Albo, you’re delulu and I have no solulu
Aaaah, another federal budget week, and this one arriving mere minutes out from a general election. Minutes, I tell you.
As such, government ministers were out in force yesterday, matching barbershop top hats and canes and thousand-watt smiles at the ready, to sell their glorious message of eternal prosperity and tax cuts for all and then, well, then someone’s drunk uncle wandered into question time and performed the chicken dance. And after that one of the other wedding guests started cackling like a middle-aged bird with a bellyful of hash cookies. OK, fine, it wasn’t someone’s drunk uncle, it was Anthony Albanese. And he didn’t so much perform the chicken dance as accuse the federal opposition of being “delulu with no solulu”.
Now, while those of us not fluent in Instagram influencer psychobabble might’ve been forgiven for clicking our tongues sympathetically and suggesting a topical cream, “delulu with no solulu” apparently translates to “delusional with no solution” or, as I like to think of it, the state I find myself in at dinner each night when I’m trying to feed my kids anything that didn’t start its life in a packet.
This tragic act of self-fantasy leads us, inevitably, back to our esteemed prime minister’s decision to slap on a do-rag and come over all peace, love and, well, delulu with no solulu. I assume he practised the line in front of a mirror before he delivered it, and saw, in his reflection, a pink-haired, sultry-eyed, microphone-wielding K-pop enthusiast (the musical genre that gave rise to the words “solulu” and “delulu” in the first instance).
The reality was what the rest of us got: a besuited, bespectacled, middle-aged politician who was forced by convention to stand at a lectern and set fire to his street cred by bookending “delulu with no solulu” with the phrase “Mr Speaker”. What a buzzkill.
For one delicious moment though, he was genuinely a right-on party guy. A man for our times. The life of the (Labor) party, simultaneously fluent in talk tactics and TikTok. Unfortunately, though, amid all the ballyhoo, Albanese’s sudden urge to take to his personality with a chisel, a circular saw and a selection of staple guns underscored one inescapable reality. There’s a federal election in the offing, which means he and the rest of his political contemporaries will be forced to shoehorn themselves awkwardly into various personas as they attempt to demonstrate their everyman qualities.
Today an Insta influencer, tomorrow a policy wonk. Easy-peasy, as they say in childcare centres, which happens to be another language our guy is happily conversant in.
On paper it’s fine, but the campaign trail reality often has a more than passing whiff of eau de delulu with no solulu as a result. To wit: here’s the grab of our elected representatives at the fruit markets at 4am, wearing a stupid vest, eating an onion and shooting the breeze with the high-vis set about the relative merits of William Bartletts versus Packham pears.
