‘Well done Angus’: A history of politicians’ misadventures in alt accounts

Ah, that Andrew Laming. This week the noted empath and former LNP MP received a total of $20,000 in fines for a series of Facebook posts in the lead-up to the 2019 election. A single post, in which he commented favourably on his own work while pretending to be another person, made up half of the fine.

It was the conclusion of the case brought by the Australian Electoral Commission over the Facebook page “Redland Hospital: Lets (sic) fight for fair funding”, which Laming administrated but did not properly authorise. Justice Darryl Rangiah found Laming contravened electoral law three times between December 2018 and May 2019 by failing to properly identify himself and his city in the posts. Most serious in Rangiah’s view was the following, posted by Laming under a different name:

… we were delighted when Andrew Laming announced an $83 million funding boost to our local hospital service in the latest financial year (17/18). Well let’s FACT CHECK. Turns out he wasn’t entirely correct. One of our spies found Queensland National Health Reform Funding — and it tells a different story. We can’t reproduce it, but the statewide table shows that indeed 7.8% of the 2017/18 money was from previous years. So Laming is 92.2% accurate if state data reflects Redlands and he boosted funding by $77 million.

Rangiah noted it was not merely a case of Laming failing to reveal his name but a “deliberate attempt to disguise the fact that he was its author”.

“Misleading conduct of that kind strikes at the core of the integrity of our electoral system,” he said.

Laming will appeal the decision. The offending posts were apparently viewed by a total of 28 people (six for one post and eight for another. The third post was seen by 14 people, with nine of those sharing it), so it wasn’t the most cost-effective form of promotion.

This is… remarkably common, it turns out.

Jeff Kennett

We’ll give Laming this much — at least there’s some strategy at play. As Rangiah noted, his post is clearly attempting to hide its intent by damning his own work with “faint praise”, posing as a no-nonsense FACT CHECK that concludes the original claim is more or less correct. Former Victorian premier and Crikey‘s-estranged-granddad-who-hates-us Jeff Kennett didn’t conjure the same energy. In 2020, on a tweet expressing sympathy with Victoria’s restaurants being unable to open on schedule after the re-imposition of COVID-19 restrictions, a terse “Agreed” is all Kennett managed.

Amanda Stoker

“Look, that was, A) a long, long time ago; 2) reflected a technical error in the way that posts were going onto my page rather than anything that reflects a grand conspiracy,” then-Liberal senator Amanda Stoker told the ABC in 2020, after it was revealed she’d posted a fair bit on Facebook under the name “Mandy Jane”.

From the account, she replied to posts, agreeing with supporters and opposing critics. Stoker said at the time the replies from “Mandy Jane” were a result of posting on the move, coming from her phone rather than her computer, which was logged into her official account. “The only thing I am guilty of is trying to get back to constituents quickly from my phone while on the road, rather than waiting ’til I am at a PC,” she said. Which is entirely fair, but doesn’t quite explain the number of times Mandy Jane spoke in the third person. If there’s no intention to mislead anyone, then “few senators reject identity politics more consistently than she does” is a pretty grandiose way of talking about yourself.

Angus Taylor

Writer and politician Clare Boothe Luce’s formulation that a leader, however great, is “one sentence” has its limits — but there are some candidates in modern Australia to whom it applies with terrifying accuracy. Scott Morrison: “I don’t hold a hose.” Gladys Berejiklian: She risked it all for a bloke called Daryl.

Former energy minister Angus Taylor, in spite of everything, gets three: “Fantastic. Great move. Well done Angus.” Not for nothing is the act of being caught approvingly commenting on one’s own actions called getting Taylor’d. Taylor made international news when he offered his warmest congratulations to himself on a post about car park spaces.