Shine on, Lucas Moon — a Liberal who isn’t scared of laughing at himself

The Victorian seat of Richmond, which takes in the inner north-east of Melbourne, suburbs like Collingwood and Fitzroy — has been Labor’s for the taking for more than a century, not counting a three-year stretch in the late 1950s when Frank Scully joined the other side of the Democratic Labor Party split.

It’s become increasingly marginal in recent years, but to the left; the Liberals didn’t even bother running a candidate last time.

All of which is to say, any Liberal candidate for the area can be forgiven for taking a bit of a nothing-to-lose approach to the gig. So Lucas Moon, running this time, put out that rarest of things — a genuinely amusing political ad:

The general vibe is that Moon tries to pitch himself as a regular Joe, before being interrupted by one of those damn marketing types trying to force him into the typical Liberal candidate mould — being forced, for example, to change “I went to a public school” to “I went to some great schools”, and changing “I work in construction” to “I oversee important infrastructure projects”.

It’s a perfectly fun bit by the standards of political ads. Remember the last time the Liberal Party tried to be funny and it produced this fucking nightmare juice? Or the ALP’s profoundly baffling meme experiments?

But there’s something to be said about how the most likeable bit of messaging we can expect from the coming Victorian election has likely come from a candidate who has no chance of winning and whose whole pitch is: “I’m absolutely nothing like my colleagues.”