Bill Shorten graphic
(Images: AAP/Private Media)

Ah, Valentine’s Day, yet another chance for politicians to demonstrate their depthless commitment to producing amusing content, and achieving nothing but giving the impression they’ve never seen a single movie.

Crikey has already essayed the NSW Liberals’ effort — a video subtitled “don’t be seduced by Labor’s empty promises”. We get a chocolate box filled with wrappers that contain “empty promises” instead of chocolates (I’m with you so far), but then they aren’t promises at all, just statements like “I don’t have an economic plan”.

But when it comes to deeply baffling social media activity, the Labor Party has long been in another class. The NSW party managed some fairly middling stuff with doctored movie posters, and we all know the history of inexplicably popular horny posting about Western Australian emperor Premier Mark McGowan. Outside of Valentine’s Day, the ALP’s memes game has been reliably bizarre and irredeemably crap.

But this year, when it came to a perfect cocktail of strange, tone-deaf content that elicits no response more positive than “Who is this for?”, all had to bow before Government Services Minister Bill Shorten. He and his team produced several Valentine’s Day memes promoting… the MyGov app.

We haven’t been this charmed since you asked us about our lettuce preferences, Bill.

The feedback was, it would seem, universally bad. When the government services minister does stuff like this, it does leave one open to the response that, say, you might wait until the robodebt royal commission (with which MyGov came to be intimately associated) is finished. Or perhaps the government could raise JobSeeker above poverty rates, or just improve an app that many people find to be hot garbage before you start trying to be funny and cute about it.

Indeed, Shorten’s account began limiting responses to the posts, but not before someone had argued: “This content would have brought down the Morrison government in 2019.”

This might seem like a cruel thing to say, but we choose to take it sincerely — after all, Shorten’s focus on policy over posting famously didn’t work out, while Scott Morrison achieved his miraculous win while paying advertising agency Topham Guerin a no doubt eye-watering amount for nonsense like this: