Politics: No Funny business
The uninitiated could be forgiven for thinking the Australian Sports Party is the kind of party that you go to on a Saturday night. But if you have the two minutes you need to look them up, they’re a political party who, from their website’s ‘About Us’ page, is ‘focused on helping Australians live a healthy, well-balanced lifestyle through sport and recreation’.
Right, so they’re serious blokes out for change.
Except that on their Facebook page on March 25, they published a joke about a fictional weight-loss company that employs nude girls that wear signs over their shoulders that say, ‘If you can catch me, you can have me’. If you wish to lose weight, the company will send over one of their girls and you can spend an hour or two chasing after them.
Some would say this is classic Australian humour, but the backlash they’ve received over the last week suggested otherwise. Women’s rights activists are demanding apologies. Feminists are seething. ‘Disrespectful’, ‘derogatory’, and ‘insensitive’ are the words being bandied about.
Serious business, then, politics, as the ‘party-goers’ are finding out the hard way.
