Weaponised Irony: The Rise and Rise of The Betoota Advocate

Nov 2, 2017
3 min read

Last Wednesday, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was the guest of honour at a book unveiling. Shortly afterwards, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten faced the cameras while having a chat with the authors.

The book was not written by a multi-millionaire megastar. It isn’t endorsed by either the Liberals or Labor. And if you’d told the authors of Betoota’s Australia, the first official publication of The Betoota Advocate, that they would unveil their debut next to two of the most prominent people in the land they lampoon, I’d put my bottom dollar on the answer being, ‘Yeah, nah.’

For those who haven’t acquainted themselves with the Advocate, it is a satirical news outlet founded by editors Archer Hamilton and Charles Single in 2014. In the spirit of U.S predecessor The Onion, it skewers all aspects of Australian life from relatable day-to-day minutiae and family dynamics to the political, sporting, economic and socio-cultural landscape. From Jacqui Lambie threatening Pauline Hanson with a roar of "Cash me ousside!", a refugee winning a protection VISA for his cricketing ability and Russell Crowe releasing a dance mix, the Advocate’s scenes can be surreal, hysterical and ridiculous but are always tethered to a truth. Race, religion, class, age, gender, past, present, doesn’t matter: the Advocate is far more inclusive than the country it critiques. At the time of writing, it has just over 420,000 Facebook followers.

It says a lot about the power of humour and irony in the social media age that two blokes on an independent website could take the country by storm to the point of having the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader at their maiden book launch. Turnbull actually made fun of his own oft-used adjectives “innovative and agile” in his Facebook post on the event while Shorten dispensed with the typical professional formalities in a photo with Hamilton and Single.

Moreover, no one could accuse Hamilton and Single of sparing either man the barbs of their sardonic wit; Turnbull’s relatability to the everyday Australian was called into question last Friday as the Prime Minister was imagined “[rocking] up in Goondiwindi… wearing a panama hat that costs more than most Australians would spend on their first car” while it was most recently confirmed that Shorten had set the standard for the “palest shade of white” after dabbing in a NOVA radio appearance.

Although they purport an accidentally-on-purpose image as everyday blokes neither flattered nor frazzled by their fame and equally concerned with sinking tinnies as discussing the state of the nation (as their own recently-floated drop of Betoota Bitter attests), Hamilton and Single have undeniably put in the hard yards to unpick the secrets of a constantly moving media world and lay a finger on the public’s pulse. Like any great sporting champions, they rise to the challenge of taking down the biggest scalps; in particular, saving their most brutal takedowns for former Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his Vote No activism.

A cynic may describe the Advocate as subversive, sugar-coating their bleeding-heart support of marriage equality, environmental preservation and social equity with that most quintessentially ocker of all things – the piss-take. However, that is the genius of the Advocate: it takes a fork in the road to similarly social conscious pages like pedestrian.tv and junkee, whose sincerity blurs into preachy righteousness so often that their content is more divisive than unifying. The Betoota Advocate’s acerbic, witty pieces are like shards of glass: hold them up to the light and you’ll see a world that, for all its off-kilter ludicrousness, keenly resembles our own.