Era 3 — Platform Advertising and Social Debate

By the late 2010s the campaign was addressing national conversations directly. Australianness is now explicitly multicultural and inclusive, and political division has replaced “un-Australianism” as the primary crisis to be resolved.

Defining context

Australia in 2017–2019 was processing major conversations: the Marriage Law Postal Survey (2017, which 61.6% voted “Yes”), rising polarisation framed as a “culture war”, the 2018 cricket ball-tampering scandal, and a succession of revolving-door prime ministers. New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern was widely admired in Australia.

The dominant idea of Australianness

2017’s Gods places deities from a global range of belief systems at a single backyard barbecue, with the explicit message that lamb is “the meat we can all eat” — the campaign’s most ambitious expression of multicultural inclusion. 2018’s Lamb Side Story treats Australia as a nation fractured by political tribalism that a shared barbecue can heal, staging left and right as rival gangs in a Broadway-musical parody. 2019’s New Zealand merger ad satirises Australian decline with affectionate self-deprecation, and is the only ad in the corpus to directly reference the “Change the Date” debate.

Creative form

Epic ensemble, musical theatre and narrative cinema. Political and social debates are now the dramatic subject of the advertisements, not merely context for the comedy — these are the most explicitly political ads in the campaign’s history to this point. The warm communal resolution remains the fixed emotional endpoint.

What changed

The inclusive message is now earnestly foregrounded rather than incidental, and the campaign begins directly addressing specific controversies rather than merely referencing adjacent events. This shapes the following era, in which division becomes physical and existential.