CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
A 50-year-old man who may just have been amongst the last cohort of Australians that were able to go to university, have fun in their 20s, and then buy a reasonably priced home without doing their arse – has today declared that young people need a reality check.
As one of the few middle-aged Australians who now has assets that need conserving, Benny Carey (Insurance broker, Betoota Heights) has begun his rapid transition into an outspoken Liberal voter.
This comes after the first ten years of his adult life were spent voting for the Greens because all he cared about was the legalisation of marijuana, followed by ten years of donkey voting, followed by a brief stint voting Labor because he appreciated their Queenslander-approach to closing the borders in the pandemic against the wishes of the Federal Government.
But now, after being radicalised by the overwhelming algorithms of social media misinformation during last year’s Indigenous Voice referendum, Benny is more than willing to take any bait that is thrown to him by low-rent NewsCorp journalists and right-wing online clickbait.
With the Queensland election now a week away, this father of three is immersing himself in the culture wars.
He’s worried the public schools are trying to make his sons question whether they want to have dicks or not. He thinks Labor are in bed with bikies and terrorists. And he’s still 100% convinced that he’s a second class citizen who doesn’t have the same rights as Aboriginal people.
The fact that Benny is feeling the pinch of a cost-of-living crisis has only accelerated his descent into nonsensical right-wing talking points, and whenever anyone, like his wife, questions his thinly-veiled bigotry – all Benny needs to do is reference Murdoch’s highly exaggerated youth crime statistics as an example of how Queensland has gone to the dogs.
The fact that neither Benny, nor anyone he knows, has had to tell with a youth offender stealing his car, is irrelevant. It’s happening. Just look at the news. And it’s out of control.
However, this pivot into a Sky News-brain right-wing dork isn’t as easy for Benny as it was for the Boomers before him. In order to feign outrage about laws being being broken, he has to pretend he didn’t spend every single weekend of 1999 chewing his face off in Fortitude Valley while up to the eyeballs on the high-powered ecstasy tablets that were flooding north from a pill press in Victorian criminal Carl Williams’ garage.
But even still, Benny is able to make peace with the fact that none of that is as bad as poverty-stricken kids stealing things from white people.
Because they are criminals. Whereas he was just simply a young fella having fun by occasionally dabbling in the ‘victimless crime’ of propping up a recreational drug trade that caused a gangland war that saw 38 people murdered by gunshot wounds in the CBD streets in broad daylight, causing irreparable damage to an entire police force and justice system that is still reeling from the knee-jerk redirection of resources aimed at stopping an underworld conspiracy that was generating millions of dollars a year from dumb cunts like Benny who worked at JB HiFI and spent his weekend with pupils that looked like oil spills in the Gulf Of Mexico.
