.000 I produced a really a simple informational graphic called Hey Hyatt don't support hate and it was using graphically the classic. It's like a semi sphere shaped axis of the H that they use for Hyatt. And so it was Hay Hayat don't support height. 02:29:21.000 With a few sort of basic facts about the Australian Christian Lobby. Because this is aimed initially at an incident, we were aiming it at the hotel in Canberra, but also at head office at the same time. 02:29:33.000 It just it said Australia's peak anti LGBTI hate group is so-called Australian Christian Lobby, the book The height of everything. This group equates homosexuality with the disease, supports the expulsion of LGBTI students from high school and makes anti Muslim statements to the media. So just losing that basic information. 02:29:52.000 Place the support, support the diversity of your staff and guests and live up to your own charter by canceling this event. And so simultaneously we got everyone to go into the Facebook page of the Canberra Hyatt and ask them to cancel this event, but also the international page using a slightly different graphic which focused on the the diversity inclusion charter from Hyatt Hotels. 02:30:20.000 Their their basic articles, you know, like I've researched exactly what they had and obviously they had. 02:30:25.000 Inclusionary things about sexuality and gender within there. And they took a quite, it went all the way up to they took it seriously. And the New York office put out a statement first of all, first of all, a really vague statement about how they support, you know. 02:30:45.000 Diversity, inclusion and anyone is welcome at the Hyatt Hotel and things like that. And then the Canberra one, they sort of, they didn't back down, but they, they, they didn't back down, but they offered. 02:30:57.000 A separate room within the hotel at the same time for queer rights, sort of drinks and get and get together, which I developed graphics for, is the Australian People's Lobby Party, special events, you know, with drinks and things like that. And I didn't go down to Canberra. Apparently everyone had a good time. But it was a simultaneous event held in the same, in the same venue, but hopefully contributed perhaps to Hyatt Hotel sort of rethinking, rethinking that again. 02:31:27.000 After that, I think there was a lot of little actions like this. I'm not going to go to minion tape, but the next major one was about two years later where I decided to try and get the ACL conference cancelled for their their Sydney conference. This was to be held at the Wesley Mission, which is in Pitt St. in Sydney and it's owned by the Uniting Church. Now the Uniting Church was and is very splits in Australia with an inclusionary faction who are very much in support of women's rights, queer rights and that sort of thing. 02:32:02.000 And then a very ******** elements who are really, you know, stayed by that I mean down the road that just down the road from the Wesley. 02:32:12.000 The Wesley Mission, there's a branch of the church that you know is currently has a, has a trans minister running. It is very inclusionary place and has been for a good, I think 3040 years or so. Had a lesbian minister before. That's just down the road. But here we have the Wesley Mission. So initially I decided to do a bit of a behind the scenes. 02:32:34.000 Get the get the ICO kicked out of there. I should actually give a little summary of what the conference itself was. They had two very problematic guests. They had Jeffrey Ventrella, who's the head lawyer from a group called the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Alliance Defending Freedom. And I was trying to shorten to the ADF, but it's not the Australian Defence Force. They're they're the other sort of transnational anti-gay Christian based group in the United States. 02:33:04.000 Very, very active in recent years on most of the K, on most of the cases involving. 02:33:11.000 Involving transgender access to bathrooms, most of the anti transgender cases in general, they have a system where they are a Christian organization, but they get hundreds of of of Christian pro bono lawyers on there. So they get people doing work for free. They use their income to do more transnational work against LGBTI rights. 02:33:36.000 Like a little big history, for example, of sending lawyers over to countries where there's a challenge to to anti-gay laws. Whether you know things, there's going to be some sort of a progress. For example, I sent lawyers to Belize in South America in 2000 and 11:12 to. 02:33:57.000 There were moves there to do criminalized homosexuality and to stop the incarceration of, of people for being for being gay. And they try to, they sort of gave a helping hand to try and stop that. They did the same thing in Jamaica. They did the same thing. 02:34:11.000 In India, so they're basically very ******** trying to, you know, maintain the incarceration of people for being gay around the world. Jeffrey Ventrilo was their head lawyer. He was coming out to speak on the stage. Another guest was Scott Morrison, who was a minister at that particular time. And the other American coming was Eric Metaxas, who was essentially had been a children's book author but a Christian guy, but had become very famous for comparing churches who accept gay people to the failure of the churches to denounce Nazi Germany. 02:34:43.000 And would constantly make analogies portraying the gay rights movie as analogous to the, to the Nazi movement that we were the Nazi, we were the Nazis, you know, as opposed to the reality of the Nazis having put thousands of queue people into concentration camps, which is something that as a, as a researcher in previous years working on film, I, you know, it was very intimate with my knowledge about. So my first thing was I, I approached one of the. 02:35:13.000 Shall we say the left wing of the Nighting Church, A former moderator from NSW, Brian Brown. 02:35:19.000 And I, we were following each other on Twitter for something else and I messaged him and I said, look, Brian, like a uniform moderator, like I want you to know about these people who are going to be there Wesley Mission and gave him information and links about Jeffrey River and scholar and Eric Metaxas. And he was like, this is outrageous. This shouldn't be happening. And he took it back to them, to the board and, and all that. And they, they came as good as they could come up with was like, well, we're not going to, we have to let this go ahead, but we're, we're we'll think twice about having the Australian Christian lobby. 02:35:54.000 Having an event on our premises in the future, which of course they didn't. They've had several conferences since there, so it was going ahead. 02:36:02.000 I I worked together with the local group Community Action Against Homophobia and Transphobia Now. They were called CAR Community Action Against Homophobia. Now they're the Community Action for Rainbow Rights Group, a local activist group with a strong sort of socialist background. 02:36:20.000 Specializing St. marches and and direct action have been very involved that. 02:36:25.000 That pretty well the first group he started marching for marriage equality in Australia back in the early 2000s and they were very heavily involved even with the massive March that was held here in 2016 and they were going to hold a protest outside. I designed a series of posters for people to print out and also to use in other states where where Metaxas and and Ventrilo were going. I was using a lot of visual meaning on a lot of visual meaning on on Facebook at the time to get people to come to the protest. 02:36:59.000 And but my main thing was that I decided to do a protest inside the conference like by my, by myself. And so I went in with my friend Tina, who's a, a, a videographer and with a couple of friends, a couple of friends ready for support. 02:37:17.000 Outside, I actually took, I didn't have a suit and I wanted to wear a suit for some reason. I think it's because I'm, you know, I was in my 50s and she wanted to have something that looked a little more formal and conservative, but. 02:37:28.000 I had over dinner, done it a bit, then my suit I used the only one I had which was my John Howard costume suit from before. 02:37:37.000 Which which had been purposely oversized to sort of make myself look a bit smaller because John how was a reasonably small man. But anyway I looked a bit ridiculous. It looked a little bit ridiculous and was actually asked if I was OK at one stage by a security guy but then left alone. I wanted to make my protests during. 02:37:59.000 During Eric Metaxas as well, because he was the man making the Nazi illusions. But we've been in there for a few hours and it was getting a bit boring. Scott Morrison was really boring. He just talked about. 02:38:11.000 How a Liberal government would support families. But he was just there to sort of pick up a little bit of Christian joy and voting power. 02:38:21.000 With my actual price. But then I got to a stage during Ventrella's speech earlier, Ventrella from Alliance Defending Freedom and he started talking about Nazis. He started to tell some sort of story about the Nazis and Polish prisoners. And I thought, OK, this is the moment now I I stood up and under my suit I had I was dressed as a gay concentration camp. 02:38:44.000 Prisoner using sort of dirty old sort of striped pajamas with the the symbol of the pink triangle. 02:38:51.000 I'll mean everything. And I marched up towards the stage and started saying, well, actually the Nazis imprisoned in prison, gay people in concentration camps. And everyone was like, oh, and now sort of yelling me down, the security guy came up to me and I just before he could speak, I said, I'm going to walk out very slowly behind me. You don't need to touch me. And so he went along with that, obviously. And so as I walked out sort of slowly, I started yelling back things about about the alliance defending freedom. 02:39:21.000 Belize and Africa, how the Australian Christian lobby was lying to you. But then the head of the head of a guy called Teo Faulkner, the CEO of Marriage Alliance, started singing Amazing Grace and they all sang Amazing Grace to drown me out as I was marched outside of the outside of the conference. So it was not a funny thing really. It was at this stage more of a direct activist thing, but it's just something that a point that I thought needed to be made. I made a speech afterwards at the. 02:39:54.000 Outside the conference. 02:39:58.000 Doing that kind of confrontational act like that, what are the emotions around it? I guess what, how does it feel to stand up in a room like that? And it's a lot of adrenaline, you know, it's a lot of adrenaline. I mean, it's stuff where I've done. 02:40:15.000 When I was back when I was 18 years old, doing flashograms and having to stand up in the airport departure lounge in an overcoat to flash people and then. 02:40:23.000 Yelling the I just hit the microphone, sorry and yelling the room down or you know something. 02:40:29.000 And I guess, you know, as a performer and a performance artist that it was really like I am performing now. You know, I think, I think with the I didn't feel dangerous or scared because. 02:40:43.000 As with Paul, you know, facing off Pauline Hanson's crowds when I when I, you know, came to her venue for that meeting time when I came across a lot of her followers or or insider inside of, you know, like essentially a concert hall, which is what that Wesley Mission was full of Australian Christian Lobby supporters. They weren't and are not the sort of the ******** that I find them very much that they're allied with the dangerous. 02:41:10.000 Violent far right on their issues and they use those alliances, but the. 02:41:16.000 Those people themselves generally are not really violent people. You know, there are like a lot of older people. 02:41:25.000 In the case of Pauline Hanson's followers in the ACL didn't feel in physical danger. But it's, it's a real adrenaline thing. It's about, you know, what am I going to get a get away with? Like the plan had been to actually get on the stage and take the mic, but I think the adrenaline started me talking when I was walking down towards the stage. I may or may not have been able to get past the security guard to get on the stage and onto the mic. 02:41:50.000 But but I know I did start speaking a bit earlier than I had expected to. It's a it's a massive adrenaline thing. But also. 02:41:57.000 It's passionate. Yeah, it's passionate. It's like, it's like a moment. I do want them to change their thoughts. I know there's no way they're going to change their thoughts. Maybe maybe one or two of them looked up something about the alliance defending freedom later and thought this is not a good thing, you know? 02:42:13.000 There's one or two people perhaps who knows, you know, you don't know the effect this sort of thing can have. But I think it's like I've always pulled stunts, you know, like it's something where it's always the idea of the, the attention attracting stunt. 02:42:27.000 As far as like an awareness raising of yelling above the pulpit, sometimes literally, you know, it can actually do something, but you can't control who it's going to get to, you know, and do that way. Was there a media response to that event? There was, there was like a yeah, I think I might my, my break in was sort of important. It was, it was, it was at that sort of like Junkie and BuzzFeed type level and all that. Or maybe I got mentioned in the Sydney Morning Herald article about it as well. 02:42:58.000 The pre activism and the awareness raising I've done about that hit there much more like the Morrison was questioned about attending the conference beforehand. And I think that was as a result of the way I'd been. I didn't talk about that a lot because a lot of it was sort of visual, but there was a lot of visual meaning, meaning I did in the weeks up to that establishing Ventrilo and Metaxas as characters, you know, means of Scott Morrison, Jeffrey Ventrella. 02:43:28.000 Metaxas talking about gay people behind them. There's like the shadow of the gay people in the concentration camp and there are a lot of different methods, you know that Scott Morrison doing tours of the. 02:43:41.000 Tours of the refugee camps with Jeffrey Ventura, with him, and I just, you know, Photoshopped, but just really playing with it, like establishing them as characters. And I think that what I did succeed with in terms of mainstream media was, was knowledge about. 02:43:58.000 The actual content of what was occurring here, you know the connect the far right connections that the. 02:44:04.000 That the Australian Christian lobbyist Alice that brought Ventrilo out here to. 02:44:11.000 Basically, and Lyle Shelton, the the head of the Australian Christian Lobby, had said this outright that. 02:44:18.000 That. 02:44:20.000 The purpose of bringing him out here was that we need this kind of action in Australia, like the Australian, and that's when they set up the the human, I think it's called the Human Rights Law Center. It's got some misleading name like that, which is run by Martin Isles, was run by Martin Iles, who's now the head of the Australian Christian Lobby. 02:44:39.000 And they did run some getaways for young law students to attend with Jeffrey Ventura. 02:44:47.000 So that essentially setting up, trying to set up that organization who've jumped onto the whole furor that occurred later with Israel Folau, who was the. 02:45:00.000 Sports person who became, you know, in the late 2017, the center of. 02:45:08.000 The both the Australian Christian lobbies attempts to sort of bring themselves into public into public eye. But this idea of. 02:45:16.000 Whether or not you can speak your views on social media about if they are supposedly religiously supplied and he gave you is a huge sort of Fuhrer in Australia. When was that? Earlier 2017, 18? I'm just contextualizing this now. But yeah, they were trying to, they still are trying to replicate the Ventrilo model in Australia of the Alliance Defending Freedom. I have no idea where they are in terms of they haven't got enough of a population here, I think to be able to have an army of young Christian lawyers working for them for free. And I imagine they probably haven't got the money. 02:45:50.000 Behind them that the American model does. But that was an attempt and Jeffrey Ventola's invitation. 02:45:56.000 Was said to be specifically to set up that sort of Christian volunteer antique activism within Australia. 02:46:06.000 Do you want to take a break? Just for a second? Yeah. 02:46:11.000 An expert action of that was the shutdown of the the shutdown of the no campaign launch of the the same sex marriage debate in Australia, which was set up as a postal survey with a Yes campaign and a no campaign. The no campaign was all the usual suspects from the Australian Christian lobby and a few other sort of anti-gay groups and plus the the conservative elements of the churches were very heavily involved as well. 02:46:41.000 However, with this particular action, we didn't know initially that it was the no campaign launch. This came about that I had a friend who was standing in as a temporary editor for the queer news website Same, Same, which no longer exists. But yeah, he was looking after that. And he got a phone call from an employee from a hotel called the Makura Hotel, which is near Sydney Airport. He said, look where really aren't, he said. He said, I'm working this hotel and like. 02:47:15.000 We're meant to work this Australian Christian Lobby event and a couple of us really don't want to, but they're, they're upset with us about that, you know, and, and you know, yeah, like I just want to let you know about that, that, you know, the Mercure Hotel is like. 02:47:30.000 You know, insisting that we actually work this event. 02:47:33.000 And so my friend called me and I thought, OK, you know, let's just like run, let's just run the model again, you know? And so it was basically. 02:47:45.000 I made a graphic of Lyle Shelton looking particularly evil and talking about is the Mercura Hotel still a place, a safe place for families and children to occur When when the Australian Christian Lobby will be there? Are all families welcome at the Mercura Hotel? 02:48:04.000 Use that as a graphic and everyone took that on, posted on the Makura Hotels page, started voting them down. The people at this stage were starting to turn their review systems off, which worked, and then by the late evening they had actually pulled the event and put up a statement that the Merkira Hotel would be no longer hosting this event. 02:48:26.000 I thought, OK, well that was quick, that's that's over. But the next day we're on the front page of the Australian newspaper. Now what had actually happened was that this was to have actually been the inaugural meeting of the No campaign to try and sort of bring people together. 02:48:46.000 And so the people who had actually been attending were the Australian Christian Lobby, but also all the other antique organizations, all of the major journalists from the Murdoch network, including their newspapers. 02:49:00.000 Andrew bolts, the Sky News team. Everyone had been going to go. 02:49:05.000 To this particular event. 02:49:09.000 And then we had stopped them and so we were attacked, and particularly myself as the figurehead of it were. 02:49:20.000 Attacked as there's this cancel culture thing and it was used as the first sort of salvo in the battle of of the same sex marriage campaign that the left are these authoritarian Nazi. 02:49:35.000 Fascists who will not let other people even even speak. And this went on for about about a week or so. 02:49:45.000 There was lots of lies told during it. I actually started to go one of the journalists about it because the what was actually published was that they had received violent, they had received, you know, violent backlash and they were afraid for their staff that. But this was what it seems to me was that the Australian journalist was relying on a statement he'd received from Lyle Shelton and hadn't actually at this stage. 02:50:12.000 I will be added about this, although I have no proof of it hadn't actually spoken to the hotel totally relied on on Lyle Shelton's press release because when I started to question the narrative he actually did go to the hotel and I thought why are you needing to go back if you're certain about what you're being saying. But we were presented in that way and it was over the top. There was Andrew Bolt went off went off at me. Sky News is Paul Murray was speaking in front of spoke in front of a like a projection behind him of the empty conference room at the Mercura hotel talking about. 02:50:48.000 The fascists who've done this. Eventually Bill Leake published a cartoon of us as as rainbow Nazis. He had leave people in Nazi uniforms with rainbow stripes with instead of s s buffin which is the German word for weapon. I had SSM same sex marriage voffin like that which was actually the image itself was sent up in a Mardi Gras float the following year. These people did this beautiful recreation of it and sort of fed it. 02:51:19.000 Fed it back to them. 02:51:20.000 But it was like, yeah, it was an attack. There were there was an onslaught of emails. I think it must have been an internal Australian Christian will be newsletter. Their emails have me sacked from my job at the university. The first time that I really come in very sort of ******** to which the university. 02:51:41.000 I had a little meeting at that stage within HR and was sort of beyond me, communicated to me through that, but they didn't find anything wrong in what they had done. There was a complication by the stage in that I was actually writing up my activism as nontraditional research outputs. It was, it was actually my sort of academic contribution as well that I'd be writing with each of the actions I was taking. I was writing a research statement for university and documenting, documenting everything. 02:52:12.000 So it was the huge, it was the huge backlash out of all these events. Maybe think we need to be a little more careful with these things, but it had been basically that knowledge that this is just another Australian Christian lobby. 02:52:26.000 Event, you know, like all that. I only have one more time the following year in 2017. Try to try it on one more time. I've just, I wanted to do another protest inside their conference, just because I just thought like Lyle Shelton had begun to refer to me. He'd begun to refer to me much more as Simon Hunt, UNSW lecturer at this stage. 02:52:46.000 Because there was obviously part of a really concerted campaign that became quite an ongoing thing of them trying to get me fired from my job. But there was lots of crazy letters and a few threats to me as well via mail. Not many, just a couple of crazies and all that. But I kept the university very much informed of. It's just that they would tell that really tell lies to their supporters. That was, there was, I could see a commonality amongst the letters and things like that. And so they were verifiably false in what they were claiming that I'd done in each instance. And. 02:53:20.000 I just have to show the university and say look, as you can see here, this is not actually what happened. 02:53:27.000 You know not renowned for their honest TV Antigua Christians I I tried one more time they were having a a conference in 2017 in Sydney in Ultimo, which wasn't too far to travel called gender theory casualties and consequences where they're really. 02:53:45.000 Sounded to get stuck into anti transgender activism, picking up the the international pattern amongst these organizations. But so once again, I sort of got dressed up, but at this point the security guards at the door inside when I you know, I bought a ticket, I got my brother to buy a ticket under his credit card. 02:54:07.000 Because. 02:54:09.000 And then and he lent me his ID for the day because we do as we've got older, he's gone balls well and had grown a beard. And so we we looked similar enough where you could sort of get away for it. And so they came in as a. 02:54:22.000 Soon as I got in there, they looked at their telephones and they very clearly had photographs of me on their telephones. They'd been, you know. 02:54:30.000 Ready and waiting. I hadn't made any announcements about how I was going, but there was a car protest, a Community Action against outside as well. 02:54:43.000 And they questioned me for a while and said, so are you, Are you sure you're not Simon Hunt? And I was like, no, I'm Adam Hunt. What are you? What, what are you talking about? And then just eventually, eventually gave up and walked out. 02:54:54.000 So that was the end of my direct action against some of that stage. 02:55:01.000 There's just one more. Just in terms of the university backlash, there was one more. One more I want to mention was the following year, 2018, I decided to go back and do one more of these sort of a joint joyful actions, one where I could involve my followers rather than a direct action. And so once more it was an event with Lyle, Chelsea and the Australian Christian Lobby. 02:55:24.000 He had this bizarrely titled event, it's called Making sense of our Time with Lyle Shelton. And so of course it was meant to be making sense of our time with Lyle Shelton. But it was, they didn't use quotes or anything. So it was, it was a funny title for a start. How do you make sense of your time with Lyle Shelton of the Australian Christian Lobby? With this one? It was, it was to be held at, at a church location in, in, in Melbourne. And I had a look at their RSVP, RSVP page. They had an RSVP page on the Australian Christian Lobby page. 02:55:58.000 And what I noticed about it was that you could put down a first name and a last name, but there was number, text limit on the two fields. So you could put in as much information as you wanted to. So we were essentially able to post on the Australian Christian Lobby site, like 100 pages of just like texts and statements and things like that. And so that's what it became is we'll do an RSVP, but Please note that you can put as much as you want to within there. 02:56:29.000 And it was, it was quite beautiful. There's like about 1000 people who took part and then people did it several times and did other things. It ended up officially being 54,000 RSVP to the event. And people put in poetry in there. They're putting in queer songs. There was abusive stuff in there. There was there was obscene. There was some obscene stuff within there. 02:56:51.000 But it just kept going and going for hours, and I was sort of reposting the best and funniest things onto the page. So it became an interactive thing that started to draw more people in that we could essentially post on the Australian Christian Lobby site just by manner of using the RSVP. 02:57:08.000 And then the Australian just just went a front page again just for this, just something which is really just like a joke. 02:57:16.000 You know, a real stunt. I was a stunt in a way, but once again, front page on the Australian attacking me directly and saying that. 02:57:27.000 Just calling it. 02:57:30.000 A Christian site deluged by filth. And so from then on we called every action we did Team Filth using an* Team Filth. So when there's something special like that, it's a Team Filth event. 02:57:45.000 And that was once again that one picked up a lot of international news, particularly amongst gay press. It was sort of the funny story of the week, the 54,000 RSVP's deluged on the on the Christian site. And so it was on in a lot of different countries and languages, which is very good for my research profile for university. 02:58:07.000 I'll put that together that way. But once again there was, there was a very ******** a very ******** attempt by the Australian Christian Lobby to. 02:58:16.000 Had me fired from from my job. 02:58:19.000 I actually dug up some stuff where what Lyle Sheldon had actually done on the day was he had stood up in the church and that they had hired, and this was in the Australian story and everything. They had hired security guards for the events because people had posted such filth on their website that they were in danger for, in danger of attack and that high security guys were outside and then and lost Hilton because some of the attendees wrote a blog about it, which is what I found. 02:58:48.000 That warned them that lecturer, university lecturer Simon Hunt, you know, could possibly be leading a group of people to attack the event and that's why they had to have. 02:58:59.000 Security outside there, you know, and so that was. 02:59:05.000 That was, that was pretty, that was, that's pretty much it for sort of the ******** activism there was. It sort of went over a period of there were just some selections from really from 2013 up until about 2018, 1819. At that stage I used. 02:59:26.000 You know, on a personal level, I think I found I'd spent that six years had coincided with both my parents being sick. And so I was like running from a very busy full time job to my parents house to sort of, you know, feed or help change or whatever. Sit by bed and talk to, you know, talk to my dad with his Alzheimer's and stuff and into late at night before going home. It was like I was running two full time jobs and a lot of this was done on the run, you know, like wait for dad to sleep. You know, I'll, I'll do a post on Facebook and a lot of this was sort of a simultaneously. 02:59:59.000 I think it made me feel like I was doing something on a personal level, that I was achieving something besides being, you know, an aged carer, you know, and running a full time university lecturer job and sometimes even running a degree and all that. But there was something about after the death of my father where I sort of, I didn't, there's no necessarily any connection, but it just made me suddenly want to back off direct personal conflict with people, like ******** going someone. 03:00:30.000 Which is what a lot of that. 03:00:31.000 My activism of the 2000s had really been about it was like, you know. 03:00:37.000 Get a target, go for them, take them down, you know, and it's something that I then once found hard to do and I'd get distressed by. 03:00:44.000 Somebody coming back at me more easily. I don't know this is an age thing or a softening thing, you know, because I've got so much more than I that I want to do, you know, now at the age of, of, of 60 and five months. 03:00:59.000 You know, both with activism and and, you know, play it like a useful part in the world in some way. So who knows? You know, I don't know what form that'll take yet. I keep thinking sometimes it's time to drop that avatar of Pauline, but in some ways it's just sort of. 03:01:14.000 Because there are other parts of my life, you know, music that I want to do that has no political content whatsoever, You know, just being a good friend to people. Just just doing what else I do within my life that is non Pauline related, that somehow it's useful to sort of like continue with that avatar of Pauline as like an umbrella for me being involved in, in activism or politics of any sort. You know, like, because I never, I never wanted to be a politician, you know, I never wanted to, but I. 03:01:44.000 Wanted to sort of take part, I guess, in the betterment of, you know, society. My God, that sounds so cliched. 03:01:55.000 That's yeah, yeah, that's what I've got, I guess. Yeah. And I'm wondering about the, you know, so the the level of. 03:02:05.000 And negative response may be escalated as well with the Australian like when you suddenly. 03:02:12.000 On the wrong end of a Murdoch press. 03:02:19.000 A response. 03:02:21.000 There might have, yeah, it might have had an effect. But I mean, it's, it's not. I'm not afraid of those people, you know, I don't. 03:02:30.000 I never really thought. 03:02:33.000 I was so certain in what I was doing that, you know, that I never seriously thought that I was going to be disciplined by the university and the job that I relied on, you know. 03:02:45.000 For for doing that I. 03:02:48.000 I, you know, there was, I think the one little comeback I didn't mention was there that the with the one of the RSVP's that we've just been talking about the making sense of our Time with Lyle Shelton event. 03:03:01.000 Is that they did. The little committee who met about me again did come back with saying that it was wrong for me to have taken some of the obscene language ones that other people had posted and for me to repost those in the comment section. You know, that what I had done about setting off an action was OK, was legal, was not against, you know. 03:03:21.000 Not bringing the university into disrepute, but that I shouldn't be publishing back, you know? So it was like, it was, that was the hardest thing that ever happened to me. That's that's so minor, you know? And I was like, yeah, OK. 03:03:33.000 So, yeah, I don't know, maybe it came to that, but maybe it's about, I think with all of these actions that there was like a. 03:03:44.000 Maybe there was a little bit of fear involved in all of it as well, you know, when someone's fighting back. Because I'm not an aggressive, I'm not an aggressive person either physically or mentally. You know that I'll always try and find common ground with people I'm talking with in disagreements and arguments and stuff. I don't yell at anybody. I don't, you know. 03:04:04.000 But with the stuff that was really, you know, putting things on the line, maybe there's a thing about being slightly removed to the fact that I'm not so face to face anymore with things that it's working from. 03:04:16.000 A degree of media and now is sort of like surprised when when the first big online action with Tamar Averi, the opera, the opera singer from Georgia, that when it got picked up by mainstream media and there started to be a consideration as to whether or not you would actually do that. I was a bit. There was a moment of like, Oh my God, I have set this off. I need to be very certain about what I'm doing. I need to research more deeply, you know. 03:04:45.000 That I've been relying on a second hand report from a small classical magazine as to what happens. And I need to go and immediately Google Translate. That's, that's a really text from Georgia as to what it's saying and what she actually has said, You know, felt I need to be on top of the fact and things like that. So that stuff's always a bit, that was always a bit scary. It's like this is real world. This is real world. This is all real world consequences, you know. 03:05:10.000 Could we just maybe as a final? 03:05:14.000 I just want to acknowledge that. 03:05:18.000 You're refocusing on or have more recently refocused on music and your creativity there with you've done some work with a new band and that music, your work as an artist and a creator continues kind of yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, like when I saw him semi retired is that I've left my university job and you know. 03:05:40.000 Brought in my super and you know, I think I just got after six years of that full time work and looking after two very sick parents over a six year. In the last years of their life that, you know, I made an assessment about where I am in life and what I want to do with life. And that while you know, avatar Pauline sort of continues out there, you know recently helped helped gather information for the federal election campaign in relation to Catherine Deves. 03:06:12.000 Gender activists candidacy just because I had a lot of knowledge of pre knowledge of her as I've been working in that series that area of activism a lot that while they sort of still continues that that that you know, I was first and foremost and always a musician and that's what's most sort of dear to my heart and that that you know what had been what had moved from, you know, going through rock music and experimental music and then classical music and then sort of taking in. 03:06:42.000 You know, pastiche section essentially pastiche of. 03:06:45.000 Pop music with Pauline was the musical content there. Very sort of calculated pop music and a very in its own way. 03:06:55.000 That I need to make music that's, you know, that makes me passionate, that actually sort of brings in that part of my passion. And so redirecting more towards a pure, a pure music, pure music thing that and so I mean, just as one, just as the recent example since our since I retired two years ago. 03:07:16.000 My my main love has always been funk and soul music. It's just been the heart of what I've always loved and listened to and has been entirely with me from what I've made before. But I started making some of this music with some friends in Sydney a couple of years ago and it was always something I thought when I got time we needed to get that produced and so we managed to get a single released. 03:07:40.000 Internationally with the it's a it's a sort of music that's not really popular in Australia. 03:07:46.000 Very small market in Australia in fact. And so it's something which has always been more popular in the United States and some other countries. And so that involved, you know, relearning the entire music industry. Again, obviously I had to the other guys in the band wanted on the final. So I had to work out international pressing. We got one of the largest hip hop distributors in the United States to take it on to get worldwide release and getting onto a very good distributor who had one of Spotify's preferred providers and learning how to gain the Spotify system. So I've been, you know, like a record company I guess in the last year. 03:08:21.000 Sort of pushing this music and which has gone very well. And now I'm just, you know, but I think I'm entering a stage now where I really just need to start making something by myself again that I had said to myself when I was 26 years old, I will never, ever be in a band again. 03:08:38.000 And maybe that's right, even though I'd like to see, you know, I'll still work with those guys and do some other projects, but going to be very sort of music centered. But I don't, I don't think my activist life is over as as yet. That's going to be there till the day I die as well. 03:08:53.000 Great. OK. Well, maybe that's a good point to to finish on. Thanks, Simon. Thank you very much.