Labor’s got a bad case of brain rot

With 29 days to go until the WA state election, WA Labor is taking every chance it can to redirect attention to Basil Zempilas, both IRL and online.

It turned out that Labor was behind a silent protest at Zempilas’s campaign launch last week, where protesters bore placards reading ‘Basil Zempilas shut down a women’s shelter’ and ‘Who paid for your secret polling, Basil?’.

Zempilas’s response, as per The West: “Labor is obsessed with me. Perhaps a Basil cookie will calm them all down.”

Despite appearances, John Carey is not the Minister for Attacking Basil Zempilas – he’s actually the Minister for Housing. Given WA is an economically prosperous state with a horrific housing crisis, you’d think Carey would be a pretty busy guy, but it turns out he’s not too busy to be making multiple TikToks going after Zempilas.

When it came to light that Zempilas had used his Perth Lord Mayor title for a Liberal party fundraiser, Carey got reeeallly fired up about the City of Perth Code of Conduct. “Basil never thinks the rules apply to him,” he said on the WA Labor TikTok account. (23.3k views.)

Carey clipped the Rode mic on and trotted out the same line again in a video posted today. (2500 views – but it's early days.) This one was in response to Zempilas being ordered by the Local Governments Standards Panel to apologise for the “blurred line” on social media between his candidacy and Lord Mayor role. Basil says he’s already apologised, but Carey says he actually hasn’t and never will. I doubt the average TikTok scroller can really bring themselves to care. What rankles more is what’s actually allowed within the rules, like Mark McGowan picking up lucrative resources industry gigs on leaving parliament, or Basil’s employer who owns our state’s only daily newspaper also having a financial stake in gas exports.

Meanwhile, WA Labor is running a live timer on YouTube titled ‘Has Basil Zempilas apologised yet??’ (There was “1 watching now” when I checked it out.) For his part, Basil says he’s making a complaint to the Corruption and Crime Commission after the orders from the Local Governments Standards Panel were leaked to WA Today ahead of his big launch.

The ABC asked Treasurer Rita Saffioti why Labor was giving Zempilas so much oxygen. She said it was a way of drawing attention to the weakness and dysfunction of the Liberal Party, but when your opponent has 30 years of experience in live broadcasting, it probably pays to be cautious about giving them air time, because they know how to fill it.

To be fair to Carey, he’s also made some TikToks about his actual portfolio. On TikTok, creators sometimes make split-screen videos combining their content with screen recordings from video games. It’s a technique to double the dopamine hit for zoomers with shot attention spans. In one post, Carey embraces the style. A recording of someone building a house in The Sims sits beneath a video of him talking about how “Labor’s housing plan is working.” (1100 views – and tell that to the 20,000+ families on the public housing waitlist.) The double-story Sims home looks much more luxurious than the boarded-up public housing I’ve recently seen in the city and the regions.

Carey also filled some time this week writing a letter to the editor of The Fremantle Herald about an electoral race he's not running in. Last week, independent candidate for Fremantle Kate Hulett ran an ad in the paper outlining her policy to end no-grounds evictions from public housing. Carey's letter quibbled with her numbers, but the facts are, WA is the only state still using evicting public housing tenants without cause. Hulett’s also on TikTok herself – a tour of some of that boarded up public housing racked up 88k views. Clearly, Labor are closely watching her moves.

Premier Roger Cook has also transformed into a short-form video creator. He’s had one viral hit: a TikTok on the WA Labor account of him talking about new P-Plater rules has been viewed 1.7 million times since it was posted in October last year. In a more recent video, he interviews Spud Shed owner Tony Galati. Not only does Cook mispronounce Galati’s name, but it’s also misspelt in the caption. “One thing I’ve always wanted to ask you, how do you cook your spuds?” Cook asks. We learn Galati likes to roast them. It’s hardly riveting stuff, but managed to earn 17.9k views.

One truly cursed TikTok posted on the WA Labor page superimposes Cook’s face onto a video of singer Benson Boone ripping off a tuxedo to reveal a jumpsuit beneath at this week’s Grammys. Say what you want about Chinese algorithms, but at least they protected viewers from this abomination – it’s sitting on 320 views.

It seems WA Labor knows TikTok is where you should be campaigning if you want to get elected, but what they’re less clear on is what they should be doing there.