Eminem (Image: AP/Charles Sykes, ABS)
Eminem (Image: AP/Charles Sykes, ABS)

One of Crikey’s ongoing morbid fascinations is the insistence of government agencies being funny and cute in their correspondence. Take the following, posted yesterday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which uses the hook of the 20-year anniversary of Eminem’s chart-topping Oscar-winner “Lose Yourself” to do… well, this (warning, you may cringe to the extent of injury).

It does this kind of thing a lot. We’ll give the rap some credit. There are a couple of Eminem-esque internal rhymes in that second last line (“You’re joking, Wow! / 50 thou times more than Lord Howe!”), and it starts with a reference to the original’s famous use of spaghetti (and what a respectful reference to everything the Italian community brings to this country). But it immediately messes up that momentum with the line “We drop stats, you best not be forgetting”, which doesn’t work from the perspective of rhyme or flow.

The question remains: why does it do this at all? Who is the target market? Ageing hip-hop fans with a taste for demographic breakdowns?

Of course, in the scheme of the ABS’ attempts at social media engagement, this lands closer to that naff “International Joke Day” effort than that time it reminded everyone how many Jewish citizens Australia has. Out of context, that raised a few eyebrows.

But it does place the ABS firmly in the tradition of government agencies attempting silliness, and reminds us that this is almost never a good approach. Indeed, it only gets worse — much worse — from here.

The real culprits are, of course, spy agencies and cops. Nothing the ABS can manage will match the Australian Signals Directorate and Australian Security Intelligence Organisation kicking off their Twitter accounts with hee-larious references to spying on their own citizens in a tone-deaf stab at humour. Nor could it match the visceral ick of various police Twitter and Facebook accounts attempting humour — or even more baffling, the New South Wales police producing a TikTok that simulates being stamped on by a cop’s boot.