Vegetarians and vegans

Vegetarians and vegans are the campaign’s most persistent foil, and the site of its sharpest unresolved contradiction. Across the corpus they function as the recurring counter-example against which lamb-eating Australianness is defined — a joke that the analyses treat as the campaign’s least comfortable, because it strains the campaign’s own claim that food brings everyone together.

In 2005, the Lambassador dismisses “soap-avoiding, pot-smoking, hippy vegetarians” who “can get stuffed” and “know the way to the airport.” As character voice, this is satirised nationalism — an absurd purity test the campaign mocks by excess. But in 2016’s Operation Boomerang the exclusion moves from a character’s speech into the narrative structure itself: a rescue is aborted the instant a target reveals he has become a vegan, his apartment is set alight with a flamethrower, and the commander mutters “Vegans” in disgust. The corpus identifies this as the one case where the campaign’s structure, not merely a character, enforces the exclusion — the closest it comes to cruelty without a redemptive frame.

The contradiction is not resolved by the campaign’s later inclusive turn. 2023’s Un-Australian welcomes back all exiles — the meat-pie-with-cutlery eater, the kombucha drinker, the subtitle-watcher — and concludes that everyone is “a bit un-Australian,” yet the vegan is never explicitly named among the welcomed. The analyses flag this deliberately: the campaign’s belief that lamb unites everyone and its repeated exclusion of those who will not eat it “cannot be simultaneously true,” and the evidence does not settle which position the campaign holds.

This tension runs through the campaign’s whole account of inclusion and belonging and its un-Australian paradox. It is preserved here, unresolved, as the corpus preserves it.