CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
An outspoken private school comrade from Melbourne’s northside has today made a social faux-pas after meeting some of the last True Believers.
Beckett Chauncey (33) is an inner-city Labor organiser who is quite well known amongst the mean girls of ‘Tear Drop Twitter’ – and is viewed as one of the shining products of the Young Labor movement.
Like most inner-city Labor types, Beckett often struggles with the other big personalities within his own party. This is mostly because he runs his own race and is firm on his ideologies.
Namely, that Labor should be embracing the tech boom that Turnbull tried to initiate. He’s not too proud to admit that in the era of automation and gig economies – his party should be able to work alongside ‘the other mob’.
He doesn’t know much about the left and right factions of his own party, all he knows is ScoMo = bad, Dan Andrews = good and Greens = inconvenient.
While he detests the partisan rubbish printed by the Murdoch press, Beckett often takes his cues from their rhetoric, especially when it’s coming from one of the more ‘Labor writers’ like Joe Hildebrand.
However, today this up and coming Melbourne go-getter discovered he is in fact a rather small fish, when it comes to the pond that is the Labor movement.
At an inter-state ALP function in Brisbane’s South Bank today, Beckett found himself trapped in a conversation with some scary old railway workers and wharfies. The types that say things that ‘we don’t say anymore’.
As attention turns to his trilby style jazz hat, Beckett finds himself deeply entrenched with the ‘toxic masculinity’ that is so common amongst their ‘traditional base’.
“Hey it was good of Elliott Ness to join us!” says one Queensland union delegate, to a chorus of roaring laughter.
The thin-skinned Beckett knows he doesn’t have to stand for this and bites back. He tells the crowd of leathery old blue collar lefties that they are the reason Bill Shorten lost out in the marginal metropolitan electorates last election. And that times are a-changing.
“I don’t know if you blokes know, but Labor doesn’t stand for this kind of stuff nowadays” he spits.
“The Tree of Knowledge doesn’t mean much in Melbourne fellas. And to be honest I’m sick of hearing about your the stupid book shop. Byron doesn’t even vote for us anymore!!”
“Sorry, not everyone works in a coal mine, comrades” he finishes with a smirk.
Beckett’s little spray falls flat, as it becomes immediately clear that he does not know where Barcaldine is, and he thinks the Tree Of Knowledge is a book shop in Byron.
“I think you’re thinking of the TreeHouse mate” says one of the old hippies from the Teacher’s Federation.
MORE TO COME.
